The New Flesh

Heavy Rain aka the other reason I need to buy PS3. Heavy Rain is in many ways the next stage in the evolution of the adventure game. First there were the text adventures, then the point and click adventures and now Heavy Rain. People have been struggling to say what genre Heavy Rain is but I think it’s fairly obviously a choose your own adventure but in graphical videogame. Narratively Heavy Rain is a traditional thriller, the son of one of the four viewpoint characters has been kidnapped by a serial killer and according to the killers modus operandi this means he’ll show up dead in exactly four days. It looks very dark and nasty like the film Seven and the stories of the four characters intertwine in a fashion that’s probably something like Magnolia.

The multiple player characters, although nothing new, is still a brilliant and underused storytelling device for a story based video games. The big problem with games is that your main character is always fine unless they’re not meant to be. The first time you watch Halloween you don’t know if Jamie Lee Curtis’s character is going to survive or not, you think she is but then you think quite a lot of things and John Carpenter is far too good a storyteller to let you get away with all of them so maybe she doesn’t. When you play Dead Space you know the dude in the lower left corner of your screen is going to survive because if he doesn’t then there’s no game and you know, he’s died a couple of times in the last few hours so if he dies again I’ll just reload and everything will be fine. Not so in Heavy Rain because you have four characters they can die, they’re each expendable, it’ll change the story but if you screw up and, as happened to me during the demo level, you “fail” an action sequence and the player character gets beaten to death by a car mechanic then that’s what happened and the story moves on. Maybe he was bound to die in that scene and it was just an illusion that my lack of familiarity with the PS3 controller killed him, I don’t know and that uncertainty makes it exciting. One things for sure, when I get the full game I’ll play that action sequence like my life depends upon it.

Now let me talk Quick Time Events since they’re the elephant in the room. The action sequences in Heavy Rain are controlled by QTEs and the problem is that in my opinion most QTEs suck. However I’d argue that while these are QTEs they have a couple of vital saving graces, firstly they aren’t replayable and secondly they’re unique to the context of the events. Combined that means that during a play through of the game you never know what button you might need to press next, you never have to learn the sequence and you never repeat it until you produce it perfectly because if you screw it up then the moment is gone. When my character got beaten to death that was it. Full stop. No second chances, the moment is gone, the game goes on to the next scene with whatever the consequences your failure. There’s no practising and getting these things right and being held back until you do get them right, basically no awful QTE grinding. There’s just a story that you can control in a fairly meaningful fashion using controls that adjust dynamically to the actions the in game character wants to make, push right to roll right, move the six-axis sharply down to smash a bottle over someone’s head etc. I think it’ll work really well, I couldn’t get the full impression in the demo because I spent the whole time trying to remember which was the triangle and which was the square but I think once I can “touch type” a Playstation controller like most PS3 owners it’ll work really well. I’m really looking forward to this and you’ll probably be hearing more about it here in Q1 next year when it releases.

AvP was the most fun I had with any game on the show floor but I am slightly worried about longevity. I played one eight player deathmatch on the PS3 version and I had a ton of fun. I was playing an Alien because the Predator looked a lot more complicated (cloaking, health, multiple weapons etc) and I can’t shoot with a joypad for toffee so Colonial Marine would have been even more suicidal than normal. I also watched quite a lot of Predator play and a little bit of Colonial Marine play. Much of the game as Aliens or Predators boiled down to running about avoiding direct confrontation and pressing the Square button whenever you got behind anyone to perform a set piece stealth kill and then finding that while the animation was playing someone else had run up behind you and pressed the Square button to stealth kill you (which is great when your the last person standing in such a chain, not so much the rest of the time). Play as Colonial Marines seemed to boil down to dying a lot although if you don’t get the jump on them their guns clearly make them the most dangerous opponents for an Alien since running away is always a good option against a Predator or at least against a n00b predator who hasn’t learnt how to shoot.

The best moment was taking out both the guys sitting on either side of me who were playing semi-cooperatively as marines in an attempt to survive. I got the first with a stealth kill and the second, who had just seen me kill his buddy, by making a semi-suicidal leap directly towards him and going mental with my attack buttons. He swore. I smiles and then got stealth killed by a predator. Good times. I think the problem is those stealth kills are rather too easy. In theory they’re just like a back stab in TF2 but they’re actually far far easier than that and you get a pop-up telling you when it’ll work that’s far easier to read than the knife changing position in TF2 so it often didn’t feel particularly skilful. Still that just console multiplayer deathmatch among a bunch of n00bs based on some early code. I should think the Marines would certainly get a healthy buff from mouse control and the sneaky bastard Predator looks like it’ll be formidable in the hands of someone who knows how to use it but for a n00b like me on this code it was Alien for the mid-table obscurity. I’m still more excited by the prospect of the single player campaigns which I didn’t an opportunity to look at but I think I’ll be spending a fare few hours with both halves of this game and there aren’t many games I’ve ever thought that about. Definitely looks like a must buy when it comes out in February. I’ll be getting it for the PC but it’s also coming out on 360 and PS3.

Split/Second wasn’t even on my radar before I went along to it’s developer presentation on Friday. I went along anyway and I have to say was really impressed. I later got to play a couple of races on the show floor and see how it actually handles. It’s a racing game of course, it’s from Black Rock who are the same guys who did Pure and it’s looking pretty good. It’s in pre-alpha and set for a 2010 release on the three powerful platforms but it’s already looking very nice. The concept is that your racing on a future racing TV show and the racers, both you and the AI get to set off traps and shortcuts ahead of you to spice up the action. It’s a paper thin excuse for some big set piece Michael Bay style explosions in an arcade racing game but who cares, this ain’t Heavy Rain. I’m slightly worried it’ll be two easy to learn the tracks and all they’re traps to the point where in spite of the eye candy you treat it just like a normal racer but I think as a silly racer it’ll good generate some good moments, particularly in multiplayer. It’s certainly given the arcade racer a little bit of a shake, enough to set it apart from the likes of Need for Speed and it’s very very pretty so yeah, I’m adding this to my watch list.