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Long read: The beauty and drama of video games and their clouds

"It's a little bit hard to work out without knowing the altitude of that dragon..."

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inFamous: How High Can You Try?

Here's one of my favourite sections from new PS3 exclusive inFamous. It's effectively Sucker Punch's homage to the epoch-making Agency Tower ascent in Realtime Worlds' Crackdown. While the actual job of scaling this particular structure is nowhere near as meticulous an exercise as it can be in Crackdown (there's plenty of useful checkpointing, for starters), there's no denying that this is the best view you'll get of InFamous' cityscape, plus the developers have taken the opportunity of giving you some gorgeous HDR lighting to help make your ascent that much more of an experience. The inclusion of some sub-human scum to dispose of en route adds to the challenge too.

So here it is, edited highlights of the mission - all story spoilers and boss battle removed. Also included is the post-mission descent; this isn't quite the pin-point accurate exercise that it was in Crackdown (since you can fall for miles with zero damage in this game) but it's entertaining none the less.

Shades of scaling Crackdown's Agency Tower in this inFamous mission.

Coming soon: we go back to inFamous's inspiration with an in-depth Crackdown appreciation feature. Find out where and how the game processes over 3,000 light sources, and watch our attempts to stress out and overload the graphics and physics engines with a series of cataclysmic blasts. Plus: see the game as it's never been seen before in an exclusive video.