"Heavy Rain" out today on PS3

[Mully]

Anyone excited?

I have a PS3, but the optical drive may have failed...about to send it in.

[Flip]

Uh oh, first broken PS3 on the board! Dont hear about that too often.

[bovine]

I am excited for this very impactful rain.

[Lox]

It looks cool and the demo was really interesting, but it's competing with Bioshock 2 and God of War 3. I may pick it up in a few months.

I know a few people with dead PS3s. My friend's just stopped working and wouldn't power on. Sony said it'd be $150 to fix it. Then a co-worker's PS3 stopped reading discs after a firmware update. Sony told him the same thing. Then another co-worker's just stopped working about a week ago.

[kali o.]

This is the only game that would've tempted me to buy a PS3 - I hope it's good, since QD only seems to manage one game every 4 years or so.

[Zeus]

I grabbed the demo. It was a very intriguing game and very pretty. But it suffers from what all "interactive movie" games suffer from, the my-way-or-the-highway syndrome. My cousin and I actually managed to glitch the third chapter in the demo and we were forced to restart it in order to finish it.

It's certainly worth a try, for sure, as long as you like story above all else. It's basically Simon Says gameplay. For me personally, it's a $30 game.

[Mully]

Anyone excited?

I have a PS3, but the optical drive may have failed...about to send it in.

I turned it on to download Heavy Rain, since it doesn't require optical hardware...hadn't finished downloading it yet BUT while it was downloading, I decided to put a game in to write down the error it was giving me...

Umm...

It works fine. Played MLB 07: The Show fine.

Maybe my PS3 is ok after all.

[bovine]

Things that I found interesting after beating heavy rain

- I was able to use lessons I learned from that awful, latest indiana jones movie.
- Do not accept drinks from weirdo old guys. I am not a woman, but I should still know to not do this.

[Mully]

Things that I found interesting after beating heavy rain

- I was able to use lessons I learned from that awful, latest indiana jones movie.
- Do not accept drinks from weirdo old guys. I am not a woman, but I should still know to not do this.

Is it worth getting? I'm looking at getting it tonight. May wait for your response.

[bovine]

I'm probably not the best guy to get this sort of advice from. If you are interested in this game and want an extremely guided adventure where each one of your decisions can have harsh effects on your ending... then get this game.

It does not control well, some of the narrative is janky, and it is very extreme in how it does not play like a normal game. If you can get passed this, then I say get it. It does some really cool things and I think anyone can play this game. The only advice I can give you playing this through is to just choose with your gut and NEVER reload old saves. Play like every decision is final.

I made a choice that I was very unhappy with the consequences, but that drove me to do some things I may not have done later on out of the emotions I felt because of the consequences of my previous actions. This game is really cool and if you want a game you will either love or hate, give this one a go.

EDIT

to clarify, I don't think I would be good at giving advice because I think an awful lot of games are worth owning. I don't know where my collection ranks with other people on this site, but it is large and extremely nerdy. I don't know what YOUR criteria for purchasing a game is.

[Mully]

..............................................So.................................

I went out and bought Heavy Rain.

My PS3 locks up and I get the error code of 80010514. A generic code of "you must send in your PS3 to Song for $149 error code."

Just my fucking luck.

This is the second game that I've bought...and NO it's not under warranty. Just to let you guys know of the heartache of me owning a PS3: my brother died of cancer earlier this year. He bought the PS3 over a year ago. Even if it was under warranty, I couldn't find it and I've tried. He never played it and barely watched Blu-rays on it. So as soon as I get it, it breaks. The xbox that I also got RROD (luckily the "towel trick" worked). Anything electronic I buy or is given to me dies very quickly. I don't do anything out of the ordinary to any of it. I don't deserve this...I just want to sit over in the corner and cry and play with my abacus and slide ruler.

[Zeus]

That sucks, Mully. I honestly haven't heard of too many PS3s breaking down, not after the original 20GB and 60GB batches. That's just blind bad luck

[Mully]

I had money saved up to fix it, then it started working and I spent some of the money buying the game I wouldn't have bought HAD the PS3 stopped working.

I didn't really even want a PS3. I especially don't want to pay half the price of a new system to send it in, then in a few months have something else go wrong and spend another half and could have bought a brand new, newer model PS3.

[Chris]

if you like utter shit writing this game is totally amazing.....

[SineSwiper]

if you like utter shit writing this game is totally amazing.....

Same guys that put out Indigo Prophesy?

[bovine]

Yeah, the writing is not top notch, the voice acting is spotty at best, and the controls (for walking around at least) are AWFUL.

