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Culturegasm: The Videogame Thread (January - March 2012)

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  1.  (10421.1)
    @oscillateur
    The same could be said about most creative industries I think. Ultimately if you do something every day, even if it's a passion, it becomes subject to many of the same stresses as any desk job.
    @DJ Stawes
    XD Maybe many years in the future I'll try.
    • CommentAuthorbadbear
    • CommentTimeFeb 28th 2012
     (10421.2)
    @Paul
    That. I would play that game. I want it. A lot of AAA games are too one note. I want some troughs with my peaks.

    Do you recommend Heavy Rain? I've heard so many mixed reviews of it...
  3.  (10421.3)
    @badbear
    It depends on what your gaming philosophy is. If you've got a very specific idea of what constitutes gameplay, you may dislike it. Many see it as a giant interactive cut-scene, which it more-or-less is. If you think that'll bug you, give it a miss.

    Personally I started playing it at 10 in the evening with my girlfriend watching, and didn't finish till the game was over at 6 in the morning, and she watched the whole thing, completely riveted. If you can get past the "is it really a game?" question, it has some of the most gripping, engaging moments I've ever experienced in a game. It's not perfect, but it's genuinely unlike anything other game ever made, for better or worse - and should probably be experience for that alone thinking about it. I love it despite its flaws and don't really care what the naysayers think XD
    •  
      CommentAuthorVornaskotti
    • CommentTimeFeb 28th 2012 edited
     (10421.4)
    badbear:

    Wrote a review of sorts of Heavy Rain as a part of this rant. But, basically, what Paul said: it's one long quicktime event without reload after something goes wrong (well, you can flick off the console and hope it wasn't just saving...) Storywise I liked it a whole lot. The game doesn't walk on water, but it managed to feel like a game for adults with very little silliness.

    "And what is the story about? It’s about the father’s love for his children, a search for a peace of mind, a story of another character’s love for his sibling and yet another’s fight against his addiction, all wrapped up in tasteful and well written and directed plot about a serial killer – who, for a change, isn’t an overly elaborate Saw-like clown, but a real person. I started playing Heavy Rain on Saturday morning and in the morning hours of Sunday finished it with one of the most unhappy endings you can get in the game. The experience left me stunned, melancholy and needing a hug. In the morning I was still feeling a bit blue, in good way – like when you see a really touching movie the last thing in the evening and stay tuned to the mood even in the morning.
    [...]
    Nevertheless, by and large Heavy Rain was just the kind of stuff I’ve been looking for in the games. Strong storytelling with no fantastic elements, no dumbed down characters, delightfully few attempts to make the game “interesting for the average gamer” (there are some unnecessary fight scenes and boob shots, but not so many that they become irritating), characters who felt like people and not characters, and adult subject matter, such as everyday people who don’t turn into super soldiers to fit the game, dealing with family life, and small and banal problems and troubles.    "
  5.  (10421.5)
    @Vorbaskotti
    Actually one of the things I loved about the game is that it never made me feel like there were wrong choices (I'm normally awful for that, I save and reload obsessively if I feel like I've made a bad decision in a multi-path game), only that my character had made a mistake and that was an upsetting part of the storyline, which was another unique experience for a game.
    When I accidentally shot the religious guy like I mentioned earlier my reactions were horror and guilt, rather than oops! I'd better reload and do it "right".
    I suppose I was just that absorbed in the experience that I didn't second guess the designers like I so frequently do with other games.
    • CommentAuthorbadbear
    • CommentTimeFeb 28th 2012
     (10421.6)
    @Paul
    I like that question. What is my gaming philosphy? Considering that it has been a hobby of mine for a good twenty years I should probably have a better idea of the answer.

    Heavy Rain:
    Just how interactive are we talking here? Is it basically on rails or do your decisions/general button pushing mean something?

    I enjoyed the most recent Uncharted game but I felt that it was hugely flawed for it's lack of freedom. I also stopped playing Final Fantasy XIII because I got bored with it for kind of the same reason. But thinking about it I didn't have so much of a problem with the cutscenes/story line part of either game it was the fact that they were broken up with relatively monotonous combat. Fighting often just doesn't cut it for me anymore as the primary interest in a game.

