If you said forty bucks, you’d be right. Until November 22, inFamous is just $39.95 at Target. Given that it still carries an RRP of $109.95, that seems a pretty good deal.

Have you seen inFamous cheaper anywhere?

Oh, he’ll still be the same old Cole. He may just sound a little different, a little more like actor David Sullivan. G4’s The Feed spotted Sullivan’s tweet about an audition for Cole in “the sequel of Infamous” today, unofficial confirmation that part two is a go.

Sucker Punch Auditioning For inFamous 2, Possibly Recasting Main Character [G4's The Feed]

Earlier this year, a couple of game developers let me in on one of their secrets: they intentionally play bad games. They play the stuff you or I would avoid not to learn what to avoid, but to learn what to do and imitate. They told me that good ideas lurk everywhere, and no one else is looking in the bad games.

The game developers who told me their technique do not work for Rockstar Games. As far I know, they’ve had no hand at making Grand Theft Auto games. But if they did, I hope they would play EA’s Godfather II, the most flawed of 2009’s big-publisher open-world games.

Godfather II is a broken, sputtering jalopy of a game. To use a more apt metaphor, it is an open world beset by blight, the digital equivalent of a city where the bridges are crumbling and the water mains are about to burst. It has bland graphics, poor artificial intelligence, awkward story, etc.

And yet, after playing through it and THQ’s new Red Faction, Sony’s inFamous, Activision’s Prototype and Rocsktar’s Grand Theft Auto IV: The Lost and Damned, I believe Godfather II surpasses those more enjoyable 2009 open-world games in a crucial way: You matter in it more. It’s more alive. It knows that you’re in it. And it reacts to you.

Prototype’s New York collapses to its red-sky ruin regardless of your actions. You surf its avalanche, chipping at rocks along the way, but the tumble is brutal and inexorable.

Red Faction’s Martian colony towers do fall from your sledgehammer swings, but the swelling revolution that brings its citizens to take up arms against the police authority feels no more the product of your actions than a river’s current feels determined by how you swipe your hand through the water.

In Grand Theft Auto IV, Liberty City stands unaffected by your mayhem, your impact noted only by new hysteria chattered on its radio stations. Like a good New Yorker, Rockstar’s fake New York barely bats an eye at what you’re doing in it.

The Empire City of inFamous bears more of your mark. The game comes closest to what Godfather II achieves, but it is still EA’s crime adventure that manages to make its location feel most organic.

The method for the Godfather II’s best success doesn’t sound sexy. What happens in the New York, Florida and Cuba of the game is a property-control simulation. It’s a dull-on-paper conquest of gambling dens, auto chop shops and whorehouses, committed sometimes at the hands-dirty ground level of the GTA games it apes. You, a mafia don, walk into a warehouse where a rival mob family runs guns and kill every rival mafioso who shoots at you before shaking down the warehouse’s boss, extorting him, adding him to your income ledger and watching his property turning your colour on the game’s map. Other times, conquest occurs from the map’s god view or, more likely, in the background, as the orders you delivered to the men in your mob family are executed off-screen. While you drive to one location for another mission that could have been in GTA III, you’re notified that your capo took over a nightclub or that your foot soldiers stormed a waterfront factory. You told them to.

The prize accomplishment of Godfather II is that the mob families controlled by the game try to do all of that to you. They attack your properties. They try to take them over. They recognise your rising influence and push back. They necessitate that you send your underboss, who would otherwise be fighting at your side as a computer-controlled ally, from your ground-level crew to defend a money-making property. A rival capo you’ve marked for death and planned to throw off a bridge might instead show up storming the brothel you fought hard to take over. He’s going at you on his own time.

The result is a game that registers the grand violence you perpetrate in its open world and retaliates. The results aren’t smooth. At ground level, Godfather II crumbles. Enemies have poor intelligence; allies shoot at walls. Guns dropped by killed mobsters float in the air. The cities are cartoonishly shrunken, the game’s graphics primitive and plain. But what is occurring within that mess and what is occurring off-screen feels like it has breath and life.

