Heavy Rain by Quantic Dream

Heavy Rain is a title we're looking forward to here at Girl Gamers Oz because we loved Fahrenheit (aka Indogi Prophecy) which was also made by Quantic Dream. A few new details slipped out about Heavy Rain recently, so we thought we'd share them with you.

Like Fahrenheit before it, Heavy Rain will focus on moral choices, but choices that will blur what may be bad or good. The story will focus on four characters:

"Heavy Rain is about normal people that have landed in extraordinary situations. I wanted a much more personal story. The first thing that came to my mind, as a father of two little boys, was that the main theme should simply be a father's love for his son. This is not a game about saving the princess or the world. It's purely about a father's love."

Fahrenheit was awesome at the in depth emotional connection between gamer and game, here's hoping Heavy rain has some of that same magic and perhaps someone with Carla Valenti's style.

On the off chance you missed it, here's some tech demo footage of Heavy Rain.

Borderlands female characters

We've had Take Two Interactive and Gearbox Software title Borderlands on our radars for awhile now, with regards to being 'One To Watch', well now it seems you'll have to watch it next year. Yes Borderlands has slipped into 2009, with "additional development" being blamed for the slipage.

On the upside we contacted Gearbox about the female content of Borderlands and this is what they had to say "Borderlands will feature female characters prominently as key playable characters." So there you have it, female characters and more importantly playable ones at that. Also note the plurality of characters and not character. So, some bad news and some good news.

Mass Effect sexuality in games on MTV

The multiplayer blog over at MTV has an interesting little interview with Ray Muzyka and Greg Zeschuk from BioWare and they pretty much cover just why they think sexuality / romantic relationships are important in games. Needless to say it comes down to common sense, these things are part of life, so why shouldn’t they appear in mature story led games.

Sadly some of you may not be able to see the video (Canada, UK and Japan), but the upshot of it is that games are an art form, just as books, TV and film are. All of which at some point suffered disapproving looks and ‘inappropriate’ commentary.

Oh and they also say the word ‘appropriate’ a whole lot, like maybe the guy doth protest too much. That said they do make a great point with the suggestion it’s better to actually connect to a character than have it just be there for titillation.

The World Ends With You DS

Ee thought this title looked pretty interesting, so we thought you might too. What we have here is The World Ends With You, a quirky DS RPG by Square Enix, due out in Europe and the US next month (April 18 and 22 respectively). Released last year in Japan titled Subarashiki Kono Sekai (It's a Wonderful World), the game is finally set to get its English language release.

We thought this looked a little like Jet Grind Radio (Jet Set Radio), the funky futuristic graffiti title on the Dreamcast, Xbox. You can check out the trailer below and see what you think.

Aliens Colonial Marines - Female Marines?

You may or may not be aware that GearBox Software is presently beavering away at an upcoming shooter title based on the Alien franchise. SEGA will be publishing the title at the end of this year (if it doesn't slip) under the name Aliens: Colonial Marines, for PC, PS3 and Xbox 360.

Aliens: Colonial Marines will feature a squad based FPS dynamic where you control 4 members of a marine squad (think Hicks, Hudson etc). We've looked into this with the obvious question of female marines, given the Aliens film had a few, including Vasquez (seen above), Ferro (the cool pilot) and Dietrich (the medic). We're hoping GearBox will get back to us with the goods because we're quite excited at the thought of this title, but that would go into overdrive if they actually include a few female marines in the mix, as is only fair and smart.

Dexter the video game

Yes, apparently everyone's favorite serial killer--Dexter--is heading to next gen gaming systems. There's little in the way of concrete information other than Mark Ecko is involved (he was previously involved in Getting Up: Contents Under Pressure for PS2 and Xbox). Mark Ecko Entertainment are developing the Dexter game.

What are people's thoughts on this? We realize TV / Movie to game crossovers are generally not that great, but this does have something promising. It would be interesting to play a serial killer who offs other serial killers and has to hide his tracks, certainly beats the usual killing for killings sake that many games go with.

Dual Love - Weird girl gaming

Every now and again a game comes along that truly has you scratching your head and say "huh?'. Duel Love is one such game. It's actually targeted at a straight female audience, with the idea being you wipe sweat of lithe young male bodies, you massage them and generally converse / interact with them. It's made by a female producer and falls into the Japanese "dating game" genre.

Now you take a look at the following trailer and see what you think, because we think it's pretty lame on so many levels and we can't really see where the draw would be, well asidefrom young teen giggly girls maybe...