OK, she's not really a gamer, but I'm trying to get her into it more and more.
As detailed in my previous blog, I thought that possibly having her play Heavy Rain would be a good idea.
The past three nights, she has played while I just watched. I thought that it could be a "stress free experience". When I said this before, I think some people thought I meant the game itself. Actually, I was referring to the stress I cause when I keep telling her about her mistakes.

"No! Go left! Left! Why are you just standing there? I said go left! What do you mean you don't know how? It's the same as the other 40 times you went left! ARGH!"

I don't know why, but I get terribly frustrated when I watch another person play a game and do something (I consider) wrong. So, she often doesn't even want to attempt a game when I am here unless it happens to be a puzzle game or something else very simple.

Anyway, my thought was that since there is no game over in Heavy Rain, she could technically do nothing wrong, so I would not point out these things I thought were mistakes.

As I said, she played the past three nights and, last night, she beat the game. To an extent, my experiment was a success. She never quit playing the entire time and was actually looking forward to it. I did still make a few comments here and there (You don't have to hit the glove button after every step you know? See the circle it makes; you just have to go outside of it and hit it again there.), but nothing as bad as I normally would.

Just from watching her play, here are my impressions of the game.

Characters are not as good as that preview video I saw a long time back.

Really does seem to be a mixture of God of War and Dragon's Lair as I imagined.

What's up with the accents?

Wish they would have made some things a bit more obvious for her (When she was supposed to help Ethan escape from the police station, she was like "Great! I saw a raincoat already.", but then stumbled around for 10 minutes getting frustrated before finding out that she couldn't pick any up until she used the mic to speak to the guard. )

Controls seem a bit difficult. (She had no problems during the QTEs and such, but when crawling through the pipe filled with glass, she could not get Ethan to turn a corner easily and she was getting angry. He would either turn completely around or he would squirm against the wall for a minute until he finally "broke free" to make the turn. )

Jason deserved to get hit by the car and die at the beginning . Seriously. I'm 5 foot behind you screaming your name and you just keep walking? It's time for an ass beating kid.

Story was interesting, but I couldn't figure out why Scott would have been given so many "good guy" options if he was the killer. Why even bring a partner along, and then even go so far as to go kill 20 guys for revenge when she gets killed? Matter of fact, why even risk your life with this guy in the first place when you KNOW his son is not the killer?

As stated above, character models weren't as good as I expected, but not bad at all. Horse Face still had a horse face and Madison turned out to be pretty hot.

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Here are the results of Ai's playthrough!

Ethan: Shot at the end by the cops after promising not to ever leave Shawn(sp?) again. Nice job creating the next killer, Dad!
Jayden: Ground up in a car after failing to take his drugs.
Horse Face: Cursed with a horse face. Luckily dies by drowning when Ai forgot to untie her before escaping a sinking car.
Madison: So hot, she dies in a fire. OK, actually died whilst jumping out of a window from a fire, but not as interesting to type.
Scott: Gets to walk away free as the only living main character.

My thoughts on Ai's results:

LOL, you killed everyone!

Still lots of fun to watch her play and I am very happy that I decided to pick the game up. I'll start my playthrough tonight. Ai is excited to see how the story changes and, honestly, so am I. I hope they are big changes and not just a few things here and there that would be utterly forgettable.