This landscape lives. Godfather’s three regions are not prop cities or sets of cardboard walls. This New York is not just a doormat on which you may wipe your feet. It is a place that seems to know that you are in it and does something about it.

I’d rather look at Empire City. I’d prefer to drive through Liberty City or fight on Red Faction’s Mars. I will, nevertheless, still yearn for the next open-world game that I play to react in the way Godfather II did. I want the game’s world to remember the heat and stamp of my actions beyond the conclusion of the given mission I’m playing and to fire back. I want it all to feel alive. And I won’t believe such things can be accomplished only or best in a broken-down Godfather game.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, Turner pitched the movie to Sony Pictures, which pre-emptively caught it, and the studio is now working out a deal for rights to adapt the game into a major motion picture. The Arad’s are set to produce, just as they are producing the Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune feature film.

As for Sheldon’s take on the game, his comments are nothing if not heartening to fans of the Sucker Punch-developed, free-roaming superhero title.

“What excited me most about the game was it was the first of which I’ve come across that had a big idea and a character arc,” Turner said. “It is, I believe, the future of gaming. The game, while big and fun, is at its core a love ballad to the underachiever, which is what our hero, Cole McGrath, is.”

An underachiever who turns himself around rather quickly, but he certainly seems to have a firm grasp. Between that and the fact that the main character is so bland that any actor with a shaved head can play him, and we might have a winner here.

Scribe takes on ‘inFAMOUS’ [THR via Empire - Thanks Ris!]

LittleBigPlanet-eers can opt to go good or be evil with their Sackboy, as defined by the colour of Sack MacGrath’s sparkiness and level of brow furrowing.

Not This week but next week on the store: InFAMOUS [Media Molecule]

(Check out our software and hardware reports for June here… then read this analysis and add yours.)

EA Nails The Wii, Thanks To mums And Dads: EA has two Wii games placed powerfully in the top five best-selling games of June, a feat that I don’t think any third-party publisher has accomplished since the Wii launched. And how did EA do it? Not with a game for teenage boys. Not with a first-person shooter. Not with an M-rated gorefest. But with EA Sports Active, a fitness game targeted at grown women, many of them likely to be mums. And they did it with Tiger Woods PGA 10, the definitive sports game for dads. That’s the Wii audience for EA… all grown up!

Tiger Pulls A Guitar Hero: Also notable about the performance of Tiger Woods on the Wii is that the game charted for the Wii but not for any other platform. While Maddens and Call of Dutys are still series whose PS3/ Xbox360 versions handily outperform the Wii editions, Tiger performed more like a Guitar Hero game. The Guitar Heroes have been selling better on the Wii than on any other platform. That speaks to who has a Wii. It is also a likely a byproduct of the Wii Remote (with MotionPlus) being so well-associated by EA and gamers with the swing of a golf club. What’s the next franchise that will see Wii out in front?

Open Worlds Are Big — But Do People Think Of Them As Open Worlds?: It looked like Prototype, Infamous and Red Faction Guerilla, three open-world games released within weeks of each other, would cannibalize each other’s sales. Maybe they did. Maybe they didn’t. But none appears to have flopped, as versions of all three made the top 10. People like open-world an consume a lot of them, despite those games being among the longest games out there. Could the allure be that they give so much bang for their buck? Or is their open-worldness something most consumers don’t notice? A genre connection that’s invisible to those buying based on commercials and boxart?

Blasts From Pasts: Among the top 10 posts of June are only five games released in the new 35-day reporting period. That’s the way it works these days: lots of games linger. This month’s lingerers are the consistent strong sellers Mario Kart Wii, Wii Fit along with recent stars Infamous, UFC and EA Sports Active.

