I decided to give up on playing the rest of L.A. Noire, and I feel bad about it. It happened when I'd just finished the homicide story arc and was starting my first case at the Ad Vice desk. I was driving to a warehouse full of furniture and some iced morphine, when I T-Boned another car crossing the intersection who was only looking at the green light in front of him and didn't think to check if a decorated war hero detective was about to fly through his red light. A real officer would have stopped at the red light, most likely, or had the siren going and at least slowed down, but nope, I barreled through full speed because I get enough red lights in real life.
I also get enough traffic in real life. Traffic in the Los Angeles of today is famously bad, but even the three cars in front of me blocking my way out of some tunnel were bumming me out. If you drive recklessly in this game world you're punished for it. It's fairly mild, but still present. You're being asked to role play a tough as nails do-gooder cop in a corrupt city, and that includes stopping at red lights. Sure, you can have your partner drive to skip right to the next crime scene, but I found I wasn't enjoying that aspect either.
The crime scenes are by-and-large a photo hunt game, where you wander around waiting for the controller to buzz before you hit the x button (on PS3) to pick up a discarded bottle before turning it over in your hand, telling yourself it's not relevant to the case, then putting it back down again. Finding the clues opens up lines of questioning later in the case, so finding them all improves your chances of getting a good or right outcome. I was quite good -- if I do say so myself -- at finding all of the clues, but didn't much like the process. Once you have all the clues, the music cues change, and then you're off driving to the next photo hunt location.
Or, maybe you're off to interview a suspect. You can believe, doubt, or say someone is lying, and the answers felt pretty arbitrary. Maybe you went to the locations in a different order and can't say someone is lying. Maybe you just can't know the right answer and it becomes a question of who you would rather put away. Which suspect will make your chief and District Attorney happiest? These are all situations that real detectives probably face, but the moral ambiguity made me unhappy. Shoot alien bad thing is clear. Which unhappy person with children to accuse of murder is less so.
The story is great. I really liked the main character and the imperfect people that surrounded him. It's just all the game in between I didn't like, so, ultimately, I just read a synopsis and watched L.A. Confidential instead. That also has a good story, without making me feel responsible for all of the evil involved.
The facial tech is also quite good. You can see some evidence of the corners of the mouths sticking together when the shouldn't, or the corners of eyes not looking quite right, or a general sense that the whole animation was compressed a bit more than it should have been, but For A Video Game it is flat out amazing. These are actors acting, and doing it well. For facial animation nothing else comes close, although it required a fairly brute force approach. As the techniques are refined, and when companies have a method of retargeting the captured animation data onto other characters and creatures, it'll impress me even more I'm sure.
But for a game being an open world game, I don't want gritty realism in all things. I want Crackdown. Or InFamous. Most of all, I suspect, I want a game where I can put my character in a hot dog suit and drive around town spraying raw sewage on houses. I want to have fun like that, doing the things that I don't (that you can prove) do in real life. Where the ridiculousness of the situation makes me not feel bad about accidentally running over a pedestrian. Now if only someone would make that game.
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