Friday, February 26, 2010

Bring On the Rain

In a landscape dominated by sequels, spin-offs, formulaic rehashes, and yearly iterations, Heavy Rain is a much-needed breath of fresh air. From developer Quantic Dream, exclusive to the PS3, Heavy Rain delivers a compelling experience that defies all gaming convention. There are no aliens, no zombies, no terrorists to kill—only a gripping tale that asks the player, "How far are you willing to go to save the one you love?"




















Drawing inspiration from thrillers like Se7en and Silence of the Lambs, the story revolves around the case of the "Origami Killer," a murderer whose trademark is an origami figure clasped in the hands of the victims. The story unfolds through the eyes of four different characters who end up entangled with the case: Ethan Mars, architect and father; Madison Paige, insomniac journalist; Norman Jayden, FBI agent; and Scott Shelby, private detective. Their different stories intersect and overlap with each other, and each scenario provides the player with a piece of the puzzle to solve the mystery of the Origami Killer. The result is a mature storyline that stands on the strength of its own merits, but told through the unique qualities of the gaming medium.

On a base mechanical level, Heavy Rain’s gameplay can be reduced to character navigation and hitting a series of on-screen prompts à la “Simon Says.” The movement controls are awkward; walking forward requires a button be held down like a gas pedal and you’ll often find yourself pivoting and twisting in place, running into random walls and furniture, and making unnecessary movements due to shifting camera angles. The action segments offer no direct control, abstracting interactivity in a series of analog stick swirls, controller jerks, trigger depressions, and hitting the face buttons when the appropriate prompts appear.

Despite the simplistic “gameplay,” the narrative infuses each button prompt with a level of context that manages to make the player forget that they’re simply pushing buttons. It helps when the game looks absolutely gorgeous. The game showcases perhaps the most realistic characters ever rendered in a video game. From the glassy sheen of the eyes to the stubble of the chin, the visual presentation blurs the line between gaming and cinema. The rained-out world is suitably drenched, soaked, and dripping. Puddles splash, streams rush, and small rivulets run. The presentation is marred by a few flaws however; the game struggles to maintain the visual fidelity with frequent screen tearing and slowdown. Voice acting ranges from decently passable to laughably bad, and the stark contrast between cutscene animation and the robotic in-game animation can be jarring.

But Heavy Rain’s greatest achievement is making the player experience a range of emotions typically not associated with games—you will feel sadness, sympathy, regret, anger, and even fear. The story IS the gameplay. The small act of making Ethan wake up, brush his teeth, shave, and take a hot shower doesn’t sound all that great as a gameplay sequence but it does a great deal to immerse you into the world and cultivate a relationship between player and character.

Our ability to influence and guide their actions allows us an unprecedented level of control over the narrative. This allows the player to invest emotionally into the characters on a completely different level. You actually care about them; their conflicts become your conflicts, their struggles become your struggles, and their choices are your choices.

Like in real life, if you make a mistake, you’ll just have to live with it. There are no do-overs because the game automatically saves after each event. You will never see a “Game Over” screen even when a character dies. The story will move on regardless. The outcome is not set in stone, and because of it, the choices you makes have very real and tangible consequence on the overall story. No one person will have the exact same experience and every adventure is unique to each player’s personality.

Heavy Rain gives you a responsibility that no other medium demands because the ending actually changes to reflect the choices you make. You will be forced into high-stress situations that require quick-thinking and rash decision-making. Because of the ever present threat of character death, each scene carries a palpable tension and emotional weight that thrives on the player’s relationship with the characters. The action sequences will have you on the edge of your seat, keep you on your toes, and leave your heart racing. You will be put in intense situations where the outcome is not clear and depends entirely on your moral compass and reflexes. Heavy Rain will play with your emotions, tug at the heartstrings, and leave you guessing until the very end.

In an industry fraught with shooters and fantasy RPGs, Heavy Rain is a revelation. The game is by no means perfect but the few gameplay and presentation issues are minor in face of what the game does accomplish. What it achieves is far beyond the ambition of every other game. It draws you in a spellbinding and suspenseful tale of mystery and makes you feel genuine emotion. It has opened up a whole new world for gaming to explore. This is an experience that no one should miss out on.