Notable new releases that failed to make the overall software top 10 (With no console or handheld version selling under 192,700 units in the U.S. by July 4): Rock Band Unplugged (June 9), Ghostbusters: The Video Game (June 16), Let’s Tap (June 16), Guitar Hero Smash Hits (June 16), Monster Hunter Freedom Unite (PSP), Overlord II (June 23), The Conduit (June 23), Transformers Revenge of The Fallen (June 23), BlazBlue (June 30), Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (June 30), Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood (June 30)

Nintendo DS – 21,900 units/day (down 725)
Wii – 10,334 units/day (down 5)
Xbox 360 – 6,874 units/day (up 624)
PS3 – 4,706 units/day (up 27)
PSP – 4,671 units/day (down 1,085)
PS2 – 4,363 units/day (up 184)

(Find out more about the Kotaku-patented NPD-PD stat)

Yes, that’s right, we’re now publishing reader reviews here on Kotaku. This is your chance to deliver sensible game purchasing advice to the rest of the Kotaku community.

This review was submitted by Andrew Burdusel. If you’ve played inFamous, why don’t you let Andrew know whether you agree or disagree with his thoughts.

Infamous (PS3)
By Andrew Burdusel

If you’re a fan of action games, open world games or just good games get inFamous because it’s all of the above. The comic book-inspired PS3 exclusive puts you in the shoes of Cole McGrath, the lighting bolt-wielding badass who can either save Empire City from certain doom or wreak havoc everywhere he goes.

Loved
Morality: The game’s whole gimmick of moral choices is done pretty well with Cole’s decisions actually having an effect on just about everything in the game.

Value: Overall the story and gameplay are engaging enough to keep you playing for at least two playthroughs. With a lot of collectibles, the game is sure to keep you busy for a while.

Hated
Repetition: One negative is that some of the missions of the game are bland and repetitive. These side missions are optional and could have done with a little more creativity.

Its nice to see the open world concept being taken out of the realm of crime, drug dealing and stealing cars and being used for more creative ideas. InFamous is a great game on its own but it’s a better example of what will soon follow.

Reviewed by: Andrew Burdusel

You can have your Reader Review published on Kotaku. Send your review to us at the usual address. Make sure it’s written in the same format as above and in under 200 words. We’ll publish the best ones we get.

Astoundingly and to their everlasting credit, both Radical and Sucker Punch participated. First up, Radical sent in two submissions, but that monstrosity takes the cake – Cole McGrath with Vegas showgirl peacock tail, a Marilyn Monroe birthmark and … oh God are his pubes showing? NEXT.

Here’s your winner: Alex Mercer, who shapeshifted up some heaving bosoms thanks to Sucker Punch, in a tableau that “could be the cover of a romance novel.” Per Yahtzee’s award citation:

It’s a close call, but I’m going to declare Sucker Punch the winner by one lovingly-rendered pair of breasts. Also their unicorn is a much prouder, mightier steed, and Alex’s expression is delightfully coquettish. Therefore InFamous must be the better game. Buy InFamous. Prototype’s still good, though. Buy it as well.

Yahtzee’s Prototype vs. Infamous Challenge [The Escapist via Joystiq]

Mario can swim. Sonic would not. A jump in the water used to kill the anti-heroes of Grand Theft Auto. Altair, the deadly hero of Assassin’s Creed couldn’t get wet. His successor can.

Large bodies of water are fatal in inFamous, act as pools of quicksand in the new Bionic Commando and are just off-limits in games as wide-ranging as Animal Crossing and everything beyond the first 30 minutes of undersea adventure BioShock.

Problem: Swimming Can Be Boring
There are smart and serious design reasons for the omission of swimming in so many top games. But before even thinking about those, a fair assessment is that video game swimming can be dull. There may be fans of Super Mario Bros.’ World 2-2 and the opportunity it affords players to throw fireballs underwater at squids. There may be fans of swimming in Metal Gears and Zeldas. Swimming, though, isn’t what carries most games, and it’s frequently a source of gamer frustration.

