HEAVY

I have a quite a bit of work to do, but the servers seem to be down for the district website. So what am I doing instead? Why, I'm listening to music and thinking of awful things to post on Twitter, of course. Yes!

I feel that I need to write about Heavy Rain, the highly anticipated PS3-exclusive adventure game from the team behind Indigo Prophecy: a game that never really found an audience back in 2005.

Heavy Rain really comes as a breath of fresh air in a market that is filled with shooters and casual games. At its heart, HR is an adventure game through and through. The game play is comprised of examining areas for clues, making dialogue decisions, boring daily activities, such as brushing your teeth. None of that sounds very exciting, true, but the mundanity is frequently broken by intense moments of peril. This is where the game truly shines, despite the fact that these scenes are simply QTE's. My roommate watched me play for several hours today and we continually jumped out of our seats and yelled frightened obscenities at the screen, which is something that we never do, not even for the most suspenseful films and TV shows.



The only caveat to the enjoyment of HR is the horrible fucking control scheme. You feel as though you are controlling a blind person in a tar pit. It's slow and awkward and even five hours in, I am still not used to it. For all of the money that Sony put into this project, you would think that they would have made some noise about the controls . . .

The game really is greater than the sum of its parts, though. It's a mature, dark, moving, chilling, and often scary interactive narrative. I wish I could stay home all day tomorrow and play that shit.

Booyah.

Facebook Killed the Reunion Star

Aging as gracefully as I am, it's hard to believe that my ten-year high school reunion is right around the corner. The ol' clicé is true; time really does fly.

I decided quite a few years ago that I have no interest whatsoever in attending my high school reunion. I don't know about you guys, but shit . . . I graduated with over 600 people, and saying that 590 of them were assholes is a conservative estimate.

The subsequent years following my decision have seen the exponential growth of social networking. This is nothing new, so I won't give it any more time than this: every single person that you have ever laid eyes on has a Facebook account.



"Reconnecting" with said assholes has only helped to reaffirm my stance on not going to my reunion. Thanks to Facebook, I already know who got married, who got knocked up, who got disgustingly fat, and who went bald. I also know their favorite artists, TV shows, and movies! It's brilliant, really.

I don't need to spend two nights of my life schmoozing with these fucking idiots. The handful of people that graduated with me that I still give a shit about I talk to on a semi-regular basis.

Any day now I expect to get a call from mother about some piece of mail regarding the reunion. I can't wait to tell her to toss it in the trash.

Peggle

I cannot stress how completely awesome Peggle is to those that have not experienced it. The game is a cross between pinball, pachinko, and Plinko. You need to stop being an idiot and download it, already. It's free from Popcap's website if you sign up for their mailing list. Get on it, kids.