Interactive Erotic Movie

Can you imagine rolling around that thing with a belly full of cold
leek and spud? Sea-legs be damned...

I swear I’ll be late to my own funeral. I sure have a knack for missing the boat where everything else is

concerned. Game releases, yearly summaries, birthday congratulations, and buses, I am consistently and unerringly late for buses – those being my preferred form of transport over the afore mentioned boat. Call me what you like, as long as you don’t call me late for dinner. I genuinely admire the righteous intentions of that anecdote, it has its heart in the right place, that being conveniently off to the side of one’s oesophagus and the cold leek and cheese mash slithering past on the back of my lacking punctuality. You know what else I’m always late for? Those wonky quick-time event prompts that feature an arcing analogue-stick movement. Those things can fuck right off. As it happens, I was also late to have a crack at playing Heavy Rain, a game which seems to revel in its prompting of unintuitive finger movements. So I guess this entire introduction has threaded together with a Nolan-ish flare for storytelling misdirection. All I need now is a clever way of weaving leek mash and boats into the final twist. Jumping Jerusalem, I think I’ve got it. WORST FERRY CROSSING EVER!

So, I’m in two minds about this Heavy Rain business. This is a pretty big deal for me - a self confessed wizard of open minded media consumption. If I was a Pokemon then I’d be a water type, the sort of useless fish that you can capture with the old rod, and I’d have a special trait pertaining to my excessive consumption of kelp. My sole redeeming feature would be my move selection – “Harden”, “Leer”, “Growl” and “Tunnel Vision Game” – a technique which allows me to relentlessly binge on a videogame, going from zero to one hundred in the space of few days, driven by the almost primal desire to leave no stone unturned and no story unresolved. Even if the product has been generic, uninspired, mediocre or just plain Dynasty Warriors, then I usually find myself latching onto some marginally entertaining value – Cue Quake 4 and its unsettling alien lore or the hilarious machismo of Bulletstorm. And finally when all else fails, I can hopefully shrug, neck the last few disgustingly warm inches of my beer and  at least acknowledge that a lot of work probably went into making whatever the hell I just played. My point is that I’m not sure whether I actually like Heavy Rain and that’s a bloody big deal considering the verve with which I just delivered that last metaphor. 

Say what you will about Quake 4 and its plethora of bugs but that cutscene where you get diced up
and transformed into an alien is still one of the most unnerving and badass videogame sequences
that I've ever experienced.

For those that don’t know, Torrential Downpour is an interactive drama action-adventure video game created by French developer Quantic Dream exclusively for the PlayStation 3. Thank you for that laundry list of genres Wikipedia. In fact, while we’re on the topic, go and read the full Heavy Rain Wikipedia article, it’ll sum things up far better than I ever could. Too lazy? Righto then, I’ll make this easy for you idle bastards. 

• Thriller
• Four protagonists 
• Set in a banged up area of a Philadelphia-ish city in what I can only assume is the month of miserable.
• The city is being terrorised by a serial killer known as “The Origami Killer” on account of his penchant towards leaving small origami figures in the clenched hands of his drowned victims.
• Perhaps those fiddly little paper animals and the deft hand-eye coordination required to master the art of origami are symbolic representations of the dexterity involved in performing a flawless sequence of quick-time events using only a Sixaxis controller and my corn-chip greased hands. 
• On that note, I think it’s fair to assume that such allegory can also encompass the main injuries sustained from either form of recreation, namely paper-cuts and RSI.
• The quicker your time, the better the event. 

Working hard or hardly working, right boys?

I think I proved a point. Not necessarily the one I wanted, but something definitely got established none the less. Maybe it’s the time of night. Perhaps it’s because I burnt the top of my hand putting wood on the fire earlier. It could be that there’s no feasible reason as to why these factors should be contributing, but I’m going out of my way to set a new precedent for ramble in this dog. Woof. I mean Blog… and whoops. Either way, this doesn’t change the fact that I’m still strangely unfulfilled by David Cage’s film noir videogame. I wish I could pin it down to a fundamental flaw in Light Drizzle’s development, some interactive-film-to-videogame mechanic that failed to bridge the mediums, but fuck me dead, I just can’t. In that sense, I have to admit that it lived up to the blurbs quite well. 

