That weird feeling when a game is set in YOUR hometown

I was born in Hong Kong, and when Sleeping Dogs was first announced, I was pumped... GTA in my hometown? Fuck yeah! It's been a dream come true for me and a lot of my friends who spent endless hours playing GTA.

Now the trailers are out, and after watching the recent lengthy gameplay footage, i can't but feel disappointed. I don't really mind the janky animations, it''s just that it feels and looks nothing like Hong Kong. I understand there are technical limitations and gameplay reasons why crowds are largely left out, but the city look like a poor impression for a generic Oriental metropolis.

Then there's the really really bad cantonese voice acting. It's like Heavy Rain voice acting in my mother tongue, with the weird ABC accent to it. It's unnatural and weird as fuck. The lady even phrases stuff in an awkward way, like it's english dialogue translated word-for-word.

You probably don't live in HK. I don't live in NY or anything so I'm not sure how poorly GTA 4 nailed the city's feel. I thought GTA 4 was amazing, being someone who never been there. So how do you actually think of the city's feel? Has any game ever been set in your hometown, or any city you are familiar with? Have games EVER got it right?

the chances of a game being set in the small city Lincoln in the UK where i live are very very remote so its a feeling i shall neer experiance.

99% positive no game will ever be set in Red Bluff, California

Flight Simulators dont count

Never gonna happen for me, I'm afraid. I'd love to see a game set in the tiny, little Norwegian fishing village I'm from, though.

We're big enough to have a popular song about how much this place sucks (Shit Towne, by Live), but I can't imagine a game set here.

My home town is one of the most boring, albeit nice, patches of suburbia in the UK. If you were going to make a game in this town it would be something like lawn mowing simulator.

It's really about suspending your disbelief. When I play a game where I grew up, it's a heck of a lot harder to ignore what I know about the city and how it's depicted in the game.

I was just in Rome and Ezio must have been some sort of superman because the space between buildings (across the street) is about 15 meters (50 feet).

@Draugen said:

Never gonna happen for me, I'm afraid. I'd love to see a game set in the tiny, little Norwegian fishing village I'm from, though.

Sounds like a perfect horror setting to me!

Never had a game set in my hometown (Melbourne) but it often turns up as other cities in Hollywood films. Ghost Rider for instance, that was an odd one.

Especially in the scene when he dive's into the river off a bridge. The whole audience in the cinema collectively gasped at that because it does not matter if you are Satan's messenger you are not surviving a dip in the Yarra.

The Kaedweni Camp in the Witcher 2 is about as close as a game has ever come to being based in my hometown.

New York duders speak up on this one, your hometown is destroyed every tuesday in games

Mass Effect 3 was set in a futuristic Vancouver, that's as close as it gets for me. Disappointed to see the Canucks basically nonexistent in the future though.

@PaulKemp said:

@Draugen said:

Never gonna happen for me, I'm afraid. I'd love to see a game set in the tiny, little Norwegian fishing village I'm from, though.

Sounds like a perfect horror setting to me!

Yeh id go for that.

There will never be a game set where I live so I have no idea what it would be like.

@PaulKemp said:

@Draugen said:

Never gonna happen for me, I'm afraid. I'd love to see a game set in the tiny, little Norwegian fishing village I'm from, though.

Sounds like a perfect horror setting to me!

Ha! I was thinking the exact same thing, and then I scrolled down and saw your reply.

Edit: On topic, I live in the fifth biggest city in Sweden, but I don't reckon I'll ever see it in a game.

London is the closest it'll be for me but I find it a bit of an oxymoron to call a Capital City a 'home town'.

@Draugen said:

Never gonna happen for me, I'm afraid. I'd love to see a game set in the tiny, little Norwegian fishing village I'm from, though.

It's called Half ife 2.

Also, Seattle needs more games that take place in it! It's a really cool city and seeing the Troll Under the Bridge in a game would be kick ass.

@RazielCuts said:

London is the closest it'll be for me but I find it a bit of an oxymoron to call a Capital City a 'home town'.

I dunno, I managed to drive by my old flat and office in the original Getaway, that was kinda cool.

Winnipeg would only be used for a joke.

I wa hyped as hell for Fallout: New Vegas because (you guessed it) I grew up there. Just seeing what Fallout 3 did with the DC surrounding (visitng familiar locations) was one of my favorite parts of that game so I could not wait to do that to my stomping grounds.

@SAC said:

I wa hyped as hell for Fallout: New Vegas because (you guessed it) I grew up there. Just seeing what Fallout 3 did with the DC surrounding (visitng familiar locations) was one of my favorite parts of that game so I could not wait to do that to my stomping grounds.

As someone born and raised right outside DC (my house would be about a mile west of Raven Rock if the map were to scale), playing Fallout 3 was reeeaal weird. The whole map is (understandably) scaled way down in order to allow players to actually walk places in a reasonable amount of time, but I kind of think that made wandering around that much more surreal.

On a similar note, does anyone know if they did any scaling for LA Noire? From a look at Google Maps, the streets seem to mostly all be there, but I've never been to LA so I can't tell if/how much they shrunk the region for the sake of travel times.

I live in Georgia so playing The Walking Dead game has been weird. I also watch the show which regularly films near my home. It freaks me out that so much zombie stuff is happening around my area.

Not quite my hometown, since it's Denver, but when I first heard that Homefront takes place in Montrose, Colorado, I certainly did a double-take. It's one of those towns that you'd only expect a fellow native of the state to know since it has almost nothing really noteworthy going for it (like most cities in the state west of the Rockies, really), so to see it suddenly become the epicenter of a fictional North Korean invasion was strange, to say the least. That being said, while I've never been there myself, the screenshots seemed to do a decent enough job of making it look like a generic small town you'd see in Colorado. Beyond that, the only other time Colorado really shows up in games is games is for snowboarding because apparently the entire state is made up of wintertime mountains all year round. South Park ones, including the upcoming one, don't really count since that show (humorously) implies people actually inhabit that area, but when the show has done Denver in the past, it's done a very respectable job considering the art style, so maybe that much will appear in the new RPG, too.

Up until recently, I also lived up near Osaka and let me tell you, the Yakuza games do a pretty hauntingly good job of recreating actual places I often shopped and played at when that city shows up in the games. Those games are always really good about making Japanese-style environments that'd be recognizable to real residents of the places in questions. They've gotten so good at it judging by the screenshots in 5 that I could actually take someone to the exact location where one would get that sort of view and angle. It's insane.

I'm pretty used to media taking place in Boston. It's rarely inaccurate. Even Fringe, which is mostly filmed in Canada despite taking place in Boston, goes to great lengths to feel authentically Bostonian.

@MordeaniisChaos said:

@Draugen said:

Never gonna happen for me, I'm afraid. I'd love to see a game set in the tiny, little Norwegian fishing village I'm from, though.

It's called Half ife 2.

Also, Seattle needs more games that take place in it! It's a really cool city and seeing the Troll Under the Bridge in a game would be kick ass.

I don't know how accurate that is, though.

Everything takes place in NYC. I only lived there for two years but I always try to recognize landmarks. It's just fun.

I'm not sure whether it was in Virginia or not but in Modern Warfare 2 (I think it was 2) the suburbia with the Burger Town and other ficitonal food outlets looked enough like Chesapeake Square that it weirded me out. That location might have been Washington D.C. though. Either way, Virginia is a pretty boring location so I wouldn't expect many games to have it as their setting.

I live in Alabama. Unless the video game was called "The History of Civil Rights: The Video Game," I can't imagine ever seeing my home town in a game.

While I don't live in New York I do live nearby. I don't think there has ever been an accurate display of NYC in a video game ever. With the exception of Darksiders. NYC is exactly how it appears in that game.

Closest my town has ever come to be featured in a video game was on a signpost in Return to Castle Wolfenstein. So yeah...

There was a mission on COD: Black Ops that started you off at Beale AFB, which is in my hometown of Marysville, CA. Thought it was the craziest thing, even though they only really showed a runway.

The last game to feature London (apart from the Olympic Games game) must have been Mass Effect 3 and that got it spot on, there's even a Reaper ship outside my house right now.

The town Armadillo in Red Dead Redemption is set in a sort-of generic parody of Amarillo, Texas, which is almost where I'm from. Actually I'd be closer to Hangman's Rock. Folks even used to call it Armadillo (the O is pronounced "uh" in both words and the L's are pronounced like they are in English, not Spanish), but now they just call it 'Rillo (O is pronounced O) because kids.
 
I was pretty amped when I unfolded the map and saw the name of the main city in the first section of the game. But the in-game town barely resembles the actual thing in 1910, unless you count Polk Street, which looked a lot like that in the mid 1800s. In the early 1900s it looked more like Blackwater, as you might notice in the pictures below:

Closest I've ever been to experiencing that is when NCAA Football modeled several miles of Lexington, KY around Commonwealth Stadium. Not really the same, but until they make a videogame of Justified I'd say that's as close as I'll get.

@Phatmac said:

I live in Georgia so playing The Walking Dead game has been weird. I also watch the show which regularly films near my home. It freaks me out that so much zombie stuff is happening around my area.

Oh, man I forgot about Walking Dead. I guess if they make a game featuring Rick and company it will start out in my home state at least. I think Rick was from one of the more southern areas near the Tennessee border though.

I"ve grown numb to games and movies set in NY.

i heard AC4 is taking place in halifax, nova scotia. pretty pumped.

I was born in Hong Kong and I travel back there every once a year and yeah I share your concerns. Having some NPCs speaking Cantonese is a nice touch, but it sounds incredibly awkward. This happens in Hollywood movies as well, when they cast Asian-American actors who can speak the language but the accent is off. I had hoped that they would create a believable rendition of my hometown but from the trailers and gameplay videos, it's not convincing me.

Lawrence and Lowell Massachusetts have yet to be utilized as a setting in a game (to my knowledge, at least). And they likely won't be unless someone sets a game in a textile factory during the early industrial age. Now if you'll excuse me I need to go pitch my new idea for a game set in a textile factory during the early industrial age. There will perhaps be a horror lean to it.

part of the reason I love Scott Pilgrim is because it's set in my hometown of Toronto.

Although I can't relate, I can say that this reminds me of a stand-up bit I saw once. I can't link it, so I'll offer a brief synopsis: somebody was playing the Pakistan part of Modern Warfare 2, noticed that they didn't get the language for that region correct (it's Farsi), and he riffed on how the developers managed to fuck that up so bad.

There is or was a major skate scene here in Tampa, and one of the tony hawk games featured the skate park here and the city as a level. It felt kinda weird, cuz a lot of those locations that I recognized weren't that close together.

We have great developers in Montreal but the only game taking place there in recent memory is a tiny chapter of Deus Ex HR, limited to the top of the Olympic Stadium (which is one ugly mother). Can't tell of the authenticity as I've never been there, it's widely considered a touristic trap.

I can't even think of a game set in Denmark. And I doubt I would ever see a game set in Viborg (or Denmark pretty much for that matter)...

The first level of Resistance is vaguely based on York where I used to live. They didn't accurately map the streets or anything though. It was more an 'inspired by' sort of thing. Pretty cool nonetheless.

Deus Ex: Human Revolution set in New Detroit. That just gives me hope for the future.

Earth Defense Force: Insect Armageddon was also set in a New Detroit....I wonder if the video game industry is trying to tell us something?

I am hoping for a level set in Worcester in War of the Roses, considering there was a pretty important battle here, but I doubt it'll happen.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XTOyxsnMl0s

Vancouver, WA = Modern Warfare 2

This video doesn't really do it justice but the set up of the "Wolverines" level in Modern Warfare 2 looks pretty damn close to a small commercial area in my town.

Believe me or not but one of my friend's older brothers was working for Infinity Ward at the time so I simply look at that level as his "trademark" per say. It's not as similar now with store closings but when the game came out damn if it wasn't the spitting image of an area around my local Taco Bell and Burgerville.

Salt Lake City will never be the central location of a video game. I usually get that feeling whenever a game takes place in Utah. Probably the best example is Resistance 2. A campaign mission, and a 60 player multiplayer map took place in Bryce Canyon, Utah. The multiplayer map was super ugly. It was cool to see Utah in a game, but kind of a bummer because Bryce Canyon is the only Utah national park I've never visited. Oh, it's also a bummer because the game sucked.

Utah is featured in a lot of sports games, but you don't really get to see the state. The ESA is in every single NBA game, but that's not really strange to see. I used to love snowboarding games that had Utah resorts in them. I haven't played any recent ones, but I remember how excited I was when one game had Brighton ski resort, which is about 30 minutes from my home, and my personal favorite resort.

Honestly, I think it's cool to see any place that I've visited in a game. I haven't traveled much in my life, so there are few places. Civ V Gods and Kings added new wonders, including the Alhambra, which I visited last month. I was pretty excited about that.

And then there's NYC. I lived in Brooklyn, so it's neat when something takes place there. Mostly everything focuses on Manhattan, however.

The closest thing to my hometown being represented was when I read a flyer in Alan Wake for a rock tour by the Anderson brothers. One of the cities listed was Newark, NJ so that came outta nowhere.

In terms of actually making an appearance, the closest would be GTA IV's Alderney, but that is more a version of Jersey City rather than Newark.

@ShaggE said:

We're big enough to have a popular song about how much this place sucks (Shit Towne, by Live), but I can't imagine a game set here.

Town Called Malice by The Jam is near enough to me. At least it's the town my IP says I'm in.