Tuesday, February 23, 2010

Changing the World

I have ambitions. Big ambitions. I'm not talking about your standard hodgepodge of fame, wealth, and women (lies!), no, what I really want to do is make a difference in this world. When you think about everything that goes on beyond our realm of consciousness, essentially anything outside our borders, it just makes you want to curl up and bawl your eyes out. Poverty, famine, drugs, rape, murder, war, disease, just about every kind of affliction you can think of runs rampant, and yet the distance between us, and all these examples of human misery and suffering is so far apart, it almost feels as if it doesn't even exist. For the most part, it doesn't. Sure the fact registers in our mind, and we can vaguely recall that there are certainly places on this world outside of the one that we've constructed for ourselves, and occasionally a shocking look into the depths of these hells-on-earth may jerk our attentions towards it for a brief moment or two, but in the end, it just doesn't fucking exist. I can't blame most people, just trying to go to school seems trying enough, why would I want to shoulder the burden of children who worry about getting shot or raped every day? In a place where reaching your 18th birthday is an achievement, and not a given, you just know, there's something totally and completely wrong here.

But I'm not here on my soapbox today, trying to drag you down with bad mojo that might sour your whole outlook on humanity, hell, you won't be seeing me running out to sponsor my first African child anytime soon, far from it. There's really only so much you can expect of "civilization." What can you say about a society that only becomes charitable during certain parts of the year and couldn't give a fuck otherwise during the other 11 months? We are generous only when its convenient for us. I always found it funny how the incidence of holiday miracles rise only in times when such acts are recognized as such. People should put more effort in pulling off Christmas miracles when its not Christmas. But you'd be hard-pressed to find a full-time altruist, and I suppose we're lucky at all to have some of us become part-time altruists, even if its out of some self-satisfied prerogative, or maybe just a simple obligation.

In either case, I believe the efforts of activist groups all over the world are wasting their time at trying to effect a change through such ineffective devices as those things we call the "truth." In a world where lies are truth, and the truth lies, the truth, truthfully, just doesn't mean shit. People don't want 4 quarters and call it money, they just want a fucking dollar. Too many people, protesting, crying, rallying, and all sorts of miscellaneous and futile displays of politicization fail to realize that nobody wants their cheap coins, copper pennies are worthless, even if a hundred of them equal a dollar. You will not a find a man willing to take ten thousand pennies if he could get ten dollars instead. People don't want the truth. What people want, is the package. There's no surprise that Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth" does fuck all at the box office while "Avatar" is the number 1 movie of all time even though they carry the same eco-friendly/humanity-sucks-ass message (it's a total stretch, I know), and that's because one is a scary-as-fuck movie about the apocalypse, and the other is a badass special effects bonanza.

So how can one, theoretically, change the world? I've already laid it out the outline. It's not by writing a letter to your friendly neighborhood legislator, its not by being an agitator, it's not being that "one" in the family who loves to fight for a cause that the family doesn't give a fuck about, and it's certainly not by believing that you can make a change by doing something as droll as voting. While I will argue that perhaps the best way to make change is infiltrate the government through the same shady circles and procedures that are designed to keep actual idealists out, and work your way up through a decrepit and corrupt system controlled by corporate interests, bribery, and generous gifts, and until after clearing all that bullshit and you're finally in a position of real power, only then can you finally betray all your benefactors for the greater good; but I highly doubt that by the time you reach that rarified air, you'd be inclined to do anything other than sit on your ass and enjoy life, so that approach is impossible by default. Truly the only way one can make a change is to make a package. The backbone of any package is a story, because people love stories. If you can throw together a story, with great characters, and bold challenges, then you have yourself right there a package. That is my plan, to create the ultimate package.

