Heavy Rain Comments by Tom Bramwell

hmmm

mmmh

This better only cost a fiver and come with free microwavable popcorn.

Riiight. So no game, just a presentation of a lashed-together psycho-babble masquerading as a game concept.

meh

its like Alan Wake in that I can't tell what the actual game is, but looks interesting enough

I think the word "game" is applied loosely here

yeah but but alan wake might be.............you know a game!

Can I get a refund on Monkey Island under the proviso of "not a game"?

the words "hype" and "flop" instantly spring to mind...

The more I read about this, the more I understand it's just going to be more Farenheight twirly-thumbstick non-gaming bollocks with a big mayo dollop of Frenchy pretention smothered on top.

And you can forget about 2009 as well.

Yeah... this is going to be a very odd experiment.

But I'm glad someone is doing it, better than someone making another Haze or Fracture if you ask me.

In most recent build, Alan Wake's ( especially "running") animation still sucks bigtime.

The latest AW trailer didn't impress me at all. Cookie cutter "watch out behind you scares".

Year of PS3 = 2010, then?

the words "hype" and "flop" instantly spring to mind...
Reminds me of last Valentines day.

According to IGN AU it was 2008, what a fun comments thread that was too.

first game to star Ken Livingstone?

This is what I imagined Peter Jackson's Halo Chronicles to be like. When I first saw Heavy Rain I immediately thought of how they described Halo Chronicles

Is that still on the go? Always interested to see what he's up to...

"A preview without a game."

Which turned out in this case to be a waste of time.

It's another response that he delivers without much contemplation. That, evidently, came long ago, as did the decision to jettison anything approaching the outlandish conclusion to Fahrenheit.

*pumps fist*

I'm totally with the guy on 'ramping difficulty'. Why do game designers think I'm going to be magically better at the game nearer the end than I am at the beginning? Don't mind it being a bit stiffer (end boss and all that), but Christ, some of these games go mental...

From reading this 'preview', this 'game' strikes me as little more than eye candy and marketing.

Good luck on selling this to the games playing public :)

heavy rain will indeed fall on this game's reception

I'm not telling the ingredient but you can imagine it: brown and dense

It seems like a really cool experience. Who cares if it's not your ordinary game, is all you want classic fps shooters, racing games and fighting games? Broaden your views peeps.
Only thing I don't really like is the trophy support. I just doesn't feels like fits Heavy Rain.

did anyone get far in fahrenheit after it introduced the button mashing qte nonsense? Was quite good up til then.

It always felt that Gage was more interested in making a movie than a game, though, and when it came to adding playable elements all he could do was add a bit of track'n'field

"Trophies will be included, but Cage hasn't decided how. "It's not exactly what we're trying to achieve with Heavy Rain, but I think we're going to make it work,"

He says. As if it were an option.

It's basically an adventure game with puzzles with a lot of solutions, different main characters depending on how often you die, non-linear (CSI episodes like?) progression and a newish type of quick-time events when action happens. At least, that's what I've understood of the game so far, without actually reading this particular.

I once played a Bladerunner game on the PC years ago which I envisiage this to be like. Story based adventure thing without resorting to the Lucasarts pointy click interface.

I welcome this kind of thing because you don't get much like it nowadays. But still, oh noes where is the gameplays etc.

Very interesting. It's hard to tell whether this will boil down to a new and improved QTE experience, and it's hard to tell whether the "impression" concept of making awkward character actions awkward for the controller will be anything other than annoying. But the sheer volume of artistry being poured into this have me thinking about buying a PS3 again. Hopefully by the time it ships, I'll be able to afford one.

@Widge

Correct me if you will, but wasn't Blade Runner a point and click adventure? I reckon it perhaps got a different interface, but felt very much like a Lucasgame back then

So I'm all alone in being excited for this 'game' then? :P

did anyone get far in fahrenheit after it introduced the button mashing qte nonsense? Was quite good up til then.

I did, just to see how bad the game would get.

By the end, it was very, very bad indeed.

Blade Runner was a point and clicker, yes. Just didn't have the verbs at the bottom.

"did anyone get far in fahrenheit after it introduced the button mashing qte nonsense? Was quite good up til then."

Yeah I finished it too - the last third was basically walk a bit, cutscene, quick time event, repeat. Still enjoyed it tho for some reason, and as a result I'm looking forward to seeing how this one turns out too

This is a movie then?

