Heavy Rain

[Sketcz]

I thought I'd throw this out there since I read it on another forum, but never noticed it myself until said person mentioned it.

Did anyone else notice that Heavy Rain takes place in 3 different time periods?

Shelby seems to exist in some alternate 1950s

Maddison and Ethan live in the present (around 2000)

Effbeeay Noorman Jaydaaaan exists in some kind of futuristic sci-fi year 2050


It went past me until it was mentioned, but stylistically the worlds the three sets of people exist and interact in all seem to be different.

[Brad]

Finished this last night. Very disappointed. I used the pad for the second half of the game but I think the problem was that by this point the game expected me to be very familiar with all the QTEs and started to throw them at me very fast with me not knowing what I was doing half the time. Bottom line is that pretty much everybody was dead by the end of the game.

The biggest problem, besides the poor animation and general walking about controls and the ridiculous futuristic glasses the FBI agent wore, was that you didn't get to choose what you wanted to do. I was stood behind a bed and had the option to move the stick down, left then up or right then up. What was I choosing to do? I had no idea until I tried it.

Yeah, I shouldn't have used the Move controls to start with but how was I supposed to know that they would be rubbish?

Such a shame :-( Anyway, I played the game how David Cage wanted me to I suppose. Just once and got 'my' story. The story of how every single character apart from

->Open Spoiler<-

the serial killer

dies!

@guts - hopefully now you can see how the game was ruined for me. I wish I'd played it with the pad from the start now but I had no way of knowing this initially :-(

@sketcz - yes! i was thiniing this too, especially during the epilogue I got where the other copper

->Open Spoiler<-

wore the FBI guy's glasses and went into a bizzarre setting and the FBI agent showed up

[Sketcz]

I actually went and replayed this recently, with the intention of doing as badly as possibly on purpose.

I noticed some things:

1) There are CRAZY bugs when you try to screw around and do badly. At one point Maddison ended up outside the walls of her apartment and it auto-saved. I couldn't get back in so reloaded and she ended up inside the bathroom - except NOTHING worked. There was no option to open the door or use anything inside. It took several minutes of polygon clipping to wedge myself through the solid bathroom door and back into the main part of the apartment where everything functioned normally. Clearly, while they load an entire polygonal model for the environment, they only load the interactive elements on a room by room basis.

2) There's less freedom than you imagine. Only in the final couple of hours do any of your actions actually mean anything. No matter how badly I tried to screw up, the characters still ended up moving along until a pivotal point or two right near the end.

This actually makes several sections entirely redundant. The entire mini-chapter involving the baby is irrelevant, since nothing you do or can affects anything. You can't actually fail it, and so any action done during it is purely filler.

I kinda wish I hadn't gone back and redid it all. It really tarnished things.

[Brad]

Yes, I suspected this whilst playing. I also suspected that some scenes you not be 'won' early on and you HAD to win them right at the end. I have no proof of this and would need to play the game again to find out. I did actually really enjoy some aspects of this game. I mean REALLY enjoy them. They got the tension up and got some emotion from me but the game has so many flaws that spoil it.

Is it possible to make

->Open Spoiler<-

Shelby

die really early on? because that would really change things in the game quite a bit.

EDIT: I really liked the story. Better than a lot of movies I've seen. Good enough that it kept me playing to the end, which definitely says something.

[rmoxon]

Ive said before how overrated I feel this was at the time of release, the move controls havent spoiled the game for you, the controls on the pad are just as rubbish, nothing has been spoilt its just a far less satisfying game than many would have you belive.

I will stick up for it and say that some things early on do have consequences, if you dont

->Open Spoiler<-

find all the evidence with Jayden then you will more than likley see him buggered by the end (even if hes not dead).

To be honest i dont think that helps the story though, the story seems designed with all the main characters in mind, if one exits the story with a couple of hours to go then it feels like poor storytelling, not some kind of open ended masterpeice like the game seems to think it is.

[Sketcz]

Is it possible to make

->Open Spoiler<-

Shelby die

really early on? because that would really change things in the game quite a bit.

I did my best, but alas no. Impossible to do that.

[Brad]

Hmmmmm, a lot of smoke and mirrors then really.