“Swimming is not as fast as running or jumping or flying, and is generally not as fun,” Darren Bridges, a game designer at Sucker Punch, the studio behind the swimming-not-permitted hits inFamous and Sly Cooper. “The gameplay [for swimming] is often bland: mashing a single button in the best cases, and just pointing the stick in a direction at the worst.”

Pete Wanat, veteran producer of many games, including Scarface: The World Is Yours, backed Bridges up. Scarface, which was primarily played on land as an open-world crime adventure in the style of a GTA, allowed swimming — until players got too far adrift and were chewed by a shark. But it also gave players the option to have hero Tony Montana stay dry and summon a boat. That ability, he wrote via e-mail “hopefully kept players in the action and not doing the 300 medley in Miami Harbor trying to reach the nearest dock.” That was a merciful decision, explained Wanat: “Because in almost every game, swimming long distances is ultra boring.”

So un-fun is a lot of video game swimming that developers who plan to include it often cut it. “Most [development] teams want their character to do everything under the sun, but reality kicks in and they start tearing out the ability to dance and swim pretty fast,” veteran game designer Dave Perry told Kotaku. “Many games have you instantly drown. Plenty just let you go up to your ankles. Some let you swim off into oblivion with nothing out there, and then you have to swim back. If there’s no good reason to swim (nothing to find or do), then it’s a waste of valuable team attention, so that’s why so many teams just trash the idea and focus on something more important instead.”

Swimming Bans Help Game Creators
Maybe many games are better off without empowering heroes to do the backstroke or the doggie-paddle.

Developers say that omitting swimming helps them. Making a dive in the water deadly can add a core element of the game’s difficulty, no matter how absurd that element may be to the game’s fiction — or how much the fiction must be stretched to accommodate it. Really, should water barricade a bunch of athletic freedom-fighters and animals?

“Fictionally speaking, it really doesn’t make sense to have water as a boundary in the Sly Cooper
games,” Bridges admitted. “There, I said it. The three main characters are Sly the Raccoon, Bentley the Turtle, and Murray the Hippo. Real raccoons are decent swimmers, and turtles and hippos spend the majority of their lives in water, but our heroes had to swear off water as part of their transition to
the video game universe.”

Capcom’s Bionic Commando producer, Ben Judd, stressed to Kotaku that the metal arm of his game’s hero is just too heavy to keep its hero — a guy who can survive multiple bullet shots and steep falls — afloat.

That’s the story explanation.

The real reason they limit swimming from games like Sly and Bionic Commando is to add an aspect of difficulty to their games. Heroes like Sly or inFamous’ Cole McGrath are so strong that other obstacles won’t do. “Cole and Sly are both excellent climbers,” said Bridges, “So tipping a car sideways to block an alley entrance is not enough to keep them out.” He noted that “water is often a better alternative than other boundary options, such as ‘Steep Mountains,’ ‘Giant Walls,’ ‘Flaming Lava Fields,’ or ‘Infinite Cliffs.’”

Judd described how water was used to add challenge to Bionic Commando: “With Bionic Commando, we needed something that could be used as an obstacle that would both limit where Spencer could go but also prove to be a danger so that if he fell into it he could die… early levels have very few ‘pit traps’ at all. If you fall, you just need to climb back up in early levels. Around the middle of the game, we use water as a device that people want to avoid. But if they do fall into it, there is a small window in which they can hook onto something nearby and avoid death because we didn’t want any insta-kills so early in the game. Toward the end of the game, there are more tried and true pitfalls that will kill you if miss the swing.”

And if water won’t kill a games’ heroes, stuff in the water might, like that Scarface shark. Or, as Drew Murray, lead designer of PlayStation 3 first-person shooter Resistance 2, reminded Kotaku, there’s the Fury, a classic deadly-swimming-enemy type seen in that game: “The Fury went through a number of iterations, from its initial design as a ‘Chimeran walrus’ that would be fast and deadly in the water but slow and lumbering on land (with arm-mounted guns to boot!), to our final design as a purely aquatic enemy that essentially acted like a sign next to a toxic lake reading ‘Swimming Here Is Hazardous to Your Health!”" he said. “We also used them in several places as timing-puzzle challenges for swimming sections, where the player would have to time their swimming based on the speed and location of furies in the water.”