    @Vornaskotti
    I love your description of Heavy Rain and as a consequence I will probably give it a go. If I can find it cheap somewhere. After I have finished playing ME3...
  7.  (10421.7)
    badbear:

    Oh, there are real choices and it's not going on rails. Each of the main characters can die, and it just steers the story into a different direction. The quicktime events aren't "do or die" type of things, but there are grades of success.

    Here's a bit of gameplay video, an 2009 demo, which has small spoilers but gives a sense of how the game works. There are several outcomes to this situation and several ways to approach it.

    • CommentAuthorandycon
    • CommentTimeFeb 28th 2012
     (10421.8)
    I think the story as a whole was kinda weak but the game is filled with so many moments that are so intense both gameplay wise and story wise that I have never seen in a game before.

    Its pretty cheap now so I totally recommend getting it or atleast renting.

    If you have a Move I feel the motion controls work a lot better than a normal controller
  9.  (10421.9)
    andycon:

    Yeah, it's a bit sad that a game where the storytelling feels adult and solid like it does in Heavy Rain is comparable to a run of the mill serial killer film :/ In far too many games the script is still a bastard child, a cookie cutter scifi thriller, fantasy epic or an action film. As I wrote in the rant, I'd like to see more GENRES and genuinely adult content, which doesn't been more boobs and guts, but the dull kind of stuff like non-juvenile sex and relationship stuff, and goddamn drama. Then again, who's going to plonk down 10-20 million bucks to make a current console niche game that's not blockbuster stuff. Sigh. That kind of stuff will have to creep out of the indie stuff.

    The last game that creeped the fuck out of me in a good way: The Warbler's Nest.
    •  
      CommentAuthoroldhat
    • CommentTimeFeb 28th 2012
     (10421.10)
    And the more I get in to Mass Effect (sorry, I SWEAR I'll stop talking about it soon) the more I want this shirt...

    • CommentAuthorandycon
    • CommentTimeFeb 28th 2012
     (10421.11)
    I think Atlus has been pretty good with the Persona series in terms of serious adult content (featuring high school kids yes) that makes you think and doesn't pander to the lowest common denominator.

    I think what would be neat for the next series of consoles is to make them REALLY open source in the sense of making it super easy for people to program for and to really push indie guys to be able to make some seriously good looking stuff for the consoles.
  12.  (10421.12)
    Heavy Rain is very worth playing through once. I couldn't bring myself to playing it again to get the different endings and such, but the game does handle the choose-your-own-adventureness of it all. I did have one single moment where I started the chapter over again because I got pissed at the current character I was playing deciding to let a character die because I did something in slightly the wrong order. More of a "Hey, HEY! Wrong moment to take control out of my hands!" moment than anything else. I felt like the decision was taken out of my hands, and so I reset. And got a fairly satisfying ending for it, too. So hey.

    That was my only real failure in the game, too, as far as a "perfect" ending goes. The only thing I could've really improved was to
    spend a little less time in the virtual reality world... Poor Jayden wound up seeing VR tanks. Only slightly nuts, as opposed to what happens if you spend too much time!
    •  
      CommentAuthorIron Imp
    • CommentTimeFeb 28th 2012 edited
     (10421.13)
    Heavy Rain was a very interesting title...

    I don't have a PS3 anymore, but when I did I picked up a copy and played through multiple times and shared it with some friends. One thing I really enjoyed was sharing it with my then girlfriend - she was always interested about videogames, but never really played them growing up... One of the aspects of gaming she really struggled with were some of the underlying deceptively basic seeming systems veteran players often take for granted, like operating a camera and moving independently in a 3 dimensional environment. She was really sharp, but had almost no practice with 3D plaftormers or FP games and an old wrist injury prevented her from dedicating the time to learning them (since she saved her economy of motion for her art, understandably). Anyway, she played through Heavy Rain to the end and loved it; it was really a joy to see since we'd been together for a long time but I hadn't really been able to share my love of videogames with her beyond discussion and observation.

