Tag games (2)
Heavy Rain review (no spoilers)
Mood: excited
Posted on 2010-03-01 10:23:00
Tags: reviews games
Words: 568
We picked up Heavy Rain on Tuesday (its launch day) and passed it on Sunday, which marks a personal record for passing a game, mostly because we don't buy many games on launch day :-) I liked it a lot - here's ars technica's spoiler-free review, and my thoughts are below.
The environment of the game is really striking. In the first scene you're at home on a nice day in a beautiful house, and although it was pretty clear the game wasn't going to be this way for very long, the calmness and beautiful music really hooked me early. (waiting for the soundtrack to come out...) Some have complained that the game takes a few hours to really get going, but I enjoyed even those first few hours.
The game itself is like an "interactive movie", in that there are a lot of cut scenes and a lot of "quicktime events" (i.e. "press X to do this action, and you better do it fast"). While I find quicktime events annoying in small doses, when used consistently throughout the game it made me feel a lot more engaged.
The control scheme is pretty interesting, too - it has you use the right analog stick for a lot of actions, some of which are ridiculously mundane. Different gestures are used at different times to do different things, so you don't have to remember them, but they always feel at least somewhat natural (pressing right and then clockwise to turn a door handle). These aren't usually too challenging, but again it contributes to the "I'm making this happen" feel.
The way you walk is sadly, a bit annoying - I consistently had trouble getting my characters going in the right direction, especially in close quarters where the view kept shifting. This wasn't too bad except for one scene in particular where I had to move fast...
You have choices throughout the game, and these choices affect how the story plays out. For a while, I was a little in disbelief about this, since I'm used to games forcing you to make the "right" choice, but after chatting with others playing the game I would often find that they had done something different, and something happened differently later. There are whole scenes that I haven't seen because of the choices I made. Handily, the game allows you to go back to any scene and play it again, either while saving changes (so you can continue the story from there) or just to see how that scene plays out if you make another choice. Now I'm eager to watch other people play to see what they do differently and how their story turns out.
The game is rated M and definitely earns it, especially for its dark storyline. This makes me glad we still have companies like Sony and Microsoft willing to publish more "adult" games - I can't imagine a game like this ever showing up on a Nintendo console.
Anyway, if you're a fan of games I'd definitely recommend picking up a copy and supporting an original game that tells a story and does a good job of it.
As an annoying epilogue, last night when Andrew was trying to play, some weird Playstation firmware bug (that seems to only affect the older "fat" PS3's) made it not launch, which is pretty terrible. Not Heavy Rain's fault, but here's hoping it gets fixed real soon.
reviews of stuff I generally like
Mood: determined
Posted on 2009-09-17 09:52:00
Tags: movies reviews palmpre games
Words: 468
After spending another month with my Palm Pre since my last review, I thought I'd take a minute and reevaluate. I'm still happy with it in general...
Battery Life: This has gotten a bit better since my first review - I still charge it every night, but just taking to the office and browsing a little with it during the day still leaves me with plenty of juice. Even traveling with it and playing games for a while on the way back from Niagara Falls I was able to use it most of the time.
WebOS: One big annoyance is that, when the phone is in landscape mode (which is better for reading web pages, etc.), you don't get the notifications on the bottom, and the keyboard is obviously in the wrong place. This leads to a lot of switching back and forth between landscape and portrait mode, or just giving up and leaving it in portrait mode.
Apps: There are now 50 apps on the store, and supposedly paid apps will be available next week. Here's hoping!
Last night we watched Spirited Away which was really pretty amazing. It struck the same "magical environment" tone for me that Coraline did. Here's a good review of it with a few clips to get a good taste of it. The director's newest film is Ponyo, now showing at the Alamo Drafthouse Village.
This week (busy week!) we also picked up Scribblenauts, a new game for the Nintendo DS whose tagline is "Write Anything, Solve Everything". The basic idea is that you have a series of puzzles to solve, and you can write any object (no trademarks or profanities) and it will appear, which you can then use to help you. It's a pretty cool idea and the dictionary of words it recognizes is huge. (according to someone who extracted it, it's over 22000 words!)
There are two types of levels - puzzle ones, where the goal is to do something specific (like collect the flowers and give them to the florist, or help the birthday boy break open his piñata) and action ones, where the goal is to get to the starite and overcome whatever obstacles are in the way. The puzzle levels are a lot of fun - they aren't too difficult but you master the level if you beat it three times in a row using none of the same objects. The action levels are an exercise in frustration, because the control scheme is fairly terrible. You tap on objects to manipulate them, but you also tap to move Maxwell (your character) to a spot on the screen. We've already died many times because of mistaps and there sure isn't any undo...
Anyway, it's a cute game and fun to play and watch. I just wish it was less frustrating!
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