Zero Punctuation: Heavy Rain
- Thread starter Yahtzee Croshaw
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It isn't anything to spend money on really. There's a few different endings, but it probably isn't worth your time, unless you want something spoiler-free to show your friends and get them into the game.SL33TBL1ND said:
I really enjoyed the game, it HAS some downsides (plotholes, rather bland/limited gameplay mechanic), but the game lets you forget it with the way it is presented to you and there are so many ways how a scene can turn out. You have to take it for what it is, an interactive Drama, it's half game half movie. I agree with Yahtzee with his point about it not making sense to play it again, it takes away all the suspence and it's just for the achievment/trophy zombies (i will never get, why people love achievments so much, i guess it's a psychological matter)
When you said that you thought you could change the killer, I remember thinking that was a bad idea since it basically meant fate wasn't constant. The same applies to the bit with the religious nut blunder. But after buying and completing the game, I actually really wish there was a way to change who the killer was....
Never pointed out the plot holes (although enjoyable game it was, doing this... would be more fun with twilight or harry potter both of which have more holes than swiss cheese).
Game was good, it did lie to you at one bit (those of you who know who the killer is, knows exactly which bit the game cheated you. since you were there, you should have saw him do it)
It also cheats at another point, yes lauren can die.. but leave the controller and just go make a snack at the car sinking bit... yeah.. game cheats again (2nd play through before you ask). Played it 3 times, 4 different endings... some of which were truly amusing. My sisters bf got completely different endings than me too.
I got the limited edition, so the taxidermist was there (although HMV screwed up so i never did get my soundtrack, shame i quite liked the music).
Now the Taxidermist is what i expected the game to be, ALL THE WAY THROUGH. It was on most of the trailers and previews of the game. Why it ended up a DLC i'll never know....
And yes i also made the origami figure while the game installed... at least it tried to be different and i enjoyed the time i put into it. Far more than any of the games thats been reviewed in the past 2 months (bar Mass Effect 2).
It did differ from farenheit though, as Heavy Rain featured an almost romantic stressed out deranged sex scene... whereas farenheit made you bang your ex redheaded girlfriend and use the right thumbstick as an orgasm maker. (funny as hell scene)
Game was good, it did lie to you at one bit (those of you who know who the killer is, knows exactly which bit the game cheated you. since you were there, you should have saw him do it)
It also cheats at another point, yes lauren can die.. but leave the controller and just go make a snack at the car sinking bit... yeah.. game cheats again (2nd play through before you ask). Played it 3 times, 4 different endings... some of which were truly amusing. My sisters bf got completely different endings than me too.
I got the limited edition, so the taxidermist was there (although HMV screwed up so i never did get my soundtrack, shame i quite liked the music).
Now the Taxidermist is what i expected the game to be, ALL THE WAY THROUGH. It was on most of the trailers and previews of the game. Why it ended up a DLC i'll never know....
And yes i also made the origami figure while the game installed... at least it tried to be different and i enjoyed the time i put into it. Far more than any of the games thats been reviewed in the past 2 months (bar Mass Effect 2).
It did differ from farenheit though, as Heavy Rain featured an almost romantic stressed out deranged sex scene... whereas farenheit made you bang your ex redheaded girlfriend and use the right thumbstick as an orgasm maker. (funny as hell scene)
I lit up when I saw that Yahtzee had reviewed this game, because -I- had just recently watched a friend play the last half or third of it. Which of course means that I missed the slow beginning and jumped in at about the point that poor lost father was wondering whether he was slowly killing his own son and had to run through a crowded subway with an insomniac girl away from the police.
He's right about the biggest disappointment - that you can't dramatically alter the plotline, no matter what you do, only make a few little differences. For instance, the first thing Corey, my buddy, decided to do after beating it was return to the underwater car scene and rescue the girlfriend of the fat cop to see how it changed the next scene if he managed to save her - It didn't, really - absolutely nothing changed except perhaps some skipped revenge dialogue.
And then he tried going back and trying -not- to manage to get out of the car in time, since he'd been told there were some plot points where your major characters could die. And it turned out that you could still be sitting tied up when the water rushed in - you'd magically get out alive. With the girl, even! Failing completely got you the preferable ending!
Admittedly, the atmosphere of the game, at least the last part, and the suspense of its first play-though, is truly awesome. The decisions you have to make seem to carry a lot of weight - at least until you find out they change jack squat important. And the way you got to select thoughts and reactions, as little keywords floating nervously around your head, was a clever and evocative way of suggesting the feeling of thoughts spinning in your mind - and made the process of -thinking- at least more interactive than in many games wherein characters endlessly repeat whatever opinions or plot points they think you should know as you're running through the map.
