Freeze and Burn - Just Cause 2

I'm not sure how I feel about demos. Jesse Schell recently suggested that demos negatively affect sales. In my experience, they have had close to zero effect on my purchasing choices. I hated the Mass Effect 2 demo so vehemently, I vowed never to buy the game. Bioware inexplicably chose a mission in which pretty much nothing happens, and it also froze my PS3 several times before I managed a complete playthrough. Fortunately, my dear husband forgot [zoned out] my moaning and bought it for me anyway, and it's now one of my favourite games of all time.
The Heavy Rain demo took 12 hours to download on my shitty internet connection and confirmed what I already knew to be the case - that it felt like a playable movie, wouldn't be for everyone and that David Cage could probably make a game where you shoot puppies in the face for nine hours and I'd buy it because I'm a pathetic slave to Quantic Dream.
Enslaved was a great demo and I WILL buy it some day, and probably would have with or without the demo anyway as it's beautiful and story driven. In fact, the only reason I say close to zero rather than zero is Just Cause 2. This demo froze my PS3 repeatedly too, but there was no way I was gonna let that put me off buying it...

I never played the original, and I'm guessing it doesn't matter. Here is a game that really doesn't look like something I'd usually play. The story's a thin excuse for blowing shit up. The main character is a sleazy South American stereotype who swaggers around in a leather vest with a scorpion on it. The women look tough, but they all need Scorpio (Oh didn't I mention that? Yeah, his nickname's Scorpio. So he wears a scorpion jacket. Or maybe it's because of the scorpion jacket. As I say, didn't play the first one where this vital plot point will obviously have been explained...) to blow shit up for them, and call him their hero when he does. His main ally is an irritating Texan gasbag who likes anagrams, because the developers have mistakenly thought including this only mildly relevant fact would inject him with some much needed personality. The game is so packed full of stereotypes, it's like a Conservative Party handbook on racial profiling. The 'Panauans' (The game takes place on the fictional island of Panau) manage to be offensive to Koreans, Russians, Indians, French and Malaysians via an assortment of awful voice acting, terrible accents and cliched wardrobe decisions. In fact, some accents were so bad, I couldn't even identify the intended country of origin. I *think* there may have been an English guy and a German bloke in there, but I really have no idea. I expect the final showdown with Kim Jong Il... I mean... Pandak Panay will involve trying to kick him over a balcony while he sings 'I'm So Ronery.'

BUT

The game is so fun! It's a simple thing that a lot of developers (and yes, my hero Cage is also guilty of this) sometimes allow to fall by the wayside in favour of being emotionally affecting or demonstrating groundbreaking new development techniques.
Just Cause 2's determined ignorance of physics becomes endearing (although also dizzying) as you zing around with your grappling hook, pulling down statues of Panay and blowing up state owned petrol stations because reasons. Hearing the guards yell "Catch him laaaaaaaaaa!" is as funny as it is embarrassingly crass and stupid. Just Cause 2 allows you to be a spy in the most ludicrous, bombastic manner, racing speedboats, riding motorbikes off cliffs and then parachuting to safety, hijacking helicopters in midair and setting charges in munitions factory chimneys before basejumping clear as it detonates. I could literally do all that all day long.

Yep, that pretty much covers it

Acknowledgements and Stuff

Heavy Rain

Okay, I think sufficient time has now passed that I can safely bang on about this game without incurring spoiler wrath.

Heavy Rain is pretty much exactly what I expected - beautiful, intriguing, unique and flawed. But that's not to say I love it any less. I adore the game 100% and I honestly think that at this stage, as a landmark game, it couldn't have been any better than it is. Any quibbles are minor and I'm confident will be worked out in David Cage's next game.

Eww. I did not sign up for this.

Take a look at Fahrenheit. It was beautiful, intriguing, unique and flawed to the point that the ending made me wonder if I'd somehow accidentally loaded a save from a different game. (Aliens? There are aliens now? Where the hell did the aliens come from and why the hell does that have anything to do with it being fucking freezing?!) It also had the most revoltingly clunky sex scene since Team America. But I still loved it and was glad to see that Heavy Rain had made huge leaps forward from this shaky start.

The ending makes sense (well, the three I tried did anyway) and the rain is a crucial plot point. Unlike the ever dropping temperature of Fahrenheit, which didn't really seem to have much to do with the aliens, or the cult, or the fact that Lucas Kane was some kind of alien hybrid immortal.

And that's for wearing that jacket!

I think the main reason internet critics had a problem with the game was that most of them are fifteen
and this, despite it's age rating, is not a game for fifteen year olds. Not because of the scenes of 'titillation' (an accusation I now feel was unfairly leveled at the game - it doesn't especially try to be titillating. In fact, the striptease scene in particular is only titillating if you choose to entirely miss the point and make Madison take her clothes off rather than escape Paco. And I think that says more about you as a player than Quantic Dream as developers.) Wow, that was such a long bracket, I think I'll just start the sentence again: This is not a game for fifteen year olds because of the emotional content, because the choices presented require a maturity of thought and because the game is very, very bleak.

It took a lot of effort to get a happy ending, but I don't think there's anything wrong with that. It's true of life.