Games I actually finished on the PS3

It's always hard to think of what you're going to say with things like Heavy Rain or Fahrenheit. Well, I can just really compare the two with each other as games because there aren't too many others like these. Maybe Facade could be considered an interactive movie experience-game as well though. Anyhow, this is better than Fahrenheit. It isn't as revolutionary, but atleast the story does not turn into a Matrix-ripoff after the first act ends. Instead we get a Saw/Zodiac/X-Files-style murder mystery with convincing actors and set pieces that are as realistic as they are fun. I love how you can use retarded cliches (the doctor, the fight on the conveyor belt of doom) and they don't feel like cliches at all in a game. Despite some sticky animation and a few bugs, I really liked Heavy Rain as it forced me to become a part of the experience rather than play the experience. I had to think if I was capable of murdering someone for something good, and I was not. And the game never outright judges you on any of these actions, it just flows forward. Like life, I guess.

A little note, despite having the Move Edition, I played with the regular controller. I have a Wii, I am not buying anything Move-ish.

This series is a bit bizarre, as it falls downwards in quality and at the same time some things just get better and better. Here the story is utterly and completely idiotic and stupid, whereas the gameplay is some of the most fun the hack and slash-style has ever offered. The first GoW was a very good story, and was nice to play. The story was a great, almost satirical look at the format of greek tragedy while still being able to make us invest in Kratos, the main character. The second game felt like a letdown with it's very basic action game revenge-story, and by the third part it has been reduced to meaningless quiver about nothing. GoW 3 attempts to make us care of Kratos, now a raving rage-filled lunatic who kills everyone without reason, by adding a little girl who is supposedly a reminder of his own daughter. It doesn't work. When you kill fifty billion things in one game and then you're supposed to care for a man who gets sadistic kicks out of tearing people apart, it just does not work. The ending is horrible as well, and anticlimactic as hell. Nothing is learned! Still, if you skip all the cutscenes, it's a pretty and aggressive game to play, and it's fun to play. I just wish they hadn't screwed themselves over with the story.

Hideo Kojima's lovely little egotrip-series ends with a rather whimperish sound. Don't get me wrong, I'm quite the MGS-fanboy and I loved every minute of this game. Until the ending started feeling like LOTR3. It never ended. It should've ended after the initial voice cast-credits had rolled, but Kojima added a twist after them that lasted about 30 minutes and invalidated all of the emotional bonds I formed to the story through the course of the series. It is absurd how one man can ruin his own creation by first ending it properly, then continuing it after-credits with information overloads that simply devalidate everything that came before. Otherwise MGS4 is fantastic as fanservice and pretty good as a game. It's fun to play when you actually get to play it, and the story is rather unusual for a videogame. It has pacing unlike what I've come to expect of the medium, with cutscenes that have these long, empty voids after most of the meaningful dialogue bits. This way the game itself asks the player to think and digest on what they were just told, a narrative tactic that at the same time occasionally draws the game out too long, but also makes it simply unique and in my opinion far more important than most of it's peers.