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"Early Access to Beyond demo via Gamestop Facebook"
-- It dawns on me that this entire sentence wouldn't have made any sense 10 years ago. Demos were just demos, they were not offered as prizes. Gamestop would have run the promotion through their own website. Wasn't Facebook just this thing that college kids were doing, then? Limited to students still?
"Early Access to Beyond demo via Gamestop Facebook"
-- It dawns on me that this entire sentence wouldn't have made any sense 10 years ago. Demos were just demos, they were not offered as prizes. Gamestop would have run the promotion through their own website. Wasn't Facebook just this thing that college kids were doing, then? Limited to students still?
Reading a bit, it seems the events play out pretty differently based on if you pass/fail situations.
"Early Access to Beyond demo via Gamestop Facebook"
-- It dawns on me that this entire sentence wouldn't have made any sense 10 years ago. Demos were just demos, they were not offered as prizes. Gamestop would have run the promotion through their own website. Wasn't Facebook just this thing that college kids were doing, then? Limited to students still?
Keep in mind the reviews for HR and Beyond are by two different people. Not really directly comparable.
Given that The Walking Dead is supposedly a well written game of this kind, I'm wondering if maybe people will be less forgiving of Beyond: Two Souls.
Given that The Walking Dead is supposedly a well written game of this kind, I'm wondering if maybe people will be less forgiving of Beyond: Two Souls and David Cage's consistently awful writing.
Beyond: Two Souls is a misstep for Mr. Cage and Quantic Dream, but its failings are not the result of the limitations of Mr. Cage’s preferred medium. That it is interesting at all hinges on its interactive nature. It would be one of the worst movies you’ve ever seen, even though Ms. Page and Mr. Dafoe give fine performances.
It's not so much that people needed a well written game to see that Heavy Rain wasn't, but rather that at the time there wasn't much else in that particular space (interactive movie-game/AAA visual novel/whateverthefuck). Of course, there still isn't much beyond Heavy Rain and The Walking Dead, but I get the feeling that for a lot of people the novelty of Heavy Rain was a big factor in what made it enjoyable and I'm not sure that's repeatable.
Heavy Rain worked because it was a police procedural, a genre that's all about narrow horizons and methodical reassurance. The tight confines of Quantic's style suited it well. The same delivery just can't contain Beyond's epic scope, preposterous premise and high-octane action. You're left feeling detached from it, and its component parts have nothing more than a frail spine of story holding them together.
And something else has changed since 2010: it's a lot less lonely on the interactive drama frontier. The indie scene has seen an explosion in narrative games using experimental styles as varied as To the Moon, Gone Home and Thirty Flights of Loving. The Walking Dead has looked toward TV and comics and proved the value of the simple dramatic virtues: strong characters, solid writing, interesting situations. Even dumb action games like Asura's Wrath have got in on the act.
Beyond's approach is no less valid than any of those. But the film stars, the motion capture tech, the black borders, all that expensive striving to look just like a movie, don't make it any more valid either. Perhaps what David Cage and his dream need are limitations - limitations that Sony's blank cheque has singularly failed to impose on this sprawling, over-reaching game.
Beyond: Two Souls is a mixture of a game that’s not fun and a story that’s not interesting
There is a single thought that ran through my head while I was trying to get through Beyond: Two Souls. I’ve had a number of fascinating discussions about games and writing with David Cage, the man behind Heavy Rain, Indigo Prophecy, and Omikron, and I was a fan of each one, for different reasons. I couldn’t wait to get started on Quantic Dream’s latest game, and I made myself a cup of tea, put the kids to bed, and got to work.
But a thought popped up a few hours into the game, and never went away. “Why am I playing this?”
Beyond the problems of narrative
The problem is that I never came up with a good answer, and so I walked away in disgust about halfway through. There was nothing there to hold my interest. At all.
I dislike the argument that some things are games and others aren’t. I had a fine time with Dear Esther, and I don’t mind the interactivity being used as a tool to tell a story without offering mechanical challenges to overcome. It’s just another approach at using the art form of video games to get to the player, to make them think and feel certain things.
Beyond: Two Souls certainly suffers from the fact that it’s a series of quick-time events that pretend to be something more profound. Combat consists of moving the analog stick in the direction of the character’s movements, and it’s hard to fail. You’ll often be asked to mash buttons or hold a combination of controls in order to do even simple tasks, such as ducking under or over broken glass.
There is just enough interaction to keep things annoying, but never enough that you feel as if you have any real control over what’s going on in the game. I often felt like I was tapping the controller in different ways just to prove to the game that I was still there, paying attention.
This wouldn’t matter, or at least it would matter less, if the characters and story were enough to pull the player in and make them care about what was going on. You play as Jodie, a young girl who is haunted by a sort of ghost named Aiden. Aiden is attached to Jodie through a sort of psychic umbilical cord, and the spirit can attack her enemies, interact with the world by knocking things off of tables, or even take over the bodies of other characters in the game.
