Over the past year, I’ve been following any media I find on Heavy Rain for the Playstation 3. At first, I only knew this as the game that introduced me to the concept of the uncanny valley. And even though the game’s Quick Time Event based gameplay doesn’t excite me enough to buy a Playstation 3, I really hope this game sells well because Heavy Rain means a lot to the future of mature games.
When it comes to video games, it’s very easy to figure out what to do with games that are clearly good and games that are clearly bad. A good game will not let you go until you’ve squeezed every last bit of the experience out of it, while a bad game will eat at your soul until you get rid of it. But what are we to do with mediocre games? The games that aren’t bad, but aren’t necessarily good, either?
Up until the release of Mass Effect 2, the original Mass Effect was a game I thought I would never touch with a 10-foot pole. The premise of the game did not appeal to me at all. I was well aware of the pedigree that BioWare has in the role-playing game space, but I hate RPGs. The last real role-playing game I ever got into was Super Mario RPG on the Super Nintendo. It featured third-person shooting combat, which I like. But I also don’t like managing an AI squad and I also don’t like the idea that all of the combat is dictated by dice rolls rather than shooting ability. Ultimately, I passed on this game because it didn’t sound like it was something I would like.
Unfortunately, my mental fortitude hasn’t been pushed nearly as hard since. Part of that has come from growing familiar with the world. But most of my growing weariness towards the game comes from the game’s design faults and squandered potential.
I vividly remember reading video game sites and listening to podcasts who were hyping up how amazing this game was. I didn’t care. The screenshots looked pretty, but I didn’t care that it came from the guy who made the System Shock games cause I’d never played them before. I didn’t care about the Little Sister dynamic. I didn’t care that you could add elemental powers to yourself to add variety to the combat.
Then I played the demo. Oh, my, God.
The original Bioshock came out of nowhere for me. It was a game that was a getting a lot of buzz from the journalists, but from the little I had heard or read about it, I didn’t care at all for the game. In my eyes, it was just another first-person shooter. Then the demo came along and rocked my face into another planet. Everything about that game to the spooky atmosphere to the combat and the impressive plot progression of that demo had me sold. It was the first game to ever sell me based on a demo. I rushed out on the morning of release and bought it.
Flashback to sometime in the early 90s. I was between the ages of 8-10 years old around the time this happened. I was on a family trip, and we stopped at some souvenir shop that happened to have a haunted house in the basement. I guess it was more of a dungeon than anything. As a cocky kid, I thought I could handle it, no problem. Then I went down the stairs, saw a pitch-black hallway, and ran back up. I told my mom straight up, “I’m too scared to do this.” Wanting to get her money’s worth, my mom then came down there with me. This time, the lights were fully on, everything exposed, and nothing there that could possibly jump out of the blue and kill me. I think whoever was running the dungeon toned it down just so that I could get through it without messing up my underwear. I may have only been in that dark dungeon hallway alone for five seconds, but I still live with that fear to this day.
In Third Person 
