Heavy Rain Wows and Whoas

I picked up Heavy Rain right away, since I'm done with White Knight Chronicles and FF XIII isn't out yet.  My wife showed some interest in wanting to play through together, so that was extra motivation.  I have to say I'm really impressed with it so far, and it's not the kind of genre I'd think I'd enjoy given that there's not much action to it.  I guess you'd describe the game as an interactive movie/drama, kind of reminds me of old school choose your own adventure books.

Right away you can tell the production values are through the roof.  Attention to detail in scenery, character models, expressions, emotions, and most importantly direction and cinematography.  It sucks you in really quickly too, in that you don't really feel like you are playing a game but are more a part of the story.  It's a lot like a good movie in that regard.  I'm not very far into it yet, so I don't have a lot to say about how it progresses after the first few chapters, but I'm definitely hooked.

It's a shame though that such an excellent game is marred by some pretty horrendous bugs, hence the groans you might be hearing all over the internet.  I was certainly disgusted enough the other night to put it away for a couple of days.  There's been lots of talk of freezing and save corruption bugs, but mine came in the form of audio bugs.  Well, to be fair, one of them was my fault I guess.

When I moved the PS3 to another room, I hooked up the network and optical out for audio, two things I wasn't using the first night I played.  The game downloaded and installed a sizable patch.  Afterwards, I had no sound in the game, but I had sounds in the menu.  I could hear it through HDMI, but not through optical.  I was out of my mind for a good 45 minutes, before I finally saw some mention of DTS 5.1.  My Dolby headset does not support it, yet it was casually checked in the PS3 system menu, which I guess made the game try to use it and resulted in no sound at all.

With that out of the way, I was tired but ready to play.  My reward?  Every 15-20 seconds the audio in the game would cut out, like it's skipping or seeking.  I gave it a good 5 minutes or so to go away with no avail. Completely unplayable since at the least it was annoying and at worst it completely broke the immersion.

I'm ready to go back and see what I can do to fix the problems, like reinstall, try without the patch, etc.  Things I shouldn't have to do but will in order to play the game.  They also need to figure why some of us are getting load times that are easily over 3 minutes in length when others are in the 15-30 second range. My editor at Gaming Age, Jim, suspects it's the space left on your hard drive (very little for me) and the developer seems to concur.