But people have no right to drag down Mass Effect 2 to show that. If you're gonna call out Mass Effect 2, then you also have to point out all the huge plot holes in Heavy Rain. Plot holes that are really unacceptable, especially considering that the game's main focus is on the narrative. That's what the development team has been hyping it up as, right?

As for the character development...they were hyping up how each character had their own problem. I only saw two protagonists that got this fleshed out. Jayden's addiction and Ethan's depression/captured son, obviously. Shelby's athsma? Pointless. Madison's insomnia? Mentioned once or twice, providing an excuse for Madison to go to a hotel and therefore meet Ethan. I was also lightweight disappointed at the romance between those two. They barely interacted. Madison fixed him up a few times, and then boom; they're making love.

I'll stop now before I get carried away. My point is: Heavy Rain is a great game, but is nowhere near perfect. Mass Effect 2 doesn't deserve to serve as a sort of foot boost for this game.

Um...That sex scene was ENTIRELY avoidable. I never experienced it.

I've finished ME2, and I'm about 4 hours into HR. All I can say is that they're both great games, but hardly comparable.

Regardless, this will turn into a fanboy war.

Example: See below

Please don't compare true Triple A's above 96% in meta with 88% ones. Mass Effect 2 didn't fail anything this guy said, it just had a different approach in which it succeeded in a way Heavy Rain wasn't even close.

its funny to see some "gamers" here trying to act like Heavy Rain is the sh1t!

Let me guess im an xbot because i said that comment?

accept that you have been deceived

But HR completely fails when it comes to levelling up your characters. *rolls eyes*

and how are these games comparable? o.O

Heavy Rain actually makes you feel for the characters and story.

While ME2 was an excellent game, I didn't really care when a character died (other than the fact that I lost my chance to get an achievement).

While playing Heavy Rain, I actually tried to keep them all alive. I connected to HR's characters a lot more.

the author didn't play Mass Effect 2! Or didn't understand it at all.

Really it all comes down to the player. Mass Effect did everything perfect in my books, i felt abit of a connection between the characters, and got pissed off one the last mission when they all started dropping like flies on my second play through.

I havent played Heavy Rain, but from what Ive seen i can see the appeal to it. Sure it may lack in what some call "gameplay", but i think thats good for a change cause it helps you focus on the story... which i think in Heavy Rains case is why that decision was made. The only thing that seems to turn me off Heavy Rain is it has alot of quicktime gameplay moments (ie. fight scenes), im not very good at those simply because i would rather watch the cutscene than watch the screen for button icons to appear.

But thats me... i still wanna check the game out though.

Blaze is right. This is comparing apples and oranges.

Aquanox-what does the meta have to do with the article(which was also a little daft and could easily have made it's point without the flame inducing intimations and headlines)and the argument? Don't go OT just cos the writer made a grab for fanboy clicks as you only encourage more like it. HR could barely run, have 8bit GFX and the point, if set up diferently, would still have been ok and something to debate so, you see, it could be an awful game and bordering on a meta of 40 or so and it wouldn't be relevant at all when it's only tro do with a single aspect of gameplay in both cases, no?

Personally, over the way choices effected your game then HR is certainly the one where they matter most and are most stark but as the genres would demand that why has anyone failed or succeeded any more than the other?

I've only just started ME2 and it's been great so far but does feel even more like a shooter than before which isn't what I'd have wanted from the sequels, tbh, and I wonder if it's been tweaked in that direction for purely gameplay reasons or whether they just thought more action and less management was gonna sell more? Whatever, if the quality is as high as ME2 it's churlish to moan just because it's not the way YOU hoped it would move.

As for HR:Played it a few times now and by it's nature the experience is moulded entirely by your choices, successes and failures to such an impressive extent that the storyline can alter drastically from play to play while still keeping a cohesive whole-it's on these occasions where I think the writers and actors were most taxed as it must have been a task for the writers to manage at every possible turn and confusing for actors who can't always be sure of their characters motivations all the time. That they only slightly fluff these things very occasionally is the most impressive thing about the way the game works and was made, imo.

So, ME2 was, imo, further taylored to it's audiences tastes and had more limited scope for in game change through choice while HR was, in many ways, an experiment for Cage, QD, writers and actors alike-ME2 and Bioware were much more clear and comfortable with their wask as they were working largely from a Bioware template but HR is a way more uncertain task all round. There's NO real parallel between the games and both do their job brilliantly even if HR might fall down in a few areas primarily because of it's fresh approach and lack of genre to follow when choices for the devs got tough.

They even deal with player choice very differently so,really, there's little other way to see this other than wishing the comparisons would stop and we can just admit, whatever, we game on, that both are incredible pieces of work and for very different reasons. Don't get why people wanted to dig out HR as we should be encouraging new ideas and growth in our industry just as much as we do sheer quality. Without the likes of Doom and Wolfenstein 3D we'd have no Halo, COD or Killzone FPS games and, in the future the same might be true of a burgeoning new genre propelled by the work done on HR.

T me there's little point in comparing these games at all. On the most basic level neither share a platform, a genre and one is part of a popular trilogy and the other a step into the relatively unknown and we desperately need both great, traditional games, AND games likely to push the industry in new, exciting directions. Don't we?

Whatever, enjoyed one and am enjoying the other too! unnily enough while playing either of these, or U2, Gears2 or KZ2 I never find myself wondering if I'm right to enjoy them because the meta score is/isn't in the higher nineties. For that matter I think a few sites really didn't know HOW to score an experience like HR as I've seen glowing HR reviews which then stick a 6.5 on the end!

It isn't a comparison of the game as a whole. Just the promised storytelling aspect. I have Mass Effect 2 for the PC and totally agree with the feelings of the writer here. There is no emotional attachment to the characters in that game. If you don't have an emotional attachment to a story, the storyteller isn't doing their job. Both games are excellent. Both games are totally different. But the one similarity, as given by the creators of the games, isn't executed well in Mass Effect.

Well I think the story is told very well in ME2 and it really drew me into it personally. Im not saying ME2 is perfect but from a story viewpoint I think its told very well and im quite glad ME2 didn't tell a story in the same way as Heavy Rain like im glad Heavy Rain didn't tell its story like ME2. I thought this article is quite short sighted with a view to ME2. Like saying "Forcing characters to make tough choices early on, to live with mistakes sooner in the game creates more of an attachment. If players know they aren't really going to have to worry about things until the very end of the game, what's the point of giving choices to begin with? You might as well stick a button at the very end of the last boss fight that asks 'would you like the good or bad ending?'" The choice early on in the game choose whether its a good or bad ending and doesn't limit those choices to the the end of ME2 because as we know the story doesn't end there as those choices will stretch into ME3. Now personally I wanted to keep all my team alive to see how they develop in ME3.

I personally thought that the characters in Mass Effect 2 were incredibly diverse and interesting. I definitely had an emotional attachment to those characters. They became more complex and real the more I talked to them.

As for Heavy Rain...I hate to say, but I can't say I felt any strong attachments to the characters. Perhaps because the game wasn't very long? I mean, they were cool, but besides Ethan, there's not too much background story given to the other three characters. We're not really given the chance to know much about any of them. I think they should have done for the other characters what they did for Ethan, where they have a chapter that specifically exposes their past.