Yeah, sorry, I meant away from the old school Lucasarts stuff like you say. The click use, then select item, then apply to thing on screen.

fahrenheit's on steam isn't it?

"'You cannot when you visit the prostitute, for example, just take a pillow and throw it on her and make a mess,' he explains."

. . . ? But I can throw the pillow at, say, the mutant chicken's house, because a cloud of feathers makes sense in that milieu? And I as the player will be able to know when something that wasn't interactive three scenes ago, or two scenes ago, or one scene ago . . . now the pillow is throwable?

I think the tech looks beautiful, and I support reaching for the stars, so go for it man, but I am now extremely leery about the potential final product. Supposedly going to ship within a year, and he hasn't yet worked out the actual mechanics of playing thing? Sorry -- he's got it completely worked out, but to enhance the artistic ambiance he won't even describe the basic controls.

I'm having flashbacks about 5-6 years ago . . . This game Fable was going to be released . . . and the artist in charge gave alot of interviews. Alot of interviews that sounded suspiciously like this one. Emotionally stirring, grandiose in vision, a "new era" was dawning . . .

@busboy33

But Fable turned out to be a great game, despite what was promised.

I don't even know if this will turn out to be a game, let alone great...

Even it's out in 2010 it'll probably still be out before Alan Wake.

Glad to see someone is trying something different for a change, i'm bored with all the halos wannabes etc

Another wanna-be filmmaker stuck in the videogames business with more ego than Naomi Campbell on coke.

Considering Fahrenheit and Nomad Soul he shouldn't have hired script-doctors, but rather scriptwriters. Plus a director, who's learned his trade.

Smoke, meet mirror.

Everything I read before Fahrenheit, then playing the game itself, and then everything I have read since has created a pretty solid belief in me that David Cage is a frustrated movie writer who thinks he has found his kingdom of the blind in video games. He couldn't get into Hollywood, but then he found the games industry where apparently "nobody has done characters properly before".

I found the way that people kept claiming Fahrenheit was original and rich (including authors on this site) mildly absurd, in the same way I find it mildly absurd when people claim MGS games have well written dialogue.

Fahrenheit was fun enough, and I enjoyed it for the most part, but it just wasn't THAT good. Not the way some people rattled on about it at the time. The gameplay was deeply flawed in places. Apologists the world over would say that the gameplay had at times to let the story take over the wheel.... except the story wasn't good enough to provide the apology that was needed. The story in Fahrenheit started off cliched and ended up quite simply ludicrous. The dialogue was tired and unimaginative from the start, so it was perhaps a blessing when the characters started talking less and flying more.

So, I have been viewing Heavy Rain with deep cynisism from the start and nothing I have seen so far has made me feel any more at ease.

I mean ffs EG, did they promise you gameplay and then provide only coffee when you got there? In NO way is this a preview, and you might have avoided a bit of comment thread flak by changing the name of the article to interview.

If QD will show nothing, I can only assume they have nothing to show. I'd love to be wrong 'cos quality adventure games (you know, the kind I was playing 20 years ago while DG was still in short trousers) are in too short supply these days.

@Aggesan

"It seems like a really cool experience."

Maybe you have read up about this a lot more, but I am baffled as to how anyone can describe the experience as anything other than "unknown" and "graphically quite pretty".

If you can provide me with even a single sentence that describes the experience in more tangible terms I will be genuinely thankful.

Oh dear. Those were my thoughts after reading that.

I applaud the attention to detail, the characterisation and the mise-en-scene he's trying to create. But at the end of the day there has to be something fun to play.

I'm hoping for the best from this, but fear it may well just end up this generation's Dragon's Lair.

Not enough musclebound marines in this.

I must say, I was hoping for a bit more of the "preview" part and less of the "lots of words, not much content" part.

Hmmmm is pretty much all I can come up with on this. All I have seen so far is what looked like a game entirely based on QTE''s which looked like a terrible idea to me. Still with how vague they are being who knows what they will actually deliver. The only vibe I am getting so far from Cage is very much in the area of Rise of the Robots.

It's another response that he delivers without much contemplation. That, evidently, came long ago, as did the decision to jettison anything approaching the outlandish conclusion to Fahrenheit.

*pumps fist*

Indeed! And then EG goes on to say that they think he's wrong about this, but don't really say why. Why is he wrong to avoid the completely bobbins ending to Fahrenheit?

I think EG thought the end of Fahrenheit was good...

I know.