“He’s a tiger in a cage,” Jodie says, trying to explain their connection. It’s an apt description, but it becomes even scarier when you realize that she’s the cage.
Aiden has made Jodie’s life a living hell. She always feels different, alienated from other people. Her parents fear her, and Aiden allows her to eavesdrop on their conversations about her powers. At points in her life she’s cared for by an organization that studies her and Aiden, and later becomes a CIA agent so she can put her abilities to use. She does this through, and I wish this was a joke, a training montage.
It gets worse. Nearly every cliché from bad movies is on display here, complete with silly action sequences, overwrought dialog, and predictable moments of danger and fear. Everything is played deadly serious, but the situations are so comically overdone that it becomes hard to take anything seriously. Jodie is often a caricature of teenage girls, and her interactions with others just operate as giant neon fingers pointing to the fact that she’s different.
Let me set up damn near everything in this game: She goes somewhere, bad things happen, Aiden helps her, but it’s likely that he crosses the line. Cue the sad music while Jodie looks mournfully at the camera. Each scene happens out of order, and they rarely seem like parts of a cohesive game. Instead I kept expecting to see Jodie hitchhike from place to place, with the same music from the TV version of The Incredible Hulk playing in the background.
There is a scene where you help a character give birth that is so nonsensical I was just glad it didn’t happen in an elevator. Of course moments later you have to save said baby from a fire, because of course you do. This is what happens when someone completely runs out of ideas for how to put characters in danger. Aiden can wrap Jodie in a kind of force field, taking away any risk from the game and removing what little sense of drama was there to begin with.
This is the worst of all worlds: You have a game that’s not fun to play, matched with a story that’s filled mawkish sentimentality and ridiculous moments. All of the characters are cartoons: the scene where Jodie, complete in teenaged goth attire, shreds a bitchin’ guitar solo to show she’s mad at not being let out of her room made me roll my eyes more than feel empathy.
I’m about halfway through the game, and I only got that far because of the fact I’m getting paid to play. I finally gave up about halfway through, and I no longer cared about Jodie, Aiden, or the game that didn’t seem interested in testing the player in any interesting ways. I couldn’t point to a single memorable moment or meaningful choice I was asked to make.
Beyond: Two Souls is a disappointment. Willem Dafoe is in it.
Heavy Rain had dumb writing yeah, but it had good tension since the characters could actually DIE and affect the direction of the plot, the story was interesting since it was a serial killer mystery thriller, and the way you could change how the plot played out was pretty neat. It had flaws but it was an interesting movie-game if you're into those things (and I do enjoy them if they have things going for them).
Same as Brendan McNamara (LA Noire). Although in his case it's a TV show.
it's almost like cage really wants to make a movie and not a game or somethinghttp://www.gamespot.com/news/david-cage-no-one-should-be-allowed-to-define-what-a-game-is-6415457
"Some people can be very conservative about this medium and this is sometimes frustrating," Cage said. "Some people wish that games would always stay what they were in the past 30 years, just with more polygons. No one should be allowed to define what a video game is or should be; no one has this power."
(http://i.imgur.com/grA8dOd.png)
Ellen Page looks like she's realizing she's only gonna be young and marketable for, what, another 5 years? And she spent HOW many of them on a mo-cap rig for a third-tier interactive Matrix ripoff? Can she even GET work again after Beyond: Two Souls? Fuck.
(http://pbs.twimg.com/media/BWEyfMeCEAEG-aj.png)You know, Willem Dafoe has always struck me as a dude who just likes to act. He's done crap, fun stuff, challenging stuff, whatever. He just like it. So for him to look so depressed about BEYOND: THERE IS SERIOUSLY A GHOST OR SOMETHING NAMED AIDEN is telling about the game.
Ellen Page looks like she's realizing she's only gonna be young and marketable for, what, another 5 years? And she spent HOW many of them on a mo-cap rig for a third-tier interactive Matrix ripoff? Can she even GET work again after Beyond: Two Souls? Fuck.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UNkRvcUn6VM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LvXQmMf3tP0more people need to watch this video, it's pleasantly homoerotic
no thats just how he always is
Just seen this on 4chan, lol at the Sony QA screenshot... pervs at Sony Liverpool turning freecam on to see her fully modelled front:
:nsfwspoiler (click to show/hide)http://i.imgur.com/b9EG4jq.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/q8baQc0.jpg[close]
1) did the 3d modellers get to see Ellen Paige in the buff or did they just have a best guess at what her boobs looked like?
2) did they consult her? Like... "Are your boobs like this? Or more like this?"
3) do Ellen Paige's digital boobs do justice to her real boobs?
4) did they bother to model her undercarriage?
5) how does Ellen Paige feel about her digital body? It's kind of weird to have a digital representation of your real naked body that multiple artists probably worked on.
6) did they also model Willem Dafoe naked?