This game is all about actions and the consequences of those actions. I find that to be very new and refreshing. It's something that I wanted Mass Effect 2 to do... give you interesting choices that have real consequences. For the most part, if you play mass effect 2 in a gamey way, you will know that if you have enough renegade or paragonness, you can skip passed any hard decision by just using the red or blue option. This makes the game's choices boring because you can always win. The only time you can really lose is at the end if you select the wrong people for the specific roles. In the end that sort of feels cheap because when they die you just think "oh crap/awesome, I really liked/hated them and they died because of a very arbitrary decision that I made". In Heavy Rain you can pretty easily figure out the consequence to your action, but the choices you are given all have consequences, so you have to decide based on how you want the story to go (do I want to go with what I think the character would do because of how they act and what they said, or am I going to do something else entirely that has consequences that would be very detrimental to this character?).

It's a good game because you feel like every decision has weight and that at the end, whether the ending you get is the one you want or not, you got there because of the culmination of choices that you made during the game.

Also, if you take too long deciding, the game makes up your mind for you... Keep that in mind you anyone ever plays this game.

[Zeus]

Isn't Alan Wake the one by the Indigo Prophecy guys?

[Mully]

Yeah, the writing is not top notch, the voice acting is spotty at best, and the controls (for walking around at least) are AWFUL.

It was written, translated and voice acted by FRENCH actors.

[Blotus]

Would really like to play this. Could buy it today, but my PS3 has the Y2K bug... so no go.

[bovine]

Yeah, the writing is not top notch, the voice acting is spotty at best, and the controls (for walking around at least) are AWFUL.

It was written, translated and voice acted by FRENCH actors.

I understand this, but they release games from Japan in North America sometimes too, and they usually have localization teams that translate and rewrite some of the dialogue in order to make it more friendly to the culture it is coming in to.

Also, the characters are supposed to be American, so why not hire American voice actors? Nolan North should have voiced everyone.

[Chris]

Yeah, the writing is not top notch, the voice acting is spotty at best, and the controls (for walking around at least) are AWFUL.

It was written, translated and voice acted by FRENCH actors.

I understand this, but they release games from Japan in North America sometimes too, and they usually have localization teams that translate and rewrite some of the dialogue in order to make it more friendly to the culture it is coming in to.

Also, the characters are supposed to be American, so why not hire American voice actors? Nolan North should have voiced everyone.

he probably could have. and the game would still be badly written. SO many idiotic choices from QD. The Plot holes are big enough you could drive a truch through em and the Sex scene was thrown in just so they could say hey guys! WE HAVE SEX! It's so far out of left field and so illogical it's mind numbingly stupid. Not to mention the reveal of who the Origami Killer is. Honestly I wanted to love it. I think it's solid for what it is but it does absolutely nothing new. It's Indigo Prophesy. It doesn't help that the Sixaxis Motion stuff is broken as hell.

[Blotus]

Burned through most of the game yesterday and just finished it this morning. Ending spoilers to follow...


APOILARZOO

Spoiler: show

I couldn't stop myself in reloading one chapter: the portion of Trapped when Scott and Lauren are stuck in the car in the bottom of the river. The first time I did it, I figured Scott would take him with her after kicking the door open, but I'd forgotten to untie her. Otherwise, I let everything play out according to what I did.

Jayden died from the triptocaine abuse while using ARI to try and find the killer's identity. All I got was that it was a cop, given the evidence of the gold watch and the seized .45. Tried to find something else in the evidence (and it gave me the option of accusing Blake, but I didn't), but took too long and he bled out of his face. I wonder if I had decided not to use the triptocaine in the very first scene in his office if he would still have died. I made him throw it out in the hotel room, but that didn't help.

Ethan drank the poison and rescued Shaun, but didn't die. Ethan shot Scott, he fell into the water, Ethan, Madison and Shaun start a new life. Lauren spits on Scott's grave. Blake sees Jayden through the ARI glasses.

There's a trophy for keeping all characters alive. I guess I'll go for that next. I assume keeping Jayden alive may mean arresting Scott instead of killing him.

Favorite scene was The Lizard, where Ethan has to cut off his finger. At first I had just seen the knife in the wall and was ready to do it. Then I found the scissors, saw, bolt cutters, hatchet, iron rod, booze, piece of wood, and disinfectant. Pretty cool to see all those things on the table as the clock counted down. By the time I had collected everything there was about a minute to go. Made Ethan drink all the booze he could before fucking up the button sequence on the hatchet twice and ended up making the cut with about ten seconds left.

