Activision’s journey to becoming the world’s largest software publisher has been fraught with difficult and confounding decisions. In this gestation period we’ve learned that it has more faith in broken Crash games than it does Ghostbusters, 50 Cent and Riddick (games that we’re pretty excited about, oddly enough). However, given that Activision makes more money in an hour than we are likely to see in our lifetimes, we’re forced to concede that it might just have a better understanding of what the gaming public wants to spend its ever-dwindling resources on. Case in point: Prototype.
When last we saw Radical Entertainment’s genemeddling, open world game in action (way back in issue 44) we felt that it needed something of a rethink. In creating a character with almost limitless powers, Radical’s only course of action was to chuck insane levels of foe at him in order to present the player with any kind of worthwhile challenge. This meant that the gameplay was almost sickeningly intense and stupefyingly relentless (not unlike James Bond’s recent cinematic outing, then). If we’re honest, that viewing of the game marked the point where we downgraded Prototype from something that we were going to follow with keen interest to the patented 360 Gamer ‘meh’ – the one we reserve for pretty much everything that we either haven’t seen yet, or have seen enough of to know that it’s going to be broken – we’re a cynical bunch, but it seldom lets us down.
Still, that megacorp Activision saw fit to retain this over several other impressive titles should stand for something. We know from its decision to drop Ghostbusters that it was keen to retain only the IPs that had the legs for sequels and from 50 Cent that the company doesn’t like swears, rap music or having puddle-deep but riotous fun (we’re struggling as to a reason why it jettisoned Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena, so we’ll mark that one down as something of an own goal). As such, we reckon that the sequel potential of Prototype plus lack of pottymouthed action (and almost certainly the revenue from a proposed DC comic of the game) saved it from the same fate that befell many other titles in the illfated Sierra portfolio.
Unfortunately, it’s also been pretty clear that Activision’s cull wasn’t necessarily based on the quality of titles – a quick play through of Crash is enough to prove that the publisher was keen to keep that on its roster due to sequel potential and its desire to offer the kids something dreadful to play last Christmas. That said, the ensuing year or so of extra development time should have been put to good use, so we’re hopeful that Radical has tinkered with the gameplay and given it the balance and pace that it sorely lacked.
We’re still not ready to upgrade our interest in Prototype from its current ‘meh’ status – a bunch of screenshots with no new information confirms only what we knew before (and that it’s still in development and heading to the Xbox, obviously). As such, Activision is going to have to work a helluva lot harder to regain the ground it lost with Prototype and convince us that this – out of all the other titles that it could (and arguably should) have kept – was the one we should also spend our lucre on.