My goal is simple: to make a package that can change the world. What kind of package exactly? I don't fucking know, but it's gonna be awesome, and that's all you really need to know. It's going to be uplifting, and its going to be sad, but its going to force each and every one of us to take one hard look at ourselves in the mirror and ask, are we who we really are? I'm going to wring every last drop of tear I could from everybody in the world. I want to reduce the world into a blubbering mess of wracked sobs. And from those tears, maybe we can wash our stain away, cleanse our past of our sins, of all the injustices, the history of our failures and violence, purging our souls, purging humanity, of the dark cloud that has hung over us since our inception as living, breathing, creatures. Morality, ethics, religion, science, society, all of those things can never hope to achieve my dream because they fail as a total package unto itself. I will change the world. I will create a package that humanity can take pride in, can take solace in, and hopefully draw strength from and push forward towards an ideal future where we don't have to curl up, and bawl our eyes out.

If that don't work, then hopefully I'll be a rich bastard to make up for it.

Thursday, February 18, 2010

From Out the Frying Pan and Into the Fire

When you go through life, sometimes you are faced with potentially life-altering decisions. Like what school to go to? What jobs to apply for? Whether to join this club or not, or to study overseas, or to ask that girl (or guy) out, or just whatever the hell--the act of making a decision is the important thing here. So when I decided to make a blog, I thought that this might be something a little too serious for me, but having gone through all but three simple pages, a few typed words, and some clicks of the mouse, here I am, standing on my new blog. For something so pathetically easy, all my pedantic mental posturing feels like such a waste. I wish somebody had told me it was this easy before, because I'm already far behind in the game.

But it's not like this is a sophomoric effort, I'm no stranger to blogs, or the blog-like structure. I'm not going to treat this like some livejournal, doling out the sob-ridden events of my daily life (which are not sob-ridden by the way), and my blog will not aspire to be anything more than a mouthpiece for myself--which I suppose is all fine and dandy with a bed of roses. The biggest reason for starting this is probably just for the sake of convenience. I've first started this "blogging enterprise" when MySpace was all the rage, not the empty hulking husk it is today. I wrote for my fellow high school friends, and they enjoyed it to an extent, although it made my term "cerebral orgasm" an all too recurrent theme, like the translucent slime of H.P. Lovecraft--it was the only adjective appropriate--Wipeout Pure was just that damn good.

From MySpace, I moved on to Facebook, which I gather is flavor of the month (or at least for the next year or so). There wasn't really any dedicated blog system, the only thing close to it was the "Note" functionality which I explored to the utmost of my ability, with middling results. My notes were really only available to people on my Friends List, which I assure you, is not that big, such is the length of my E-penis. I remember the good old days where people competed for the biggest and most exhaustively extensive Friend's List, hell, I got caught up in that shit myself until I realized I knew fuck-all about the random names on it. It's not about quantity, but quality.

So here I am, housed in a very bare-bones, flimsy, workman-like, and totally slipshod operation. No customization, no crazy fonts, no kick-ass banners, nothing to really inspire any kind of spark, or to indicate that any amount of creative effort went into this blog except for what I just wrote. I don't have the style, the pizazz, the draw, and hell, maybe my substance isn't what I thought it was, it's probably as half-baked as Snoop Doggy Dog or whatever iteration of "Snoop" and "Dog" he's running with right now. This place is no more freer as a public pedestal, as my soapbox, than my Notes on FaceBook. It's not really an escape from the confines of FaceBook's limited system, I'm still stuck between a rock and a hard place, and it still remains to be seen if I could manage to crack open that shell, and make something "blog-worthy" (admittedly not a very high standard).

My sincere hope is to get more exposure, but hopes have a nasty tendency to get crushed beneath the weight of reality. Writing my Notes garnered me no more attention than if I were to buy a diary, and start out my entries with "Dear Diary," since I'm still writing to an imagined and invisible audience--at least this way, I save paper. I'm back to where I started. No recognition, no acknowledgment, I might as well be chopped liver, to be ignored in favor of rump and breast. But that's fine. I'm used to starting at the bottom of the barrel, it's always a fresh start, a new beginning, renewal and all that jazz. Clawing my way, scaling a smooth wall, fighting against slippery slopes and fragile footholds, that's been the story of my life, and it ain't about to change now.