Dollars and Sense

This is the moment I realized I had played this before.

I thought Fallout 3 was a great game.  I played it for sixty something hours.  I played the main quest through in its entirety.  I spent hours just roaming the countryside looking for interesting things, of which there were many.  I used internet faqs and YouTube videos to find the bobble head dolls so I could get an achievement.  So naturally, when Fallout:  New Vegas was announced, I was psyched.  New adventurers to be had in the fallout universe?  In Las Vegas?  Sign me up!  It was a release day purchase for me.  I played New Vegas a little over an hour on that first night…..and haven’t touched it again since.  So what happened?  I realized something when I turned on the game for the first time and got to the main menu.  The menu was the EXACT same one as Fallout 3.  I was about to play the same game.  The characters were different, the story was different,  I’m not saying there were no changes.  I just realized while staring at the main menu that while I had enjoyed playing Fallout 3 I just wasn’t interested in playing more of the same.  Now this isn’t true for every series.  I’ve played all the Call of Duty’s, all the Assassin’s Creed games, both Bioshocks, both Gears of War, Halo 3 and Halo Reach.  I am not championing myself as too cool for sequels.  They have their place.  I’m just growing concerned that developers might be cashing in, literally most of the time, on brand names at an amazingly high rate recently.  I’m growing even MORE concerned that we, as gamers, only have ourselves to blame.

Why the Ending of Heavy Rain Fails

Editors Note – Two things! First, the following are my thoughts on the ending of Heavy Rain. There are MASSIVE SPOILERS that start almost immediately. Stay away if your planning to play the game and haven’t yet. My review of Heavy Rain is spoiler free, and is actually the second thing I want to mention. If your someone who doesn’t care about the spoilers but is not familiar with the story of Heavy Rain, the review gives you a basic outline that will help you greatly in understanding whats below. So check that out first.

Heavy Rain plants the idea of a playable character being the villain very early on. Main character Ethan Mars has blackouts. They start following an incident in which he and one of his two sons are hit by a car, resulting in death for his son and a massive head injury for him. He will sometimes find himself coming too in the middle of a street, holding an origami figure in his hand. The “Origami Killer” whose identity at this point is a mystery, has been kidnapping and eventually drowning young boys.

I don’t need to break out any fancy charts and graphs for you to see where this is going. OMG! ETHAN IS THE KILLER! Of course he isn’t. It’s too obvious. The game, wisely I think, uses this to build drama in the character of Ethan. While we as video game nerds see past this easy solution, it’s understandable we as Ethan can’t. When Ethan’s other son goes missing it enables the game to deliver some powerful scenes of Ethan questioning whether any part of himself, even ones he has no control over, can harm the son he loves so much.

Heavy Rain (Fighting Crime with Jerky Controller Motions)

The problem is choice. Remember when The Matrix movies said that and it felt pretty deep in the theater, but then later you realized it mostly pretentious mumbo jumbo and you wished there was less talking and more upside down Kung Fu? It turns out that the mumbo jumbo part was mostly spot on, but choice is the core concept of Heavy Rain.

Heavy Rain calls itself an “interactive drama”. The game involves controlling one of four characters at a time using contextual controls, which is the first departure from tradition. There is no control scheme that you can memorize. The X button might be making you drink orange juice, put a car in gear, throw a punch, pull a trigger, or shoot a basketball. Heavy Rain also makes what is probably the most intuitive use of the PS3′s six-axis motion controls in the consoles lifespan thus far. Pushing open a window? Shove the controller forward. Swinging a two by four at somebody’s head? Quick left! While initially the entire control system can be confusing, by the time the action really starts rolling your comfortable enough to be able to handle it. The situation onscreen dictates how the controller will be used (or not used, in some cases) and changes in practically every scene of the game.