Wonderful short critique of a game review, that highlights what I’ve said so many times: games aren’t movies, and shouldn’t even want to be. They should want to be games, and we should critique them as games.
RPS mentioned the article in the context of Heavy Rain, and I think that is a good illustration. HR was an interesting demo, I’ll give it that, but in some ways I found it downright comical in it’s excesses. In it’s desperate attempts to maintain some illusion of gaming, the game assigns game-like actions to every mundane little action the onscreen character takes, right down to rotating the stick to open a door knob.
It’s ridiculous. As a game, it’s rubbish, in many ways. The fight scene wasn’t too bad at generating some tension, but mostly the game feels weird, and tedious. The adventure game element feels tacked on and inconsequential. The hand scanner is a neat trick, but it’s presented in a way that makes me think I can’t actually miss anything important, and I don’t get the feeling I’m expected to be drawing any conclusions from it, the character seems to be doing that part for me.
And yet ironically, despite trying so hard to be an “interactive movie”, the fact that it’s still a video game is what holds it down. Put blunty, as a film, this would bomb, and hard. It’s notability as a cinematic experience only holds up in comparison to the video game genre, where the standards are far lower, and yet there are still better examples out there. The acting is stiff and emotionless, the writing has a tone that can only be described as “generic”, and the reliance on the player to “direct” the game, means the direction invariably sucks.
Somehow, it’s still a marginally compelling experience, but I’m not sure why. Maybe I was just impressed they’d managed to pull of QTEs in a way that didn’t make me want to murder someone. I certainly wouldn’t pay $60 for it, but I could see paying a rental fee for it and playing it once just to see where it goes.
But it’s a sterling example of the importance of gameplay, because for all the effort and words spent on trying to make it a movie, even it’s crude facsimile of interactivity is ultimately the part that makes me want to play it at all. Games are having enough trouble creating a profitable budget structure as it is, the funding and the talent just isn’t there to be blowing even more money on trying to make them movies. I think, in fact, the biggest problem in the industry right now is it’s determined drive to become Hollywood, when it would be a lot cheaper and more profitable if they’d instead focus on being Blizzard or Maxis or Firaxis.
I’ve gotten more enjoyment out of Civilization 4 in the years since I first received the boxed set as a Christmas gift, than I have out of a million wannabe movies put together. The replay value keeps me coming back, and kept me eager to buy up every expansion they released for it. I’ve gotten more play out of the Civ series than I have out of a jillion games trying to ramrod their stories down my throat. Even when they do well, games like that date themselves with their very approach.
Much as I loved Mass Effect, I still found myself biding my time more in Fallout 3, because there was room to move around, the structure of play is my own, and I’m free to take things at a free pace and approach that means it doesn’t have to play out the same every time.
Heavy Rain has claimed that there’s quite a bit of branching to the storyline, and I hope so, because I can’t see putting up with it for a second playthrough unless it can accomplish what games like Civ4 and FO3 accomplish.
