Comments

1. Strident says:

   March 18, 2010 at 1:52 pm

   Great episodes guys. It’s nice to hear from Joe again as well; he is very much missed in Twitterland at the moment! As usual Eddie was also a great addition to the conversation. It’s a sign of his good taste in games, I’m sure, that his opinion and mine are so divergent!

   To comment further on Heavy Rain… (*spoilers ahead*)

   I didn’t really enjoy the game at all. Some of that was down to being conned by the hype, some was down to the subject matter not being my cup of tea but there were also a few key issues that just stopped me buying into the whole experience, mostly story-based.

   I’m a huge fan of narrative driven games, having been a text adventure player and amateur writer back in the day, but the story in Heavy Rain was a complete disappointment. When you’re pushing story and drama as the main selling point of your title, I think you really do have a responsibility to make sure it stands up to some degree of scrutiny.

   On the interactive side of things, I was never convinced that what I did in the game ultimately mattered or really affected things that much. I felt like I was riding the David Cage Story Express, able to do whatever I wanted inside the carriages but ultimately heading along the tracks to the prescribed destination. I understand that it’s incredibly hard for a developer to get across the range of possible outcomes, particularly if the player is only meant to play through the game once, but this particular game seems to push players down the “win” paths a little too much. You would deliberately have to fail sections, I feel, just to see a lot of the other possible outcomes.

   My final issue with the story was the big twist at the end. I just really didn’t buy it. I know that part of it was down to Shelby being, quite easily, my favourite character, particularly as the romance between him and Lauren was so deftly, brilliantly and believably developed… a stark contrast to the contrived situation between Ethan and Madison.

   I just think that there just weren’t enough clues that Shelby was the killer. It felt tacked on and I felt like they had cheated.

   Agatha Christie’s novel “The Murder of Roger Ackroyd”, widely heralded as a very important work in the field of detective fiction, had a similar plot twist. I’ve not read it for years but I’m tempted to pick up a copy again to see if she managed to better hide the killer’s true thoughts, yet still leave enough clues so that the “big reveal” believable.

   Ultimately, I also felt the game “wussed out” at the end (quite understandably considering the possible controversy it would’ve generated) as it failed to provide the option to actively pursue a *win* situation for Shelby. No matter what David Cage might think, you never actually played the game as “the killer” and so you never truly got to understand his motivation. Had you been able to choose to help Shelby get away with the murders (rather than passively let him get away with them by failing with the other characters) then perhaps this truly would’ve been a real landmark episode of interactive fiction.

   There was a lot Heavy Rain did right. I liked the controls and the QTEs. I could quite easily see myself raving about the game had it told a different story. The particular drama, in this interactive drama, really was the part I liked the least.

   (Regarding some of the points about differences in Sinan’s and Eddie’s playthroughs…

   I was Ethan in the kiss scene. I didn’t kiss Madison because he had basically just said something like “nothing else matters but saving my son”… how could the kiss be appropriate in that situation?

   In the preacher standoff situation, the guy pulled a gun on the cop and I managed to talk him down and get him to drop his weapon. Then, as the cop was going to cuff him, he reached into his jacket again… this was where the preacher pulled out the crucifix in my run through. I had actually panicked and hit the shoot button… unfortunately the game didn’t register my button press so I never had to face the consequences of my action!))

   Reply
2. Xantiriad says:

   March 20, 2010 at 9:26 am

   Another take on the the opening scene. It eloquently describes what I was trying to say about the opening.

   http://www.edge-online.com/blogs/where-did-you-go

   Reply
3. grenache says:

   April 5, 2010 at 12:50 am

   *SPOILERS*

   I listened to your podcast describing various key scenes and it didn’t sound like the game I played at all, apart from the early plot. I never had a kiss scene. There was no nightclub scene. All the characters died except for Shelby. I don’t even know what the hell happened in the scene where I was scrabbling around on broken glass for 15 minutes trying to find a way out – I think it just sort of faded to black after awhile. I sort of feel cheated. Am I really that bad a player, that Madison was killed by the pharmacist with the drill, and the other lady drowned in the car, and the agent was shot in the junkyard after discovering a corpse?

   I am left wondering what I could have done differently to change the outcome.

   I had no idea it was Shelby, and seeing the cut scene of right at the end of him knocking out the typewriter guy in the shop was particularly galling because I was playing Shelby in that scene, so it could never have happened.

   It left me pretty confused and disappointed TBH.

   Thanks for the good discussion on the topic – enjoyed hearing your viewpoints.

   Reply