Preface: Girls, please forgive me for the following geek entry. C’mon! You girls gotta gimme a break! I’m a guy and I grew up always wishing I had a game console to play but my parents never wanted to buy me one. So now that I have one (or two), I feel like I’m living my delayed teenage years! Yay!!! I love playing my XBOX/PS3 games, that is… whenever I get the time to. Even My Hello Kitty sometimes shakes her head and wonders how she ended up with a geek boyfriend loves games and doesn’t appreciate art.
Anyway today I shall give you a picture of my very confused looking Hello Kitty.
For the guys: So I just sat down at my computer trying to think about what to blog about. I was going to blog about something… general but there’s nothing in my mind right now except for… sad to say… a PS3 game. A DAMN GOOD ONE THOUGH! I just finished it! It’s called Heavy Rain. That has got to be one of my favourite games this year and I’ve played some damn good games at that too!
What makes this game really great though is one big change in the concept of games. We’re all used to playing games where you’re supposed to do something in order to advance in a game’s plot. So say you’re supposed to kill the bad guy but you fail to do it, then the game makes you start over again right? That’s how computer/video games have conventionally been made.
Heavy Rain though was made to be played where…. whatever you do, whatever choices you make (wrong or right), life (or in this case the game) still goes on. If you fail to do something that you were supposed to do then it’s okay, you just might have to pay for consequence of that later in the game. That’s just like life! I mean in life there very often isn’t a right or wrong choice. We make choices based on what our mind or our hearts tell us and then we move on. Only in hindsight do we sometimes think back and say “I’m glad that I didn’t do that” but the truth of course is we’ll sometimes never even know in hindsight whether what we did was right or wrong.
Heavy Rain anyway has a lot of underlying themes: Choices, Love, Regrets…. but the story is about a man who has had his son kidnapped. The kidnapper then tells the man that in order to get his son back, he has to do certain tasks to prove that he loves his son. If he doesn’t, then the son will die. There’s a lot more to the story and it’s so captivating that if it was a movie it would’ve made a DAMN GOOD movie!
It’s also the kind of game that is as fun for the audience as it is for the player. My sister was watching me play much of the game and she was really addicted to the plot. If you have a PS3, make sure you try Heavy Rain! It’s one hell of an experience. In fact, I kinda envy those people who haven’t played it yet. Such a fun experience ahead.
Here’s a trailer of the game, check it out.
Oh and just to illustrate how different actions in the game leads to different endings, there are 24 different endings. I found out about them after watching so many of them on YouTube.
Timothy Tiah – Co-Founder of Colony, Kuala Lumpur Co-Working Space