Sony has a number of PlayStation 3 games on display at its E3 2006 booth, one of which is the forthcoming adventure title Hard Rain. Unfortunately the game isn't playable as it really just serves as a tech demo for the game's rather impressive graphics engine, but it's certainly interesting to see, even if its content lies outside of the scope of the game.The demo opens with the female protagonist in a nearly empty white room, talking to the camera. She's come for an audition it seems, and begins by talking to the unseen director for a bit. The sound was muted for the demo so we're unsure of what she was talking about, but that wasn't really the point anyway. You can immediately see the immense detail that has gone into the game's facial animation system. As she spoke, every muscle in her face would move naturally - as she smiled, the edges of her eyes closed a tad. When her eyes raised, her brow would crinkle. The way her eyes danced around the room as she spoke was scarily realistic.A clapboard then appears before the camera to mark the start of the audition take, closes shut and pans away to reveal a full kitchen setup. A sink is behind her, a kitchen table to her right. The objects in the room are rendered with effects that you'd normally only see come out of a CG rendering. Glass both reflects and refracts, knives shine, book covers are rendered with pro-pixel leatherization diffusion and everything is light very smoothly. You need only look at the screenshots to see what we mean.As the scene goes on, the actress' demeanor gets much more somber, and a tad bit of hatred and possible jealousy begins to creep into her eyes. It's rather amazing that these sorts of emotions are conveyed as well as they are. Soon she gets up and walks over to the sink, and as she turns around she has a revolver in her hand. As she talks, she puts the gun to her head. A few seconds later, she seems to rethink that and lowers it, seemingly speaking in a somewhat confused manner with a hint of disbelief. Again, though we couldn't actually hear what she was saying, these subtleties come through simply from visuals alone. A few seconds later, she points the gun towards the camera, says something and pulls the trigger. A white flash is seen and then we're back in the empty room again.The actress carries on a bit more conversation with the director after the scene finishes, immediately returning to good spirits. Soon thereafter, the demo fades to black. Even though we couldn't hear one syllable come from her mouth, this is a seriously impressive demo.
Sony released today 25 new amazing and detailed screenshots for Heavy Rainhttp://news.vgchartz.com/news.php?id=5129
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/heavy-rain-dec-hands-onHow far would I go to save someone I loved? Apparently, I'd start by letting them win. The first thing that happens in Heavy Rain is that you take control of architect Ethan Mars as he wakes up on a beautiful Saturday morning in his lovely modern family home, gets dressed and goes downstairs to wait for his wife and children to come back from the shops. When they do, he helps get stuff ready for lunch and then has a bit of time to kill, so he goes and plays in the garden with sons Shaun and Jason.Heavy Rain is easy to pick up and play, but at this stage you are still effectively in one of those playable tutorials, doing things like depressing triggers at varying speed to see how much you can influence the speed of animation (a lot). At this stage in any game the goal is to do what you're told while events warm themselves up in step.What sets Heavy Rain apart, however, is that while I'm having a mock lightsaber fight with my kids in the garden, I remember it's better to let kids win. So I deliberately fudge some button prompts, "failing" by any traditional gaming yardstick, take a few mock blows and tumble dramatically to the floor to Shaun and Jason's great delight. To my great delight as well - Heavy Rain isn't a mature game because it has unhappy families and moody lighting, it's a mature game because it anticipates an adult response from the player and is prepared to receive it.Unlike past previews, for the first time we are getting to play through an extended section of Heavy Rain. Other publishers are very protective of their blockbuster games, revealing them in dribs and drabs - the apex of which remains Activision's decision to show journalists a mere two minutes of Modern Warfare 2 at gamescom in Cologne two months prior to its release - so today suggests Sony is rather proud of Heavy Rain, because this preview build is over two hours of continuous play.Like Quantic Dream's previous games, individual scenes can play out in a variety of ways determined by your actions.It allows us to observe how the game introduces its four playable characters