Played these yet?

[trashcanman]

I know the Curmudgeon has a PS3, and now that I do to, it means it's my duty as a gamer to bludgeon him over the head with the occasional must-play games. More than any other exclusives, the best reason to get a PS3 has to be Quantic Dreams' games Heavy Rain and Beyond: Two Souls.

Heavy Rain is pretty much an interactive version of the movie Seven with some Saw thrown in and it's probably the single most intense gaming experience I've had from any game ever. It's not so much a traditional game as a film that you play. There's no game over, so no matter what you choose or fuck up the story carries on regardless. You just get a different outcome. It still looks a decade ahead of its time and it was released 5 years ago. It's literally the first game I bought for the PS3 and it's still the best.





I just recently got around to buying their next game Beyond: Two Souls, and fuuuuuuuck. What a premise. You play as a girl who has a demonic entity (think Paranormal Activity) attached to her and you can play both. The story jumps around between childhood, her career as a CIA spy, and life on the run as a wanted fugitive, filling in details of her life. It's creative as hell and crazy fun playing both as a haunted little girl and the spirit doing the haunting. As the spirit you can do everything from fuck with the lights to pushing your little girl on a swing to burn down an asshole houseparty to taking out a fucking SWAT team in epic fashion. So badass.



One of the great thing about these is they don't require much in the way of gaming skills. It's more about the choices you make so as long as you can push the stick in the direction you need to or push the button it tells you to, you're set for some the best entertainment that both cinema and gaming have to offer. If you have't played these yet, now's the time.

[The Curmudgeon]

Dunno how it is in the States, but one of the great things about the PS4 being released when the PS3 was still so damn good is the value of second hand PS3 titles has plummeted. I'm now picking up decent PS3 games for insultingly low prices. Mortal Kombat vs DC Universe? £2. Mass Effect 3? £2. I actually got Heavy Rain about three weeks ago for £1. A fucking pound. Madness.

I've not played Heavy Rain yet, only bought it because I'd heard nothing but good things about it. Your seal of approval only sweetens the deal. Beyond Two Souls is a game I've never heard of and would probably have passed without a second thought. I'll definitely keep an eye out for that one now.

[trashcanman]

It's a great experience. Heavy Rain is a true fucking nailbiter. More so than almost any movie I've watched because you can actually fail and potentially watch your characters or even a small child you've bonded with die as a result of your own incompetence. It's nerve-wracking. At least in a movie, you know whatever happens can't be changed. In Heavy Rain, you have to live with the consequences of your bad choices or poor reflexes. Beyond just keeps getting more an more interesting. It's more linear than HR in the sense that you can't change the outcome of events much, but the events are wild. It's one of the best combinations of supernatural and humanistic themes I've ever seen. One scene you're homeless deciding whether or not to eat out of the garbage and watching jocks filming each other beating a bum, then you're a little girl seeing dead people, then you're a spirit deciding how much you want to fuck with the heroine's date, then you're doing covert CIA operations, then you're fucking battling a giant demonic sandstorm to protect a Navajo family in the desert. What a ride. I can't believe it got such mixed reviews.

Prices are actually really high on most used games here still. On occasion I'll get one for $3 or so, but usually anything worth getting will be at least $15.

[trashcanman]

Oh, and I just discovered this little gem of a short film as an unlockable bonus feature in Beyond: Two Souls. I got really excited thinking it was their next game, but apparently it's just a really amazing tech demo showcasing the studio's new engine. Still, even as a stand-alone short film this is an amazing piece of work:

[The Curmudgeon]

Shit, that is seriously impressive.

So how does Heavy Rain work, then? Is there 100 different endings or outcomes or something? If I do something I can't go back and change it if I don't save? Is it, once it happens, it's happened?

[trashcanman]

Pretty much, yeah. There are auto-saves after every scene so if you hit a wrong button or something you can exit out before the auto-save hits and replay the section, and I believe there is a chapter select where you can go back and start again from a given point if you like so it's not entirely unforgiving. But yeah, there are a lot of different outcomes based on what choices you made with each character and how it all comes together at the end as a result. It's pretty awesome.

Beyond just pretty much asks you at the end which ending you want so it's a lot less sophisticated in that sense, but the out-of-sequence storytelling, amazing performance by Ellen Page, and uniqueness of the narrative itself makes it well worth the time if you think of it as an interactive film (or TV series) instead of a video game.