The First Hour with [Prototype]

Regardless of what I am about to tell you, I cannot recommend that anyone purchase the PC version of the game [Prototype], developed by Radical Entertainment and published by Activision.

I cannot recommend it, because it is the single buggiest game I have ever played in my life, with the exception of Front Page Sports: Football Pro 99, which was so bad it killed the franchise.

I cannot recommend it, because I could not play it the first night I downloaded it from Steam. But I’m getting ahead of myself here.

[Prototype] is a sandbox game. You are given control of the protagonist – Alex Mercer – and more or less left to run around a city, killing everything in your path, following the plot if you like. I’m going to link to a screenshot taken from handpuppet.net, because I couldn’t deal with Steam’s shit tonight regarding where it decided to fucking hide screenshots (if the game allowed me to take them at all – there’s no option to map that key, and, Jesus Christ, it’s 2009, having a “take screenshot” button ought to be there) .

This particular shot doesn’t do the game’s senseless bedlam justice, but it’ll do.

It took me a long time to get to the point where I was senselessly murdering hundreds of NPCs, however!

The first issue I experienced was that I could not progress past the opening cut-scene. I couldn’t get to the screen that let me select a New Game. That’s right – all I could do was watch the cinematic over and over again. There is an issue on Activision’s forum about it here.

I eventually got past it, but I’m not sure what solved the issue. I rebooted my computer, went to work and came home. The game worked when I tried it tonight, but the bug still shows itself from time to time. If playing [Prototype] is the first thing I do after I reboot my PC, I seem to be okay.

The next issue was that my input device – a Logitech Marble Mouse (not a mouse, it’s a trackball… named a “marble mouse” for the same reason Chicken of the Sea is actually tuna, I guess) was not working correctly. The right button was registering as the left, and the actual left button wasn’t working at all.

Look, I’m bad enough at video games, I can’t play them with one mouse button tied behind my back.

This led me to trying to use a gamepad. I have a cheap-o USB hub that lets me plug up to four Playstation II controllers into my PC. [Prototype] recognized that I had a gamepad installed, but didn’t let me actually select it as the primary input device. (That bug is on the forum here.)

I mean… I mean, come on. I’m not going to fReAkoUt here or anything. This is completely unacceptable. It’s just unacceptable. The PC version of the game wasn’t finished – I can drop in a lot of swear words here, I can rant and rave and go berserk, but what it all comes down to is that the game wasn’t finished and it shouldn’t have been released. Yeah, it would have sucked for Activision if they had to delay the PC version while people were buying it for the 360 and the PS3, but you just can’t sell a game this preposterously broken. The manager or managers at Activision that made the decision to go ahead with this are incompetent, they should be fired, they’ll probably get raises, blah blah blah. They’re turning people off to the hobby with this infantile nonsense. Here’s how the technical support forum for the game looks – at the moment, there are 282 threads for the PC version, and just 37 combined for the 360 and PS3. Even when you factor in the fact that nobody owns a PS3, and even when you factor in that 50% of those threads are created by illiterate retards, it still plainly shows that the PC version wasn’t finished.

And it’s a shame. I did finally get the game to run, and I got a work-around for the mouse button issue by locating a USB mouse, plugging it into my system while the trackball was still plugged in, starting the game with the mouse, then unplugging it and switching to the trackball. After all this goddamn nonsense, I really have to say – the game is initially awesome. I’m picking up cars and throwing them at helicopters, I’m running up buildings, and – best of all! – well, this deserves its own paragraph.

You can walk up walls in [Prototype]. There are some very tall buildings in the game. After going up as far as I could, I took a running leap off the building and actually felt the sensation of falling as Alex Mercer fell to earth. I did this over and over again, just feeling my heart race and nerves go on edge. I’ve still got a bit of adrenaline in my system from this. I’ve never, ever experienced anything like this in a video game, and yeah, [Prototype] seems to be completely ridiculous in a number of ways, but even if it accomplishes nothing else, I have to give it credit for stirring that inside me. If nothing else, it’s the best skydiving simulator going right now.

I’ll end with this – I bought the Ghostbusters PC game a couple days before, and that didn’t work, initially, either. I tried to look up the issue on Atari’s site, but Atari configured their support forum so that you can’t search unless you register. Game publishers: tell your web developers to STOP FUCKING DOING THAT. I understand your desperate need for control in making us register for an account. Eliminating spambot posts is a fine reason for it. But you cretins need to let us at least run searches on your technical support forums for your bug-ridden fucking games as “guests.” No other industry in the world gets money for making broken garbage, the least you can do is make it easy for us to find out what we have to do to fix it ourselves. I’ll give Activision credit for making search accessible to unregistered users.