LazyAza said:
If ever their was a human being literally crammed too far up their own ass, it's David Cage. I watched a lets play of Heavy Rain a few months back and I gotta say, wow, like I knew it was bad but eeeesh. I've seen god knows how many crappy movies that weren't as crap as that "game".
Well, the thing is that "Heavy Rain" got a lot of praise, especially when it was new, for moving the genere along in terms of art and so on. Objectively it was kind of crap. A return to the era of "interactive movies" of the sort that choked game shelves when CD Roms were new for PCs and portables, and the industry went through a phase of being obssessed with digitizing real actors to play the role of characters in various games. This lead to things like "Ripper", or "Daedaelus Encounter" (starring Tia Carerra), and numerous others. The ill-fated 3DO was really into this and wound up featuring some of the most godawful games ever featuring terrible actors dressed in even worse costumes. The period DID have a few cult classics though like "The Horde" which starred Kirk Cameron (from Growing Pains) where the digitization didn't have much to do with the gameplay.
A lot of people like me pointed out that this was pretty much the same kind of garbage, just replacing the digitized actors with high quality "uncanny valley" animations to create a semi-interactive cartoon with a "serious" plotline, and got kind of battered badly even if we saw where it was going (that happens with me now).
Today guys like David Cage, high on the hype and praise they received before the gamers and the industry regained their sanity, suffer from cases of unwarrented self importance, and come accross as being both out of touch with reality and utterly pretentious.
That said, Heavy Rain *does* deserve praise for pulling of a few high quality, and sometimes fairly gruelling, scenes. But that's more a standout for a game that came accross as a movie, and had fairly good direction for a movie. It also admittedly touched some chords with some people in the interactions (like father and son) but again, you really can't do a lot to really "play" the game or signifigantly alter the outcome. At the end of the day it's a movie that let's you do exciting things like take control of brushing your character's teeth, and other exercises in sometimes absurd monotiny, on the way to it's handfull of genuinely clever moments.
Such are my thoughts. People praised some of the things the best moments of Heavy Rain made them feel, which has actually caused David Cage to forget pretty much everything everyone said about it, especially once the hype died down, and indeed occasionally sound like a self-help guru setting out to form his own cult of virtual polygon emotions.