and the concept of the Origami Killer, and how it reconciles the seemingly mundane - like taking your kid to the park - with events far more out of the ordinary. Following the prologue, the game sticks with Ethan Mars as we experience the pivotal event in his life: the death of his son Jason. It's a shattering blow, as it must be, and it forces Mars and his wife Grace to separate. We meet him again as he struggles to reconnect to his distant, remaining son amidst the fog of depression.As Infinity Ward demonstrated recently with its "No Russian" level in Modern Warfare 2, it's very difficult to introduce powerful, emotional themes and social commentary into a videogame, even when you're one of the world's foremost game developers with two of the biggest-selling releases of all time on your CV. So it's important to bear in mind the scale of Quantic Dream's ambition: Heavy Rain's initial theme of coming to terms with personal tragedy isn't just a convenient sob story backdrop to a game of combining items and solving puzzles; this, it seems, is the game.And to this end the developer is simultaneously bold and delicate, perhaps best illustrated by the gentleness of the other three playable characters' introductions. You adapt to private detective Scott Shelby's calm, polite investigative style as comfortably as you put on your favourite jacket. When his first interviewee gets into trouble and he is forced to defend her from an attacker, he never slips out of the character you've just seen defined. His physical appearance and manners bespeak quiet courage and personal responsibility, and his actions do little to disturb the measured start of the game, even though they are its first acts of violence.Quantic Dream controls the lighting very effectively, and individual locations already live up to early promises.FBI profiler Norman Jayden, meanwhile, arrives in a car at a crime scene, calmly presents his credentials and then attempts to investigate without treading on the toes of cops who plainly consider him to be an unwelcome burden, summoned by forces beyond their control. He also appears to be masking withdrawal symptoms - but of course this is less of a problem in the pouring rain and dismal light beneath a highway overpass, so the game can save his flaws for later. We see the least of Madison Paige, the last playable character to be introduced - her "Sleepless Night" scene is the final one in our preview build - but her initial performance frames her restlessness and hints at creeping fear and isolation.Quantic Dream has spoken repeatedly of its desire to provoke an emotional response within the player, and there are a number of occasions within the opening few hours that worked on me. I've written before about the unhappy memories Ethan Mars' descent into depression raked over; the house he moves into after Jason's death is furnished with the same disinterest I remember from my dad's first place after my parents separated. It wasn't until later that the green shoots of pride began to emerge in redecoration and the resumption of hobbies, but Ethan's still buying microwave dinners for his son; the prologue suggested he was the breadwinner and thoughtful father, but evidently he wasn't the cook.But it's not just the bleak aftermath of tragedy and divorce that resonates. Anyone who has ever given up smoking would recognise Norman Jayden's frustration as his body insists it must have something he knows in his heart he must deny it, even if smoking's a slightly less extreme example. And surely everyone has cursed him or herself for getting out of bed to investigate a noise elsewhere in the house, as Madison Paige does, and then thought about what the event implies.Away from these occasional sharp reactions, there's the ongoing theme of having to ask difficult questions of people in the throes of grief, and it's practically impossible not to identify and emphathise with Scott Shelby as he attempts to push, but not too hard. Within the first few hours, Shelby comes across as the most idealised character, within a broad spectrum of otherwise-dysfunctional or down-on-their-luck individuals, all of whom are, however, portrayed very realistically.The key to this, of course, is the game's exceptional character detail. The load screens are extreme close-ups of the next playable character's face, as if to encourage you to seek out blemishes through a magnifying glass. From the bags under Shelby's eyes to the fine stubble on Ethan's chin and the cut on Jayden's cheek, you can't. There is also sufficient stylisation in the way each character is defined to evade the infamous Uncanny Valley, and the artists' subtle and astute observation - which owes a lot to the game's extensive performance capture - also pervades the animation. Watching Ethan Mars put on a shirt is like