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Heavy Rain | 
| From: Sony
Category: Video Games
List Price: $59.99
Buy Used: $40.00
as of 3/14/2010 20:03 MDT details
You Save: $19.99 (33%)
New (23) Used (31) Collectible (1) from $40.00
Seller: Neel Ray
Rating:  158 reviews
Sales Rank: 18
Platform: PLAYSTATION 3
Genre: action_games
ESRB: Mature
Media: Video Game
Edition: Standard
Autographed: No
Memorabilia: No
Number Of Items: 1
Batteries Included: No
Age: 17 - 20 years
Operating System: PlayStation 3
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.3
Dimensions (in): 5.7 x 6.7 x 0.6
Legal Disclaimer: We do not in any way represent that any part we sell is legal to possess in your jurisdiction. Check with you local authorities to ensure it is legal for you to possess before buying!
MPN: 711719816423
Model: 711719816423
UPC: 711719816423
EAN: 0711719816423
ASIN: B002CZ38KA
Publication Date: January 31, 2010
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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| Features:
| • | A PlayStation 3 exclusive featuring accessible gameplay via intuitive, contextual controls and interface. | | • | An evolving action adventure thriller featuring mature content, reflecting a realistic world setting and powerful themes, in which you shape the story with every decision made. | | • | Action featuring four playable characters that allows you to continue playing as one of the other characters if your initial character is killed. | | • | Savable chapters that allow you to replay the actions of the past, while maintaining the continuity of the events of earlier chapters. | | • | Stunning graphics, animation and technology support an emotionally driven experience. |
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| Editorial Reviews:
Product Description
Experience a gripping psychological crime thriller filled with innumerable twists and turns, where even the smallest actions and choices can cause dramatic consequences. The hunt is on for the Origami Killer, named after his calling card of leaving folded paper shapes on victims. Four characters, each with their own motives, take part in a desperate attempt to stop the killer from claiming a new victim. Heavy Rain is a cinematic and evolving thriller from Quantic Dream, the developer behind the critically acclaimed Fahrenheit. Dealing with a range of adult themes, the game revolves around a sophisticated plot and strong narrative threads that explore a complex moral proposition. You assume the role of multiple characters, with very different backgrounds, motivations and skills, in a world shaped by Bending Storylines - a dynamic narrative design where your actions and decisions will shape your story.
Amazon.com Product Description
Heavy Rain is an interactive, single player, action adventure game in which every decision players make influences the evolution of a desperate quest to catch a deadly killer poised to strike again. Featuring a complex and dark storyline meant for mature audiences, the game is a PlayStation 3 exclusive featuring a variety of possible endings, advanced crime scene analysis, replayable chapters, four playable characters and the ability to continue play as remaining characters in the event of your current character's death. Story
How far will you go to save someone you love? In Heavy Rain each player discovers their own answer to this question as they experience a gripping psychological thriller filled with innumerable twists and turns, where choices and actions can and do result in dramatic consequences. Spanning four days of mystery and suspense, the hunt is on for a murderer known only as the Origami Killer - named after his macabre calling card of leaving behind folded paper shapes at crime scenes. Even more chilling is the fiend's well established pattern of killing his victims four days after abducting them. The public is gripped with fear as the police seem powerless to stop the carnage, and another potential victim — Shaun Mars — has gone missing. Now four characters, each following their own leads and with their own motives, must take part in a desperate attempt to prevent the killer from taking yet another life. Discover how far you will go to protect a loved one as you join the search for the Origami Killer.
View larger. | Gameplay
Heavy Rain is a single player, action/adventure game with a particularly strong emphasis on a player-influenced storyline as a means of facilitating the evolution of action towards one of many possible conclusions. The game features four playable characters: a father, a photographer, a FBI agent with a special skill set and a retired cop turned private detective. Each have different paths, means and motives to ending the reign of terror that the Origami Killer has imposed on their city. As players follow the path laid before their character of choice, they are able to explore, interact with and view their surroundings in a variety of ways using their controller's left and right sticks. At crucial times players are given a series of choices relating to how to proceed in various situations, with the outcome of these choices revealing both benefits and consequences. Benefits can be important to progressing through the game, while possible consequences can in turn pose a very real danger to characters, including death. But unlike other games, and because Heavy Rain features four playable characters that exist independently of each other, yet simultaneously within the same the story arc, this does not end the game. Players are instead able to play as one of the other available characters, with appropriate changes to possible outcomes due to the absence of the deceased character(s). Key Game Features - An evolving action-adventure thriller in which you shape the story with every decision you make.
- Action built around four playable characters that allows you to continue playing as one of the other characters if your initial character is killed.
- Savable chapters that allow you to replay the actions of the past, while maintaining the continuity of the events begun in earlier chapters.
- Mature content reflecting a realistic world setting that explores powerful themes.
- Stunning graphics, animation and technology that support an emotionally driven experience.
- Accessible gameplay via intuitive, contextual controls and interface.
| Additional Screenshots:
4 unique playable characters.
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Advanced crime scene analysis.
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Story influencing actions.
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Stunning graphics quality.
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| Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 1-5 of 158
 More please! March 14, 2010
Kristen
Let me begin by saying that I am a casual gamer. I have a full-time job, a social life, and other hobbies competing for my time and attention. But I am also a long-term gamer, having played electronic games since my parents brought home a TI-99/4 in 1979. Part of me loves how games have evolved--the amazing graphics, the complexity, the creation of whole other worlds to be explored and conquered in a fairly open-ended manner. But here's what I don't like about it--it's hard for casual gamers to get invested when there's a steep learning curve. There aren't a lot of games that I can just pick up and play for an hour that don't leave me frustrated or bored.