I like the whole interactive movie approach, where the player gets dragged by a leash from one heavily scripted sequence to the next. Hell, that’s my favourite thing about each new COD instalment. I even like quick-time events. I think they’re a great mechanic when used to choreograph a particularly important moment of gameplay or story. Maybe it’s a question of mediation then. Too many cooks will spoil the broth, and too many flashing button prompts will put the hurt on any chance of immersion. I like where this self indulging monologue is going. Games like God of War and COD getaway with linear scripting and regular servings of quick-time pie because the regular gameplay is based on templates of tried and true entertainment, gratuitous violence and extravagant action scenes. So there’s no deviation from regular gameplay and no dramatic escalation of events occurring in Heavy Rain for those quick-time moments to feel like they’re actually significant moments of gameplay right? True, but that’s not a good enough reason to martyr Cage just yet, and that assessment makes me out to be an uncivilised specimen of modern jock-gaming. 

Unfortunately he's not about to pass me some petrol money from out of
that clenched fist...

Is it a matter of difficulty then? I mean, how hard can it be to bash a limited selection of buttons in singular

succession, it’s not like I’m trying to pull off a 20 hit combo in Mortal Kombat right? Well be that as it may, but Hefty Hail does have a rather relentless approach to action sequences. These bastard sections can happily pummel you for minutes on end, to the point where I honestly started to wonder whether I was going to lose through sheer mental attrition and brutal cramping in my sausage-like fingers... A piano player I am not... It’s simple and crudely effective. One entire chapter can revolve around something slow and relatively docile like investigating a crime scene or wandering aimlessly around an apartment, whereas the very next scene plants you in the unfortunate shoes of an FBI agent getting seven shades of shit kicked out of him courtesy of a burly, black criminal in thirteen rounds of bare-knuckle “you won’t learn that in the academy” boxing. The pacing is great and the fact that I’m so vested in the outcome of each character’s story-arc made the possibility of imminent failure all the more nerve-wracking, with the exception of the main female character that is, I swear her sole purpose in the game is to just flush out all of Philadelphia’s sexual perverts by way of bumbling vigilante investigations or as I like to call them – fuck ups.

Spoiler alert - Worst case scenario...

Whoa hold on a sec that sounded suspiciously like a backhanded compliment, so I better slam the brakes on this enthusiasm train before it rolls on through contradiction station. I’m man enough to admit that there are plenty of aspects that I enjoyed about Bulky Deluge, the gritty storyline, the bleak setting and the eerie musical score to name a few, but I think I came close to hitting the nail on the head when I discussed  the game’s difficulty. From the moment I picked up Heavy Rain’s case, I was informed via the most indiscreet of box-blurb warnings and menu prompts, that there would severely dire consequences for every one of my decisions and by extension, each time I failed to solve a puzzle or pass a time sensitive challenge, I would be drilling another hole in my waka, allowing nautical physics to run their course and rapidly flood my vessel full of shit-creek. This basically meant that despite the many possible endings that Quantic Dream had hinted at, I was compelled to succeed at every possible opportunity, to pass as many bullet-time events as possible and hopefully make it out of shit-creek smelling less like excrement and more like Hugo Boss. Quite frankly, anything else just strikes me as counter intuitive for a videogame, rendering a massive chunk of the game redundant as there was no way in hell I was going to stand for any disaster ending where I failed to capture the serial killer or allowed the main characters to kark it. The rogue-like saving system meant that every botched chapter would be permanent, but this wasn’t a movie where I was detached from the unpleasant ending, I knew that any unfavourable conclusions were all on me and that overwhelming sense of responsibility just left me feeling uncomfortable. If that’s what Quantic Dream were going for then shit damn -mission success, but if Ample Precipitation was supposed to immerse or create some semblance of common artistic medium between film and videogames then I think it was a good attempt that unfortunately curved a fair way off stump. To summarise, Heavy Rain was a hotchpotch DVD with plenty of deleted scenes that I have no intention of ever watching because I can’t stand the idea of sitting through another fifteen hours of party-time events. Maybe I’m just sour because I got the FBI agent killed... 

There were in-game instructions meant to help me craft the game cover into an origami masterpiece, but
just as I failed to save Norman Jayden's floundering FBI career, I also blundered horribly in my attempts
to become a paper folding wizard.