Heavy Rain

Heavy Rain is a difficult game. It's not hard to play, it's just hard to describe and to judge, and hard to enjoy but also hard to dislike. For all the times that I admired the effort that's gone into making this game "cinematic", I just as often found myself wondering, "Isn't this supposed to be fun?" Heavy Rain goes to such lengths to be serious and dramatic and to break the mould of a video game, that it ended up losing something along the way.

Every character in the game is so dull. Take Ethan for example, the protagonist, the hero, the man on a mission. He is totally lacking in charisma and personality. Maybe this was an effort to make a lead character that didn't fit the Nathan Drake model of video game leads, but Heavy Rain goes too far. Ethan is so dull that by the end I didn't care what happened to him.

The problems with the characters might be the result of poor acting. Simply casting actors as though you are casting a movie does not mean you are going to get high quality cinematic performances. Using state of the art motion capture techniques does not guarantee that the characters in your game are going to be totally believable. The performances are all very dry, and seem restricted by the seriousness that looms over the entire project. I really believe that no matter how well you capture facial expressions, you're not going to get anything natural or entertaining out of those poor guys sitting in a booth with balls stuck in their faces. Technicalities aside though, I don't think any of the actors involved were any good to begin with, which is a problem for a game whose big selling point is human drama.

The director pushes so hard for the dark realistic tone that it overwhelms and swallows whole everything else in the game. It's admirable to try and maintain a harrowing tone for an entire two hour movie, but maintaining that tone for a 10+ hour video game is misguided. I felt sympathy for none of the characters, all of whom seemed depressed, bored, confused and lonely. The aggressive effort to deliver an involving dark cinematic experience went so far that it pushed me away.

And I don't care what anyone says, the gameplay is nothing but quick-time events. There's no other way to describe it to anyone.

Hot Taxi

The Rock's promo on Raw last night was so awesome that it inspired me and I thought about channelling some of that energy and charisma in my class. I have some dialogue to read out and a vision of The Rock appears in my head and starts to take shape and it is warm and close enough to touch but The Rock fades out of focus and dissolves and is gone.

I settle for reading louder than usual and the students follow but by the end we are not so loud, which the other teacher notes. Was that because I dropped off or did the students lose interest? Maybe both. Sitting down hurts my thighs and my knees and my back and standing back up is so hard that it hardly seemed worth sitting down in the first place. Everyone is enjoying the Pokemon trump game I printed off (but did not create) and walking around seeing the children smile and laugh reminds me of something that was once lost that might one day return but the memory is now too weak and it slips away.

Mark Kermode and Simon Mayo's movie podcast entertains me on the taxi ride home. As cold as it is outside, all trains, taxis and staffrooms are just as hot inside. The contrast is too shocking and it makes me sick and everyone is wearing winter clothes anyway so it doesn't need to be so hot inside right? I roll down the window just to breathe and the driver turns off the heater. Nothing is said.

On my bike on the way to the post office to pick up my books which couldn't fit in my post box a little seven year old girl is in the middle of the path swinging her school bag around and she stops because she recognises me but she is mistaken because I have never seen her before. Her pink t-shirt looks like a rag draped over bones. Wide-eyed and open-mouthed she starts to form a word "Ja... Jan..." and her big wet eyes follow me as I ride past almost hitting her. The image is like something out of a movie about poverty which doesn't fit because my movie is about alienation, anxiety and gaining wisdom through loss.

The woman at the post office speaks Japanese. She says that the books have not yet returned but if I am home between seven and nine they can be resent to me and I say okay. During this she attempts some English words because she maybe thinks I don't understand even though I am nodding my head and responding in Japanese. It doesn't annoy me because the woman is just being considerate and I do not look lucid and smiles are not coming easily.

Lunch and Interculturalism

I finally built up the courage to tell one of my teachers this fact: The more Japanese the school lunch, the less delicious it is. The best school lunch menus are curry rice day and cream stew with bread day, which are Indian and, what, English? The worst is the mushrooms that coagulate the soup, which tastes like crap. That’s Japanese.

One day someone found a bit of seaweed or a mushroom and discovered that it was edible, so they decided to eat it - but only because there was nothing else available. Time passes and food that people originally ate out of necessity is then called “traditional” - like the fish that is covered in putrid sauce and is mostly skin. I would only eat that if I were desperate or in a war. If you put Caesar salad and smoked salmon in front of someone they wouldn’t turn round and say “Actually I was thinking about putting mushrooms and seaweed in a bowl of water.”

What I want is more screening of the food that reaches my school lunch tray. At the moment the screening process seems to be –
Is it safe to eat?
Yes.
Stick it in.
And this leads to people eating crab, for which you need a special fork to scrape out the edible parts. A special fork to scrape out the edible parts. Not worth it. In a perfect world the screening process would be –
Is it safe to eat?
Yes.
Is it tasty?
Maybe.
Would I ever choose to eat this over any of the food that is freely available today?
No.
Then forget it, get rid of it.

With this system things that look like erasers and soggy paper would definitely not make the cut. The Japanese style lunch menus appear to be people doing the best with what they’ve got, like making a lawnmower on Scrapheap Challenge. But outside of Scrapheap Challenge, the contestants will most likely just buy an actual lawnmower when they need a lawnmower. We don’t need to scrape together a meal using whatever edible things the Earth has to offer. Why am I eating fish eggs? Why is that happening? There are at least four proper delicious kinds of fish available, isn’t that enough? Let’s just make the tasty ones extinct first and work our way down.