Gamer Girl Tuesday: Heavy Rain

I've decided to institute something new on the blog.  Every Tuesday I plan on posting something (a review, a rant, cool screenshots, etc) about what games I've been playing lately.  Since I'm cheap, they'll all be older games (that I've probably bought used), so don't expect anything groundbreaking.

Over the weekend I played my first go-round with Heavy Rain.  If you're unfamiliar with it, HR plays more like an interactive movie, where you choose what (within limits) your character says and does.  It reminded me a lot of a better, sleeker version of Indigo Prophecy, a much ignored PS2 game (I'm actually the only person I know that's played it).

Looking at the link for Indigo Prophecy, I found out that both games were created by the same company Quantic Dream, so there's no surprise they're similar.

The plot is centered around finding and catching the origami killer, a serial killer that drowns little boys, before he kills his latest victim.  You play as four different characters (any and all of which could die at some/any point in the game).  The thing that caught my attention about the game was 1. it was supposed to have awesome storytelling, 2. it was supposed to be creepy as hell, and 3. it has about 20 something prologues that combine to create tons of different endings, based on your choices and actions during the game.

Here there be spoilers!!!! I'm keeping character names out of it, but you might be able to piece together things from what I say.

My major problem was that it doesn't matter how many times you play the game, the killer is always the same person.

And that person sucks.

It was the only person in the game I really liked.


After finishing the game, I really felt angry and betrayed by the sloppy storytelling.  There are red herrings that were needed (it'd be boring if we knew who it was the whole time), but completely from left field and left unexplained. If you troll message boards, you'll find angry people yelling you just don't get it, and it's ambiguous on purpose, and of course the killer followed the person around and waited for a blackout, led them to a specific street corner, and put things in their hand, because THAT'S WHAT KILLERS DO!

Or you'll hear people say that the creators did it on purpose to generate "discussion" about the game and the plot holes inconsistencies twists in the plot.

Don't listen to them, it was just lazy storytelling.

It also didn't help that you're actually in the killer's mind the whole time, but they keep thinking innocent thoughts (It's so sad the boy died, that killer's a terrible person, etc. and the like) and are intent on catching the bad guy.  But the character was completely aware of what he/she was doing, so the game has been lying to us the whole time.

I'm all for unreliable narrator, but it was clumsily handled.

But this was all in hindsight.  While I played the game, I was completely immersed, to the point of yelling loud enough to be heard upstairs and shaking the controller with such force that I hit myself in the head.  It's a beautiful game, with some really intense scenes, and a classic film noir feel with some modern touches (the ARI system the FBI agent has was an awesome idea that I wish had been fleshed out a bit more).

Overall, I really enjoyed it while I was playing, but will probably not play it obsessively to see all the endings.

Although, I think I might try an epic fail run of it...

Review of To Your Scattered Bodies Go by Philip Jose Farmer

First let me the you the rundown of how I came to read To Your Scattered Bodies Go.  Based on previous ratings and genres you like, Netflix gives you suggestions.  Well, it was being really insistent that I would love this movie called Riverworld.  I read the premise and it sounded interesting enough, so I gave it a go.

I only gave it about 30 minutes, and then gave up.  I read a couple of reviews and saw that it was based on the third book of the Riverworld series.  So I hunted down a copy at the library and gave it a go.

I think I should have learned my lesson from the movie version.

Plot 5/10 (With a mercy point for premise) 6/10
Sir Richard Francis Burton, a famous nineteenth century explorer, awakens after his death to find himself an a strange new world.  It is similar to Earth except for a few things: the entire planet seems to be covered in one giant river, he is years younger and in perfect health, and the entire history of humanity (including neanderthals) has been resurrected.

Burton quickly gathers a motley crew around him to try and find the origin of the river and the reason why everyone has been given a second chance.

Sounds like a great premise, huh?  I know, it had me hooked, too.  The problem is, there's not really much of a plot.  It's a short book (216 pages), but it covers seven years.  In that seven years, there's really only a bare minimum of plot.  Most of it is simply Burton and his crew traveling from place to place.  It's not until about halfway through the book that we get a character that could be seen as a solid antagonist or even an understanding of where the plot might be going.

The plot feels like a long boring road trip, even though they are randomly attacked, so there should be some suspense. 


Characters 4/10
There's really only one character in the whole novel: Burton.  Everyone else is simply a placeholder.  We have a history buff to fill us in on all the real-life characters we meet.  There's a Holocaust survivor to add drama when we meet Herman Goring and allow Burton to explain his real-life Antisemitism. (Although the author does a little bit of Antisemitic stereotyping in the novel himself.  Did you know that all Jewish women are shrews?) There's a string of beautiful women that Burton sleeps with (who are all resurrected as virgins), and one that he loves for no reason other than she's beautiful and snubs him.  There's even a small girl to help show that Burton isn't as hard as he seems, he has a softer, protective side.

Even the Neanderthal and an Alien that died on Earth are bland and boring.  There's so much potential here for great characters.  I mean, you have EVERY SINGLE PERSON THAT"S EVER LIVED at your fingertips! You could actually have Ghandi get into a fistfight, a duet between Hendrix and Joplin, and finally get to see if Anne Boleyn is the slut she's always portrayed as.  Instead we're stuck with stuffy boring characters that never come to life.


Writing Style 3/10
My main issue with the writing style was that it was too detailed on issues that didn't matter.

We get way too much detail about physical characteristics and settings.  For example, here's the description the first time we see Tau Ceti (the alien from the future):

"The creature, it, he--it undoubtedly was a male--was a biped about six feel eight inches tall.  The pink-skinned body was very thin; there were three fingers and a thumb on each hand and four very long and thin toes on each foot.  There were two dark red spots below the male nipples on the chest.  The face was semi-human.  Thick black eyebrows swept down to the protruding cheekbones and flared out to cover them with a brownish down.  The sides of this nostrils were fringed with a thin membrane about a sixteenth of an inch long.  The thick pad of cartilage on the end of his nose was deeply cleft.  The lips were thin, leathery, and black.  The ears were lobeless and the convolutions within were nonhuman.  His scrotum looked as if it contained many small testes."

I get the point that he's like nothing Burton's ever seen.  But we don't get a shocked "Holy Crap, What is that?" from Burton.  Instead we get a calm cataloging of his physical description.  Down to the scrotum.  Do we really need to know what alien balls look like?

We also get a data dump on every real-life character we meet. In one scene, several characters, including Goring, are debating if they are still who they were when they were on Earth, or if they are copies (the word clone is never mentioned, but that's what they're batting around).  One character is trying to explain this to Goring.

"You are living. But you are not the Hermann Goring who was born in Marienbad Sanatorium at Rosenheim in Bavaria on January 12, 1893..."

I was going to type out the whole speech, but realized it goes on for 12 lines.  And you get the point from that one sentence.


Overall: Thumbs down
The premise was very interesting.  Interesting enough that I read summaries of the rest of the books in the series. But not interesting enough to read them myself.

However, the lack of overarching plot, character development, or emotional attachment to ANY of the characters made this book feel like a chore to read.

This book has made me question the selectivity of the Hugo Awards.  Really, this was the best they could find?




Sorry this turned into a bit of a rant.  If you love the book, I apologize for offending you.  If you have any other suggestions that will restore my faith in the genre of sci-fi, please feel free to leave them in the comments.