heavy rain WAS effing awesome!

Haha. It's sad that it's been long enough since I last posted that I am able to respond to my last post from like 3 weeks ago. Oh well, being busy sucks. Anyway, we got Heavy Rain like the day it came out from GameFly and I have to say it was pretty much as impressive and awesome as everyone has been saying. The gameplay is pretty different from most other games (other than of course Indigo Prophecy, the previous title from French developer Quantic Dream) and decisions drive everything that happens. Do you want to be sympathetic to a crazy person or aggressive? Will you drink a drink or abstain? These in-the-moment choices are what makes Heavy Rain great, and also what makes it insanely replayable - every action can have serious consequences on how the game proceeds and what kinds of situations the characters find themselves in. You play as four characters in interwoven stories that occasionally overlap. The character models are amazing (and QD obviously knew this as up-close studies of each character's face make up the loading screens) and the crowd scenes are truly something to behold when you remember games where background characters were 2d still images. If I had to pick one thing to complain about it would definitely be the voice acting, however, which comes close to ruining the moment in several places throughout the plot. The kids are especially terribly voiced but many adult males in the game sound just ridiculous. Still, this game is really, really cool and offers enough varieties of outcome that it is definitely worth playing through multiple times. Plus the chapter organization makes this especially easy, letting you choose which chapter you want to play through and having those ramifications carry through to the rest of the levels. If you have a PS3, Heavy Rain is definitely not a game to miss.