As each gaming generation has passed by, we’ve seen a lot of games become more like movies, or graphic novels with a painted picture. Starting from the Resident Evil and Metal Gear series, to God of War, or even Uncharted – games have evolved into a more entertaining experience.
Now we’re seeing games like Heavy Rain and Alan Wake come along and are making those games look like a Mario Bros. game in the storyline aspect. This is an amazing thing for games as we are evolving a new phase and not into a new phase which is key. The question that I ask is, are we sacrificing gameplay for entertainment? It started with quick-time events where we had amazing pre-rendered scenes play out as we hit the correct button at the precise time, but now we’re seeing whole scenes play out as we’re watching and not gaming.
Yesterday, I was watching the latest footage of Heavy Rain on HipHopGamerShow.com and was amazed and disappointed at the same time from what I saw. The scenes showed extremely poor voice acting while still expanding on what you can do in the game – which was pretty much anything, and I found that amzing. But the strength in Heavy Rain is the fact that it put’s you in the movie and not in the game, the movie plays out as you intend which gives you creative control. Another thing I noticed is the unique use of the Sixaxis controls when used to aim a basketball.
The other game I mentioned was Alan Wake which seems to focus more on being a Sci-Fi Thriller with the shadow people that are wreaking havoc on civilians and appear to be impervious to everything except light. These two games are similar in quite a few ways, but in that same token they are very different as Heavy Rain appears to have more depth in the gameplay with the various ways you can play out the game.
These two games remind me of inFAMOUS and Prototype, except only inFAMOUS was exclusive to a console, but these two games were similar in as many ways as they were different. Prototype seemed to be a cheaper version of inFAMOUS where Cole was able to just do more things in the game compared to the Alex character in Prototype.
Gameplay aside, the one thing that really stood out for Prototype and inFAMOUS was the storyline and the bridging of what videogame storylines are becoming. This leads us to Heavy Rain and Alan Wake – the more I see of these two games, the more it seems clear that Heavy Rain will be the better buy between the two.
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I to find that the advancement in story telling has come a long way that I’m happy to be a part of. This new found power needs to be implemented correctly or else gameplay WILL suffer. For example Ninja Blade (which I feel like the only person to have enjoyed on some level) had fun cutscenes that bordered on ridiculous and kept me entertained throughout. However the gameplay did tend to lack a touch, but it’s games like this that show developers how important balance is in games. In my opinion, games like Mass Effect, Assassins Creed, and Bioshock have interesting stories AND gameplay that keep me indulged.