Really glad this game remained mostly plausible throughout. Indigo Prophecy was really good until its last third or so when Lucas turned into Neo and fought an AI. Although there's still occasionally that icky Uncanny Valley look to the characters (mostly in the mouths), I actually cared about them this time around, which I did not in Indigo Prophecy.

Anyway, I liked it a lot. Want to play again, but don't know where to start. Looks like I'm missing some chapters, but maybe that's all epilogue from different endings. Tempted to check a guide, but shall not!

YOUR ENDINGS: TELL ME THEM.

[bovine]

Okay, here's mine.

Spoiler: show

I did not do the Ethan/Madison sex scene because when they leaned in to kiss, all I could think of was "he would never do that, he's way too focused on finding his kid".

When I saw Jayden was bleeding out of everywhere during his Ari experience, I quickly just gave up and he lived because of it.

I did not shoot the drug dealer/father with Ethan, so I had to do some guess work at the end to figure out where the location of Ethan's son was. The guess work was very easy, so I was able to get Ethan to the final location.

When Madison escapes Scott's apartment, she is given the choice of who to call to tell the location of Shaun, and I called Jayden because I thought that he would be a better, level head if my guess with Ethan turned out to be wrong. However it turned out to be right, so I got all of the characters to meet up at the warehouse at the end.

Lauren died for me. I also did not untie her before swimming out of the car and in doing so I think I made a more plausible ending. I think it's something that the origami killer would have taken advantage of to make it look like Lauren's death was not due to him, and that he would have been trying to kill her the whole time. It also made the next scene all the more impactful. I was not happy with letting Lauren die, but I was really panicking during the whole underwater car scene. I wanted to play the whole game through without reloading anything, and I think I like the game as much as I do because of it.

So when Shelby storms the rich fellows house all pissed off because Lauren died, I was totally feeling that and really enjoyed the whole experience. Because Lauren was dead, I let that rich individual die and then, in the end, feel that Scott would have done that too.

So in the end I had Madison, Scott, Ethan, and Jayden all at the warehouse. Scott and Jayden do a final fisticuff battle atop some conveyor belt that ends with Scott falling into some sort of trash destroying device and him dieing (you get the all four players live achievement, though).

Ethan and his kid move into an apartment together and are happy. Jayden starts getting hallucinations (I made him take tripto once), and Madison becomes a famous writer and there is some eluding to a sequel with some serial killer sounding dude appearing in her book signing line up.

Seriously, if you have any inclination of playing this game at all, do not read Blotus or my spoilerseses.

Burned through most of the game yesterday and just finished it this morning. Ending spoilers to follow...


APOILARZOO

Spoiler: show

I couldn't stop myself in reloading one chapter: the portion of Trapped when Scott and Lauren are stuck in the car in the bottom of the river. The first time I did it, I figured Scott would take him with her after kicking the door open, but I'd forgotten to untie her. Otherwise, I let everything play out according to what I did.

Jayden died from the triptocaine abuse while using ARI to try and find the killer's identity. All I got was that it was a cop, given the evidence of the gold watch and the seized .45. Tried to find something else in the evidence (and it gave me the option of accusing Blake, but I didn't), but took too long and he bled out of his face. I wonder if I had decided not to use the triptocaine in the very first scene in his office if he would still have died. I made him throw it out in the hotel room, but that didn't help.

Ethan drank the poison and rescued Shaun, but didn't die. Ethan shot Scott, he fell into the water, Ethan, Madison and Shaun start a new life. Lauren spits on Scott's grave. Blake sees Jayden through the ARI glasses.

There's a trophy for keeping all characters alive. I guess I'll go for that next. I assume keeping Jayden alive may mean arresting Scott instead of killing him.

Favorite scene was The Lizard, where Ethan has to cut off his finger. At first I had just seen the knife in the wall and was ready to do it. Then I found the scissors, saw, bolt cutters, hatchet, iron rod, booze, piece of wood, and disinfectant. Pretty cool to see all those things on the table as the clock counted down. By the time I had collected everything there was about a minute to go. Made Ethan drink all the booze he could before fucking up the button sequence on the hatchet twice and ended up making the cut with about ten seconds left.

Really glad this game remained mostly plausible throughout. Indigo Prophecy was really good until its last third or so when Lucas turned into Neo and fought an AI. Although there's still occasionally that icky Uncanny Valley look to the characters (mostly in the mouths), I actually cared about them this time around, which I did not in Indigo Prophecy.

Anyway, I liked it a lot. Want to play again, but don't know where to start. Looks like I'm missing some chapters, but maybe that's all epilogue from different endings. Tempted to check a guide, but shall not!

YOUR ENDINGS: TELL ME THEM.