He's right about the biggest disappointment - that you can't dramatically alter the plotline, no matter what you do, only make a few little differences. For instance, the first thing Corey, my buddy, decided to do after beating it was return to the underwater car scene and rescue the girlfriend of the fat cop to see how it changed the next scene if he managed to save her - It didn't, really - absolutely nothing changed except perhaps some skipped revenge dialogue.
And then he tried going back and trying -not- to manage to get out of the car in time, since he'd been told there were some plot points where your major characters could die. And it turned out that you could still be sitting tied up when the water rushed in - you'd magically get out alive. With the girl, even! Failing completely got you the preferable ending!
Admittedly, the atmosphere of the game, at least the last part, and the suspense of its first play-though, is truly awesome. The decisions you have to make seem to carry a lot of weight - at least until you find out they change jack squat important. And the way you got to select thoughts and reactions, as little keywords floating nervously around your head, was a clever and evocative way of suggesting the feeling of thoughts spinning in your mind - and made the process of -thinking- at least more interactive than in many games wherein characters endlessly repeat whatever opinions or plot points they think you should know as you're running through the map.
I thought he would find the start really boring so did i. I leaped at the first opportunity to kill them off. second part was really good though.
..they could have just not declared who the killer was, and allowed it to be up to the viewer to decide who it really was.Dapz said:
But yeah, I agree the objection to the way they did this in Heavy Rain seems to be some sort of "academic" point about interactive gaming. Because in Heavy Rain they really have both. They had a very compelling narrative about deciding who the killer is first - then a detective part where you continue trying to figure it out. And they have a separate scene where the killer is revealed. And it seems pretty ridiculous to demand a more flexible scene like that, if they had to trade the "revelation" for it. After all, from the beginning we know that Ethan can't have actually been the origami killer in the papers. But he can be a copy-cat murderer. So QD really did the best possible with that story.
And any objection to that way of making the story would have to come along with a suggestion to restructure the story to be much less linear, with huge amounts of content that never would have been shown. And I'm not sure that's a very good suggestion, when the design in Heavy Rain was to have choice within particular context - and then reasonably limited story-paths and event triggers between those scenarios.
Instead, I guess you could mention that QD was pretty skilful in hiding where those branches happen. Because there are several events that are picked up and cause actual changes - most of them are never mentioned by one reviewer alone.
In the same way, the choices within the contexts are pretty intelligent - they make you choose for yourself what sort of motivation you have in the situation, rather than try to figure out what the main character's motivation is. Or, said in a different way, you are giving your character motivations in a situation - and the game then acts those out for you.
And that's.. pretty good, and novel, and new, and stuff like that.. on it's own. So that bears to be mentioned, before the "not enough choices" things - specially when combining those two ways of telling an interactive story really isn't possible.
Obsidian had a similar discussion going on when it came to choice in Alpha Protocol. Bioware has mentioned the same when comparing Mass Effect and Dragon Age. That you have two different approaches to the choices you insert in the story. So it's not as if you have nothing whatsoever to rest on here either..
I honestly thought that the game was one of the best games I've played in the realm of video games I've played in my 20 years of existence, but I agree that the game is a little bit slow at the beginning. However, being a literary/cinematic type of guy, I imagined that playing Heavy Rain was like a movie that the viewer was involved with.
Oh and I had to laugh at Yahtzee's talk about the hacking of extremity part.
"Just hack off an extremity where I can see you, *****! Anyways, the whole sequence gripped me by the BELL END!"
"Just hack off an extremity where I can see you, *****! Anyways, the whole sequence gripped me by the BELL END!"
Managed to get my hands on the game- not bad, pretty good story with a lot of padding, and I'll admit I was starting to nod off right around interrogating the hooker (meaning I ended up missing about half the QTE's in the immediate fight scene afterwards), but Yahtzee is right- it does get better later.
But as some people have said before, the plot holes just drove me up the wall. Hello?! What about Ethan's blackouts? What about Madison's insomnia? Where the hell was the ex-wife for all of this?
On second thought, screw the ex-wife. She was kind of a *****.
But as some people have said before, the plot holes just drove me up the wall. Hello?! What about Ethan's blackouts? What about Madison's insomnia? Where the hell was the ex-wife for all of this?
On second thought, screw the ex-wife. She was kind of a *****.
See, what i don't like about this review is that everything is part of the plot, he claims that the dream sequence isn't important, but its character development, this is why I hate yathzee sometimes. He goes to the hot tub next to the pool and claims that there is no pool.
Its just a fuckin time waster to say things are bad when you just not paying a(FUCKING)ttention
Its just a fuckin time waster to say things are bad when you just not paying a(FUCKING)ttention