Ok, FBI agent when he goes to the scrap yard. How quickly can you take care of the

->Open Spoiler<-

huge black guys

? I mean, I made it by the skin of my teeth when he got caught under the

->Open Spoiler<-

caterpillar tracks

but I was using the Move controls which I later realised probably weren't working properly (the number of time I shouted at the screen "I did #@*&#37;ing swing the controller up you piece of sh!t!").

[Sketcz]

I got him pretty quick on my first playthrough, on my second I didn't touch the pad and died very quickly. But by this point you're fairly near the end.

From what I've seen, that scene can move in quite a few ways. Ultimately there are only two endings to it (I think).

[SuperBeatBoy]

really want to play this again. if i want to try out move controls will i need to buy the re-release or can just pick up the original release second hand?

[Family Fry]

The move patch I am sure is a free patch for original game. It's included on Move Edition Disc version with the extra episode.

[Ady]

Been playing this over Christmas with my sister (whom I bought the game as a Christmas gift). It was all going great, up until one of the dreaded, notorious glitches occured.

Basically, we're up to chapter 9 and went to switch off the console after a section. And no, there was no flashing save icon on the screen at the time.

We restarted the game, only to find that our save had been "wiped". The game started right from the very beginning again!

Even stranger still, under the save data menu in the PS3 menu screen, the save file in question is still there, but for some reason, the game refuses to read it. Whenever we boot the game, it tries to start a brand new save from scartch and our old save doesn't even appear in the in the 'Load' menu.

Has anyone experienced this, and if so, what did you do to solve it if anything.

I've got a horrible feeling we might have to start over, and if that's the case, then I think I'll just leave it as this experience has put me right off what was otherwise a very enjoyable game.

This is possibly the worst thing that could happen to any gamer; how on earth did this get past QA?

[Jimmyboi]

I seem to recall there was a problem with Heavy Rain in which if you patched it with the update after starting the game it would ignore your save file. I would have imagined that would have been fixed by now though.

[kernow]

Just finished this, was practically bolted to my seat all the way through, just wanting to know 'whodunnit' .. quite a twist at the end.

Great graphics in some parts, some of the best facial animation I've seen.

7/10 if only for the dodgy controls and the way it was quickly wrapped up, I didn't realise it was going to end just like that. Some really harrowing sequences also.

->Open Spoiler<-

did anyone manage to climb through the electric bit at the start? whats the consequences of failing all these trials exactly? also I can't help but feel the game would be longer if I didn't cock up the norman part and later realised he was killed by mad jack. The differences in peoples endings.. poison with ethan? eh?

my ending:

Lauren died in the car, I wasn't sure how to rescue her and was just panicking like a girl at that point
Nathan got killed in the acid bath I think
Madison escaped the burning house, and saved Shawn, battled with Scott up on the crane, and let him fall to his death
Ethan was locked up this whole time after being caught at the motel (once again me cocking up the QTE's)

Think thats about it, I'm definitely considering my 2nd playthrough and what I'll try to do different. I always seem to play games and be as much of a protagonist as possible, even on the 2nd playthrough, I just find it hard to be an arsehole to the people in the game

Definitely think it's worth another playthrough, I've never been so shocked in a game at some parts, when I saw scott killing manfred it still didn't totally add up and I was what the hell?

[JP]

Good to know you enjoyed it.

For all the negativity the game received from some quarters I've never been as emotionally involved in a game as I was while playing this. Although it was quite scruffy at times I do genuinely feel that it was a small but clumsy step forward for games.

As much as so any developers seemed to rave about what had been done in places in the game I'm yet to see any other developers learning from what was done here.

Hopefully David Cage's new game will be able to carry on with what was started here.

Have you tried The Taxidermist DLC? It's a short side story which follows Madison as she investigates the origami killer for her paper. She wants to interview this bloke who was originally believed to be the origami killer but was released by the police.

It obviously doesn't go as planned and it's a fairly short piece set inside his house, the atmosphere is very different and shared a similar feeling to some of the scenes in The Silence of The Lambs.

I've never felt so uncomfortable playing a game as I have when I played this, it's not as subtle as the main game as it doesn't get as much time to build up the atmosphere but the sense of dread and the overwhelming feeling of just not wanting to be inside that house is unlike anything else in a game.

I've no idea how much it costs now but it's certainly worth considering.

Aww, you've made me want to play this again now.

[Brad]

In my ending everyone died and I really didn't care.