watching a bloke put on a shirt. We're there.It only ever looks wrong if you perform an unnatural act. That may sound as though the game's controls and movements are restrictive, but in actual fact the bond between player and character is seldom forced, with the interface versatile and intuitive. It's impossible to dismiss Heavy Rain as a sequence of "quick-time events" once you begin to play it; the extraordinary visuals, intriguing activities and mature way the game interprets and anticipates your actions transcend the traditional relationship between, say, Lara Croft and the pendulum blade the X button is designed to propel her away from during the heat of an in-engine cut-scene.Heavy Rain's novelties extend into its fiction too. We've been promised no yellow internet monsters this time, Fahrenheit fans, but writer David Cage is evidently still fascinated by the psychological impact of physical and emotional trauma, evinced by a trip to the doctors with Ethan Mars, who is experiencing potentially dangerous blackouts. Cage trusts and teases the player a little too - at one stage Shelby straightens up as though he's about to go into a similar catatonic state, but it quickly becomes apparent he's actually having a mild asthma attack.There are three difficulty levels - for non-gamers, casual gamers and gamers - which vary the volume and timing of actions.With the majority of the sequences I've played set in late 2011, there are a few futuristic touches too. Norman Jayden is equipped with a pair of computer-augmented spectacles called ARI, which along with a special glove attachment allow him to record what he sees, store audio notes, access information relevant to his surroundings via an overlay within his field of view, and manipulate virtual objects.In one rather cute moment, he kills time at the police station by bouncing a virtual ball against a virtual wall. At a crime scene, he traces scents, footprints and DNA samples with ARI. When he is dumped in a dusty, barren old office, he ignores the pinboard, sweeps the phone and files off the desk and uses ARI to create a virtual office on top of a mountain or at the bottom of the sea. He then flicks through virtual files, drags and drops the locations that bodies were dumped onto a pull-down map, and considers his case notes as he tries to draw up a profile of the Origami Killer.Elsewhere, there are more traditional and restrained methods of storytelling, including good use of static camera angles (of which a couple can usually be cycled), and the way key concepts and details are often introduced at the periphery. Nobody ever stands in front of you and spells out what is going on, and they needn't, either.One of the options when you go outside into Ethan's beautiful garden during the prologue is simply to lie on the grass. Lovely.Throughout, Quantic Dream's composition is as accomplished as almost anything I've played. Uncharted 2 arguably bests Heavy Rain for convincing interplay between characters, but Heavy Rain hits back by keeping you in control, despite comparable visual fidelity. The only technical question mark remains over sections of the dialogue and voice acting, which sometimes comes across as a little unnatural - perhaps as an otherwise-imperious Cage struggles to disguise the fact he's writing in his second language. But it's a minor blemish, only discernible in the context of the superlative construction evident elsewhere.With that said though, story isn't just a vital component of Heavy Rain, it is the absolute core, which makes it difficult to draw any serious conclusions even after playing a continuous portion of the game. Strands and themes are starting to coalesce over the horizon, and mysteries have dawned or shone through the ever-present clouds that descend beyond the shattering prologue. But the way everything works together across the course of the game will probably be what determines its quality.At the moment, it's fascinating and compelling, despite the heavy, sometimes-cloying atmosphere and sense of sadness, despair and alienation. Heavy Rain is racing through virgin territory before you have even finished learning how to steer it, and whether or not it proves to be a great success, it already stands apart.
Well, after watching my brother play the demo...and reading that review, I know for sure that I......this game.Brushing teeth and drinking orange juice? Seriously?Someone send me the memo where it says this is fun...exquisite storytelling notwithstanding.This one gets a PASS. I'll be blowing things up in Port Valdez, Atacama Desert, Arica Harbour, etc.
Downloaded demo, installed. PS3 dead I installed it on my sis ps3 though and tried it.The change of pace, gameplay..All fresh. i loved it alot!Attention to detail as noted in reviews is very high and visuals were amazing as expected.
