Indeed, I gave it a shot today. Who would have known that repeatedly going *SPLAT* "Doh!" would be so entertaining?
I'm still early in Red Dead Redemption, but I'm really impressed with Rockstar's level of narrative quality nowadays, so I'm looking forward to LA Noire.
As much as I LOVE Heavy Rain and Indigo Prophecy, stuff like that is never going to become mainstream until they can integrate more player controlled action into it. Most people want to PLAY games, not watch them, and until we can reach that happy balance of play and watch (I personally think Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater came closest) then Heavy Rain is always going to be stuck in a sub-genre.
I think Heavy Rain is the game to have ever evoked the strongest emotional response to it. I played through the entire game in an all day marathon setting, and maybe it's because I was sick with the flu at the time, but after it was all over I felt emotionally exhausted.
Well, don't let go of that disappointment feeling just yet.
Sorry, I missed this.
Wait for the asteroids.
Thats the ending that I saw coming so I did EVERYTHING in my power to avoid it. Despite it being a great, maybe the perfect, ending I did NOT want that to happen.
My entire complaint about the kid is that he's used entirely as an object during the game. We never get to know him or learn what kind of person he is before he's snatched up. Worse, his own father doesn't say much about him ether (except "I've got to save my son!"). Ethan never talks to Madison about how his kid has been having trouble sleeping at night since he and his wife divorced, or how he and the kid would always work on his homework together before dinner because he has trouble with math, or any of a million other things that would show how much he's thinking about his kid. It's sort of like rescuing Princess Peach from Bowser: You know your supposed to do it, but your never really given any reason why aside from your own speculations and societal expectations. In short, Heavy Rain fails to flesh out someone who should ostensibly be one of the most important characters in the game. It merely treats him like an object.
I agree. Heavy Rain was very much Ethan's story, and he did generate legitimate empathy from me, but he was only able to do that despite the developer's actions, not because of it. If they had fleshed out his son better, the story would be more complete and require less speculation on the player's part.
I won't disagree there, especially when for the finale they show Shaun's face during the loading to remind you who's the pin holding them all together. They went the lazy-ish route there, a la how Nostalgia Chick points out Roland Emmerich uses famous landmarks to generate instance emotional recognition.
I think I've finally found a perfect way to explain what I've been saying about Deadly Premonition... from a Game Critics Article on why Deadly Premonition should be Game of the Year.
In short, Deadly Premonition beat Heavy Rain in story telling because it didn't try to be a movie and merely give you what it thought was important... it let you decide what was important.