    I guess the take away from that anecdote is that I think Heavy Rain is a good game and also that it's removal from "definitive" gaming opened it up to someone who might not have been able to engage with it. I don't think she would have clicked with it in the same way if it had made the concessions to action game expectations that something like LA Noire and I think that's a statement in it's favor.
    • CommentAuthorandycon
    • CommentTimeFeb 28th 2012
     (10421.14)
    couldn't you skip the action parts of LA Noire? Ive never tried but I thought that was one of the selling points was that people who just wanted the adventure game aspect of it wouldn't be bothered by the shooty parts
    •  
      CommentAuthorD.J.
    • CommentTimeFeb 28th 2012
     (10421.15)
    @andycon
    Yes.
  16.  (10421.16)
    I'm enjoying the living hell out of Asura's Wrath at the moment, so no way can I start in on the "gameplay more important than story" discussion. :)
  17.  (10421.17)
    Iron Imp:

    There is an incredible amount of speed blindness about what kind of rather complicated skill set you need to have for basic levels of gaming, including the cognitive skills to read the visuals and sounds of the game, and the flow. I've heard from a few people, who've gotten their grandparents and other old relatives hooked to gaming, that just realizing which items in the game environment you can manipulate and which ones you can't is pretty damn far from being trivial to figure out. Of course, a seasoned gamer sees all the doors that can open, buttons you can press and valves you can turn usually with one glance. It's a super interesting field.
    • CommentAuthorbadbear
    • CommentTimeFeb 29th 2012
     (10421.18)
    @oldhat
    I frikkin love Mass Effect. Probably a lot more than I should. I'm on my third full play through of both games.

    @vornaskotti
    I know there's a lot we take for granted as gamers. I tried to get my non gaming friend to play halo once and she could not get a handle on the two stick movement and just ended up spinning round and round in circles shooting. To be fair I did drop her in at the deep end instead of allowing her to learn things gradually. At the same time though I think that to a certain extent it's a skill and people should expect a reasonable learning curve. It's kind a shame that a lot of games now don't have any learning curve at all (for gamers) because the language of games is so set in stone that you can pick most up pretty easily and then run through without really thinking about the how.

    At the same time if I died as much in modern games as I did in games of yore, I would spend most of my time watching loading screens rather than actually playing.

    Equally though I've read a lot (too much) about how games are getting easier. This video, if you haven't seen it, is pretty funny and makes a lot of interesting points about tutorials and how we learn to play games.
    •  
      CommentAuthorVornaskotti
    • CommentTimeFeb 29th 2012 edited
     (10421.19)
    badbear:

    Yeah, whenever I hear someone bitching about how games nowadays are so easy and it was so much better in the days of yore, I'd like to bitchslap him with a copy of Zoids and Wizball and an Atari QuickShot QS-111. I remember those pre-teen shitfits I used to have with games and the endless grind to get through them, and I thought it had been just hormones talking. Then, when I was like 25, I got a Commodore 64 emulator and tried out those old classics, and they were exactly as sadistically frustrating as I had remembered. They weren't entertainment, they were sports, and I had exactly the same kinds of rage-quit shitfits as 10-15 years ago :P I've been at it from 1984, and I'm thinking that things have been going steadily for the better :)

    Tutorials and pointers can be pretty frustrating and it can feel like you are being patronized. Then again, surprisingly enough, if that pointer is removed, you are suddenly lost. This exact thing happened to me when I was involved in testing a big league game (edit: Alan Wake, actually, NDA says it's okay to mention it by name :). I've been bitching about games doing a bit too much hand holding and leading you by the nose. In one test session I got into these situations where I was basically expected to go into a fairly obvious place and flip a switch, but I guess something happened - I spaced out for a second, someone came in through the door and distracted me, and I missed the cue. What I needed to do was pretty well lanterned through the game design, but nevertheless I ended up wandering around lost and trying to figure out what the shit was going on. Broke the flow and the immersion of the game right there.

    When I was playing the finished game, they had added a recurring verbal "dude, go there and flip the switch", and I got this flash of annoyance. "Yeah, I fucking get it without- oh, wait, I didn't get it the first time around
    *eating a humble pie*."

    Okay, you can do the verbal cues and tutorials and so on hamhandedly and insultingly, and you can do them craftily. I guess this is where the learning process is going on with game design currently - how to do it and be smoove.
  20.  (10421.20)
    oldhat:

    :>

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