That would be what Japanese culture is basically like now, except they have a very skewed perception of what the West is actually like. First, they don't really give a shit about anybody else but the United States. Second, their perceptions about the United States come almost entirely from MTV.Lou said:
As for this piece of news...
Well, fuck Square, fuck its CEO, and fuck the shit out of Heavy Rain. I'm all for trying to develop games that're making more serious attempts at storytelling; I'm all for trying to develop games that cover different storytelling genres than just action and adventure; but Heavy Rain, in addition to having monumentally shitty interactive design, makes the gross oversimplification that all of the appeal in interactive storytelling is simply in the fact that the stories are interactive and therefore better. That's stupid. That's like saying the appeal of television is merely that the pictures move. There's so much more to it than that.
This is SO not the direction that gaming should move in as a narrative medium. What's it offering? Same stuff as film, nothing new. A game should be about creating a story and themes that you can explore and play with. It doesn't necessarily mean that an explicit narrative--as in the case of either Heavy Rain or Final Fantasy--is a bad thing, but it does mean that you have to have a game and not just interactive cutscenes. That's why we collectively said "NO" to FMV games the first time developers tried to foist them on us. This time Heavy Rain got more attention because there's more gamers to cater to and because they're largely ignorant of how lame FMV games actually were back in the day, so they're willing to accept it purely on the grounds that it's different. This won't hold up forever, though, and I can predict that it won't be all that long before gaming culture rejects FMV games for the second time.
Agreed. The worst thing about it is how un-immersive most of the interaction actually was. You get to play with an RC car--only you don't get to play with it, you just watch the character play with it. You get to look at a book--only you never actually see what's in the book, you just watch the character page through it quietly. Cage claims that gameplay would distract people too much from the story, and to some extent he's right, but you know what? If you really feel that gameplay is a detriment to what you're doing, why the hell are you making a game in the first place?GonzoGamer said:
It's a basic rule of interactive design. Whatever the user is doing most frequently, make it lightning-fast and stupidly easy. David Cage isn't an interactive designer, though, and somehow I doubt anybody on the Heavy Rain team was.GonzoGamer said:
