theprof00 said:
He was obviously trying to disassociate his game from what is considered to be a dead genre. He doesn't even know what genre heavy rain is. He says so in the interview. It's different. Definitely. It's a modern take on adventure gaming. His qualifications on adventure game tropes are 10 years dated. Recent point and clicks don't have inventories or cutscenes either, but focus very heavily on the characters. There are tons of games like this. |
He doesn't like the point&click genre or the adventure genre in general, but he doesn't want to openly admit it. At least that's what I think when I read his statements about the genre. It's okay, but I'd prefer that he'd just admit it and that he wouldn't pretend he liked a genre he obviously doesn't want to be associated with. I'm not sure he knows or even cares about the history of the genre, but Heavy Rain actually is an adventure game. It belongs to the still small subgenre of interactive movies (or interactive drama, which is the term Cage prefers afaik to differentiate his games). The Walking Dead's development process was most probably influenced by Heavy Rain's success imo (and it clearly payed off, but Telltale denied this influence either. Lots of insecure people among adventure developers these days.)
If Cage for once realized that there's often some unintentional irony in his simple statements, e.g. "The games industry offers many games based on violence and adrenaline" => this is true for many games incl. a game called Heavy Rain which starts with kidnapping, which is all about violent acts, about killing or getting killed, about being chased despite being innocent (or not?), about false trails, about building up suspense and adrenaline. If at least the people who interview him would recognize this unintentional irony in his statements, they could have a more interesting discussion with him, but they never do. They are game "journalists", after all.
If Cage wouldn't always blame "the industry" for something he thinks is going wrong, if he'd instead claimed that - say - he brought interactive storytelling in gaming (which was invented decades ago) to a new technical level, I could for once agree with him. If he (or one of those brilliant gaming jounalists who claim that HR and/or TWD revived the "dead" adventure genre) claimed that he single-handedly brought interactive movies back to the table, that the commercial and critical success of Heavy Rain proved that this once ridiculed subgenre has the potential to be more successful today than ever, I'd agree even more.