Enter Heavy Rain. Wow. It has been a long, long time since a game single-handedly sucked away almost my entire weekend. I literally could not put this game down! The graphics are great, the sound effects are great, the acting is superb, and the storyline is compelling. Best of all, anyone can pick up this game and play it and get the hang of it in just a few minutes.
In a genre calling itself "interactive drama," the chapters unfold chronilogically over a period of four days. The chapters alternate among the four main characters--an FBI agent, a PI, a photographer, and an architect. Each has their own perspective and their own stake in tracking down the Origami Killer, a serial killer whose victims are always young boys, always drowned in rainwater, and always found with an origami figure in their hands. The gameplay comes in the form of QTEs, or Quick Time Events, action mimicking, and decision events. An X comes up on the screen, and you hit the X on your controller as fast as possible. You need to open a refrigerator, and you see a directional movement diagram pop up on the screen, and then you mimic the movement with your right stick. A character asks your character a question, and five options pop up on the screen--four different things you can say in response corresponding to four buttons on your controller, and also a fifth option to just punch him in the face by hitting R1, for example. But you only have a few seconds to decide, or the game will decide for you!
While some decisions you make don't matter one way or the other, some will have an impact on future chapters, which trophies you get or don't get, or perhaps even on which ending you get. You don't know which are which as you're playing. While it is true that characters can die and that the story will then go along without that character, you can also restart a chapter for a different outcome if you end up making a decision you really don't like.
I know some people have experienced technical difficulties with this game. I have a 3rd generation 80 GB PS3, and a couple of times, the sound cut out, and a couple of other times, the sound got out of sync with the picture. One time my character froze up, but there were other characters moving around him in the background and I was able to simply quit the game, reload my last save point, and everything was peachy. Some of the load times were longer than I would've liked, but given that everything else about this game was near-perfection, I was willing to demonstrate a little patience.
I do have one complaint. This game is too short! I wanted it to go on and on. I really hope there are more interactive dramas in development!
Had a great time playing this. Recommend it if you like crime movies and video games. March 14, 2010
Irwin I. Silva (Chicago,IL USA)
Amazing game that pushes the boundaries and sets the bar for interactive cinematic video games to come, it has a pretty captivating storyline that actually changes depending on what you choose, who dies, lives, events that may or may not happen so there are i believe 18 or so different endings possible! ( ive finished it and got a happy ending, but ive seen the other endings on youtube ( wanted to know how else it could have ended) and wow some very sad ones great shock value in many endings.
Some have said that there is some "lag" stutter in the video, in some parts the system does have to "say load a bit more" but its negligeable the game never froze on me or anything of that sort, if it has for other people im pretty sure its the systems blueray player or console that is having problems ( is too old use ect.)
The game is for adults there is cursing in some scenes simulated drug use i guess by a character and some sexually explicit scenes with mainly nudity but thats why the M for mature is on the box so nothing to get shocked about.
There is some nudity/racy scenes but its mostly tasteful and fits the scenes not very vulgar nudity and you can skip them if you want( just don't take a shower,choose not to kiss ect.), but theres far more sexually graphic scenes in most HBO /cinemax movies, so im not sure what all the controversy about the female nudity is.( im pretty sure there is no full frontal male character nude, only the girl, Madison Paige the one on the cover art, shes the only one ive seen go topless ect.).
Also while the game installs the first time you play it, you get instructions on how to fold/make your own origami figurine with a special piece of paper that comes with the game. While the game loads up ( like 10 mins) so i found that pretty creative :)
Really great game recommend to any one that likes crime thrillers at least to rent it if not buy it.
Great advancement in Film Style Gaming March 14, 2010
Justin Raleigh (Pasadena, California USA)
This game is great. Ready to play it again just to see what happens when I make different choices.
Wasn't expecting this. March 13, 2010
Minerva Reynoso (new york)
This game is one of the most sadness game i ever play until now, also is very created but is very tricky at the same time. This game is like law and order and bones. Is a good game. I would recomment this game to people.
 Succeeds as a narrative but ultimately fails as a game. March 13, 2010
C. Trevarthen (Detroit, MI USA)
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
Heavy Rain is one of the first games I've played where decisions/actions early-on affect the outcome of the rest of the game. With most games, you might receive two or three different ending sequences, but with Heavy Rain, the entire course of the game can be altered based on an earlier decision (or indecision for that matter).
Unfortunately, the branches that you have real control over - where you make a conscious choice - only affect the story in a minimal way. Most of the critical story branches happen during action sequences. These sequences can determine if a main character will live or die; affecting how the other characters proceed through the story. These action sequences are knock-down-drag-out fights that are indeed exhilarating. But, the fights are really just cinematics that are loosely controlled by the player hitting a button at the right moment ("quicktime events"). This is the most aggravating part of the game for me: the illusion of choice. It is a shame that such crucial story paths are decided merely based on the player's reaction time, and sometimes the ability to hold 6 buttons down at the same time in the right sequence.
While you can go back and replay any chapter (including those you "failed"), you often have to play through the entire chapter to get to the quicktime sequence - which you could quite possibly fail again.
Also, the game is also not without its technical flaws. Upon initial installation, all of the menus flickered so fast they couldn't be read and there was loud static. A reboot of the PS3 fixed this issue, but it still made a bad first impression. Also, when going back to fix "failed" chapters, the quicktime events sometimes skipped ahead to a death scene, even though it was still early in the fight, meaning I had to go back and replay the chapter *again*.
It is difficult to decide whether to recommend Heavy Rain. It has a fantastic narrative with distinct and interesting characters. You really feel like you are part of a serial killer investigation. I think it is because the story is so engaging that I experienced so much frustration when failing a quicktime event when I couldn't mash the buttons fast enough. It is an experience I won't soon forget, and the replay-value is surely high, if you can avoid breaking your controller.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 158
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