Lusipurr.com – Presenting the Sundry Opinions of Lusipurr and Friends

I thought about writing about why Peggle is the perfect game, but I am going to save that for my part of the Easter Podcast (also, the game has been covered to death on this site already by MasterChief [who the crap is that asshole?!] and Johnny Pipes [I love this asshole!]), so I guess I will talk about Heavy Rain a bit (though Bup reviewed it for us already).

As Bup has said already, and many of you have already commented, the game is not to be missed. I cannot agree more with him or any other games journalist out there right now; despite what might not have been the most engrossing demo available on PSN (which basically consists of the beginning tutorial part of the game), Heavy Rain is an absolutely stunning example of how to produce an interactive movie if I have ever seen one.

I played through “my story” in two seven hour periods. I would say I couldn’t stop, but I obviously did (once because I was tired and the other because the game ended), but if there were more to play, I would not have stopped. The story can and will be unique to nearly every player, and that is most definitely one of its strengths. I doubt Bup and I shared the exact same experiences, as we would surely want the characters’ arches to play out in our own ways; that is something that I find utterly refreshing. As great as last year’s Unchartered 2: Among Thieves was, everyone will have experienced the same things by the time the end credits roll due to its linearity. Heavy Rain practically begs each player to make the characters their own and shape their outcomes. I have never had that happen in any game before.

Another aspect that was so gripping was the story. Without spoiling a single thing, it was like playing the video game equivalent of Se7en (one of my all time favorite films). The mood, the tone, even the score seemed like they were lifted from that movie and are begging David Fincher to make it happen on celluloid. That the game is open to player input, however, makes it totally unsuitable for the film format and is another giant win for the game. I appreciate that David Cage’s direction and Quantic Dream as a whole were able to produce a piece of “interactive drama” as they have here so deftly.

This brings me to my final point and, as a Trophy whore, probably the most stunning case for what makes it absolutely incredible: I cannot bring myself to replay it, even as individual chapters, for more Trophies. The acts that I have committed, the story I have created, and the narrative arches that I brought each of the four playable characters through is, again, uniquely my own. I struggled for a couple days with this and considered replaying single chapters or the whole game to get more Trophies, but I just can’t bring myself to do it. The time I invested and decisions I had made are exactly as I wanted them to be.

David Cage would be so proud of me right now.

(Full disclosure: I did replay a couple chapters in Heavy Rain. The replays, however, were played immediately after that chapter. The reason for replaying those specific chapters was because I did not get the outcome I had hoped to receive due to player error [hitting the wrong button, shaking the DualShock3 in the wrong direction, etc.], and while that might go against the spirit of my original argument, I feel it was justified as my experience was still the one I had uniquely made for myself. Any additional Trophies gained from said replays are purely coincidental – I’m actually kinda bummed I have them if you can believe it.)