Hands-On with Heavy Rain and PlayStation Move
It's different!
Published: August 16, 2010
Heavy Rain is a weird game, and it’s about to get weirder with the release of a patch that adds PlayStation Move support. The basic philosophy behind the existing controls in Heavy Rain is to mirror the actions of the onscreen character through creative manipulations of the controller. This requires a pretty huge degree of abstraction, so that something like turning a key in a lock is done by pushing an analog stick in a circular motion. Using PlayStation Move, the same action is performed with a twist of the wrist.
Other actions involve quick flicks, thrusts and pulls, and different kinds of rotation. And naturally there’s some shaking going on. Obviously, manipulating the Move controller is still a pretty abstracted method of performing the various tasks in the game, but having recently had the chance to play the game this way, I can report that it’s a fun alternative, and in some spots it does create a stronger connection between the player and the character.
Due to the fact that one is regularly presented with multiple available actions, it’s important to prevent accidental inputs caused by positioning the Move controller (or scratching one’s nose, etc.). To solve this, the course of an intentional motion is marked by holding the trigger for the duration of that discrete action. This takes some getting used to, but it becomes fairly natural after a while. Fast action sequences (such as fights and chases) ditch this requirement, trading the obsessive accuracy for speed.
This system for dealing with actions monopolizes the user’s main hand, necessitating a change in how the game handles locomotion. The default controls for Heavy Rain utilize the left analog stick as a sort of steering mechanism, with the right trigger acting like a car’s accelerator. It’s an interesting idea, because when it works, it simulates the way people face things before simply stepping around willy-nilly, something that games tend not to reproduce. In practice, it’s often clumsy and robotic. When using Move, walking is done by simply pushing the stick on the navigation controller in the desired (camera-relative) direction. It’s not as progressive as the old method, but it works.
Heavy Rain works well with PlayStation Move. It’s debatable whether or not the union of the two is good enough that one should drive sales of the other, but at the very least, adopters of Move who own Heavy Rain will find it worth a bit of extra playtime. Those who have intended to play through a second time to see a few different plot branches but never got around to it may as well hold off until they can experience it with the different-but-still-weird controls offered by Move.
Other actions involve quick flicks, thrusts and pulls, and different kinds of rotation. And naturally there’s some shaking going on. Obviously, manipulating the Move controller is still a pretty abstracted method of performing the various tasks in the game, but having recently had the chance to play the game this way, I can report that it’s a fun alternative, and in some spots it does create a stronger connection between the player and the character.
Due to the fact that one is regularly presented with multiple available actions, it’s important to prevent accidental inputs caused by positioning the Move controller (or scratching one’s nose, etc.). To solve this, the course of an intentional motion is marked by holding the trigger for the duration of that discrete action. This takes some getting used to, but it becomes fairly natural after a while. Fast action sequences (such as fights and chases) ditch this requirement, trading the obsessive accuracy for speed.
This system for dealing with actions monopolizes the user’s main hand, necessitating a change in how the game handles locomotion. The default controls for Heavy Rain utilize the left analog stick as a sort of steering mechanism, with the right trigger acting like a car’s accelerator. It’s an interesting idea, because when it works, it simulates the way people face things before simply stepping around willy-nilly, something that games tend not to reproduce. In practice, it’s often clumsy and robotic. When using Move, walking is done by simply pushing the stick on the navigation controller in the desired (camera-relative) direction. It’s not as progressive as the old method, but it works.
Heavy Rain works well with PlayStation Move. It’s debatable whether or not the union of the two is good enough that one should drive sales of the other, but at the very least, adopters of Move who own Heavy Rain will find it worth a bit of extra playtime. Those who have intended to play through a second time to see a few different plot branches but never got around to it may as well hold off until they can experience it with the different-but-still-weird controls offered by Move.
