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Heavy Rain

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NeverQuiteGoth:
I'm only about half-way through my first play of Heavy Rain, but I absolutely love it.

Number17 keeps talking about not having control of the characters, but really, Heavy Rain gives you more control over the characters than any game I've ever played. It just strips out all the useless game-play that has nothing to do with the story. This is a game that is PERFECTLY balanced between story and game-play.

I'm sorry, but I don't see how being able to make your character spin around in circles and bunnyhop makes for better gameplay. The controls in Heavy Rain are so perfectly meshed with the action that it almost feels real. And this is even more true when you mess up: mistakes are completely and seamlessly incorporated into what's happening.

I hate games that make you play through some long and pointless "level" (using gameplay elements that are either irrelevant to the story, or outright violations of the story's universe.) which is basically just there to eat up your time until you finally beat it and are rewarded with a pat on the head and another pittance of story.

You can call Heavy Rain an "interactive movie" and deride it for that. But for $50, you get a roughly TEN HOUR experience that makes you feel more involved with the characters than in any game I've ever played, and can be significantly different each time you "watch" it. That's a better deal than $20 for nearly any movie.

Number17:
Wait until you reach the end.

NeverQuiteGoth:

--- Quote from: Number17 on 03 Mar 2010, 22:02 ---Wait until you reach the end.

--- End quote ---

Which end? You're talking about a story where any combination of the four main characters can die at any point, in any order.

Johnny C:
ebert's not right or at the very most he's only part right and if any of you fucks were with it enough to consider games as TEXT as opposed to games as ART and if you knew anything about authorial theory (as opposed to auteur theory which is a simplified and film-specific version of it) you would know that the major debate since barthes has been the importance of the author and the relative interpretation & perspectives brought to text by an individual, and the question is whether any reading has primacy over another

at most you could say serious film/literature/art/whatever relies on SOME form of authorial control - as do video games

you mooks

KvP:
To a certain extent auteur theory can be applied to games. I've certainly argued long and hard for Chris Avellone's inclusion in that sort of a concept, but outside of his work it's hard to find specific individuals who fit the bill (Ken Levine maybe, Hideo Kojima, probably a few other Japanese gaming luminaries) I don't know how you'd approach authorial control with regard to games because since games these days (aside from indies like Braid) are made by dozens of people. A game like Mass Effect 2 is akin to maybe a thematically unified short story collection or a novel written in parts by different authors, and even with a pretty decent amount of quality control it's inconsistent to some extent.

Anyway, I'd disagree with Ebert and say that games are art. But I'd say that, especially as games become more "cinematic", games are showing themselves to be, with few exceptions, bad art. I would say that we need a different metric, or several metrics, related to mechanics that separate games from other mediums. Honestly were you to analyze even the best games by film standards they would be judged as clumsy at best and bad at worst. A good part of this is due to the fact that until very recently, subtle storytelling was far more difficult to accomplish in games. There was no "show versus tell". There was only "tell". And so you got lots and lots of expository dialogue (you even get this in "literate" RPGs like Fallout 3 and Mass Effect) and lots of flat descriptions. That sort of habit is hard to break. We're just now getting to the point where you can reasonably approximate body language in models, where you can convey messages without having them said, and you can have the "camera" establish things without being utterly confusing. One of the significant reasons Bioshock is as well-regarded as it is is because the audio diaries you pick up only tell half the story. Everything in the game world - The splicers, the way you have to pay for everything (except the vitachambers, although that is explained eventually), the plasmids - establishes the theme of the game, which is why it's such a great setting (Bioshock 2, on the other hand, sucked in this regard).

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