Joystiq Reviews Heavy Rain: Looking Good Folks ^_^

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Re: Joystiq Reviews Heavy Rain: Looking Good Folks ^_^

[nsfw] Awesome - Encyclopedia Dramatica

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Re: Joystiq Reviews Heavy Rain: Looking Good Folks ^_^

Let's take Resident Evil as an example for a moment.

OK, now let's take away the zombies and ammo/item management and just strip it down to items for puzzle solving.

We have new entered the world of a point-and-click adventure, I'm now playing something more akin to Myst or Broken Sword.. So now we're just wandering area to area potentially dealing with a story-based threat determined - at best - by NPC encounters as well as collecting things to solve puzzles.

We will take the elements we find and use them to form logical conclusions about their function and then we experiment to see if our reasoning holds true. I find a crank with a square-shaped end, I go looking for a place to put that, hoping it helps me progress and reveals another aspect of the story to me.

In an adventure game, you're really only going to be rewarded with more story, another item to solve a puzzle with or a "Eureka" moment where you have a new dialog branch open up. In essence, story is the reward here. RPGs would reward you with EXP, money and gear too, but adventure games its a bit more stripped down.

So if story progression is the reward, why are we stripping down that aspect now? Now I can be a total moron, fuck up a little and still be rewarded. How am I supposed to feel as though I won, if this is the case?

If the point is to watch and not worry about winning or experiencing the crush of failure, then just make a movie and be done with it.

I don't thing video games are so complex they need to be stripped down this far. Not even the "casual" games of Wii are this fucking dumb.

Instead of treating gamers and casuals like they're morons, perhaps what's really in order here is market your games correctly rather than water them down. Things like Ace Attorney or Heavy Rain are viable candidates for being advertised with CSI and Law and Order. Hell, they've made CSI and Law and Order games in response to the resurgence of this genre, they seem to know its another way of connecting to their audience - why don't game publishers know that?

The forthcoming Trauma Team for Wii isn't making the kinds of compromises Heavy Rain is, but it's striving to convey the same kind of detective/crime investigation experience, with a dash of ER thrown in.

Going back to RE for a moment. If we take away the zombies and the limited resource management, we've removed a lot of the tension. The world might still be "spooky" but the sense of dread is gone as there's nothing to combat. Now its just talking to people and puzzles. The puzzles could still kill you, but the tension for that is lowered now. So now we just have the satisfaction of progress or a Jill Sandwich.

Take away the threat of the Jill Sandwich and what's left?

A B-movie with a derivative plot and not a very good one.

You're right. Heavy Rain sucks.

Basis: I can't be bothered to read all of this.