Just Add Swimming
There are so many reasons not to have swimming in games, that the addition of it can be a feature worth promoting. It’s a literal game-changer, as players who transitioned from the death-water of Grand Theft Auto: Vice City to the pearl-diving-permissible depths of GTA: San Andreas can attest.

To add swimming, developers need to draw more graphics, tweak their camera system, add animations and find that elusive fun in video game breaststroke. Some have determined all that works’ worthwhile.

The Assassin’s Creed series is making the move from non-swimmable to swimmable with this fall’s sequel. The sequel’s lead game designer, Patrick Plourde, told Kotaku, “We listened to the feedback of the players who were pretty vocal that the fact that that Altair couldn’t swim wasn’t feeling right for a master Assassin – they were right. Also our new setting which included Venice has a much stronger need to interact with water. So that explains why swimming wasn’t in Assassin’s Creed but is in Assassin’s Creed II.”

Swimming wasn’t available in the first game, Plourde said, simply because the team knew water wasn’t going to be an important enough part of the game’s terrain to make getting in it worth the development energy. The threat of water wound up shaping one port-based assassination mission in that first game, forcing Altair to hopscotch across moored boats. In Venice, new Assassin Ezio will have to have other hazards to worry about than a bad soaking.

Just Remove Swimming
For all the nice things that swimming might add to a game, it’s not a must. Some designers have de-emphasized it. See the drop in swimming content from Super Mario Sunshine to Super Mario Galaxy.

Others are removing swimming completely. That’s happening in the next Ratchet & Clank. That series’ creative director, Brian Allgeier of Insomniac, explained how swimming had served Ratchet well in the past but proved a reasonable omission for the next adventure, Ratchet & Clank Future: A Crack in Time: “On the Ratchet & Clank games, we included swimming as another means of exploration and felt that it rounded out a nice set of moves for our main character,” he said. “Ironically, water was also used at times as a level boundary along with lava, toxic goo, and fall-to-death areas to prevent people from exploring too far. Sometimes we’ve used swimmable and non-swimmable water together. For instance in Quest for Booty, we had a lagoon area in the Hoolefar Island level where Ratchet could swim, but further out there was deadly water that bounded the level. For A Crack in Time we’ve decided to change course and not include swimming. We’re putting a lot of new gameplay features and modes in this game and decided that swimming wasn’t Ratchet’s strongest suit. Plus we also wanted to avoid the confusion of swimmable water versus non-swimmable water. So he won’t be swimming in the latest game in favour of Hoverboots, Clank time gameplay, new gadgets, and a lot more.”

Who would miss swimming in a game, anyway? It’s not like Insomniac is cutting the ability to hover, shoot cartoon weapons or smack enemies with a big wrench. That’s what the people pay for.

As 2009 turns to summer for many of us, and as you dip your toes in the pool or step toward a crashing beach wave, enjoy this one easy thing you can do that so many video game characters can’t.

Swimming can be a chore in games, a hassle for gamers and game makers. But wouldn’t we all rather swing giant hammers and double-jump over cars instead?

The inFamous-themed Abandoned Docks of Empire City arrive with several new activities for players to participate in. There’s of course the requisite shooting bad guys with lightning mini-game, which allows you to compare scores on global leaderboards. Sucker Punch will be delivering exclusive video content to the space as well, showing inFamous fans the love long after they’ve decided their final fate in-game.

Perhaps the most interesting addition, however, is the graffiti wall, where players gain access to various graffiti creation tools, allowing them to create new designs, share them with their friends, and have them voted on by the community for mad props.

Check out the video below to see the new inFamous Home space in action.