Heavy playing

The last time I went to a Playstation event it was the summer release party at Nineteen 42 in Britomart and I thought that would be hard to beat.

Fortunately Sony don't like resting on their laurels so now I can tell you that if you are ever going to play PS3 you are not going to impress me unless you can compete with playing it on the big screen while enjoying the luxury of the cinema at Sky City Gold Glass. I was there to experience what Sony is calling a game that pushes the boundaries of intelligent gaming in their new release Heavy Rain.

Sony is heralding this release as a groundbreaking title that blurs the lines between a game and a movie but I am not convinced that it as groundbreaking as they think. If you are as old as me then you will remember that when you were young you used to read books instead of playing video games and that every primary school library had a selection of pick-a-plot Choose Your Own Adventure books. You would read down to the end of the page and then choose one of a few options and then turn to the corresponding page to continue the story and the story would change every time depending on the choices you made.

Essentially this is exactly what Heavy Rain is. The game plays out like a movie but you have the ability to alter the course of events by controlling your characters actions and reactions. Apparently no experience of the game is every identical as the story alters depending on your every decision

Beow: the serial killer style invite we were instructed to fold to find a code (it outsmarted me - Ed)

The plot drives the game as you play a combination of 4 different characters all investigating the disappearance of a boy in a small town on the East Coast of the USA. There have been a number of unexplained disappearances linked to a serial killer and the latest to be taken is the son of one of the characters. The tagline in the promotion is that your decisions affect the plot, every action has an unexpected reaction, every decision has a consequence, and every choice has a price.

This is where it really starts to break new ground. For most gaming titles your experience is reasonably linear. If you complete stage 1 then you get to move on to stage 2. If you defeat the baddie then you move on. Heavy Rain defies that convention to create a game where the interaction between characters becomes a lot more realistic as the variables start to affect the outcomes of each situation.

What we were playing was only a demo of the game and the first section was pretty boring to be fair, but it was essentially just a long winded introduction to ensure that you had a firm grasp of the controls. It is needed, however, because it can get a little complicated with the number of options available to you. Not only can you control the characters' physical actions but also their verbal responses and you can hear their thoughts.

This makes for interesting experiences as you move through the game. In one scene, when you are playing as the Private Investigator you enter a store that ends up getting robbed. You control your response to the robber and in the example that we saw with one of the other media people at the controls, you can talk the robber into retreating and leaving the store.

The Great Rain Robbery: can you talk this robber into leaving the store?



Overall the game is really clever. The graphics and game play are all really well put together. The controls are about as intuitive as you expect and it makes for an easy experience. It wasn't hard to get the hang of which is a good thing - especially when you are playing on the big screen in a cinema full of strangers.

Just like the old pick-a-plot books I think that if you played the game over and over you would see similar scenes coming back again and again each time that you played it but realistically this is no different to playing any other title more than once.

After all of the game demonstrating was done and we had heard from the guys at Sony they let us hang out with some drinks and popcorn for another couple of hours while we watched Law Abiding Citizen. I won't tell you much about it seeing as this isn't a movie review, but if you get the chance, I would go and see it.

By Jeremy White, March 2010.