Quick Look: L.A. Noire (PlayStation 4)

Lock 'em up Chief!

If it weren't for the empty streets, this game could easily pass as a current-gen game.

http://lanoire.wikia.com/wiki/Dan_Ryckert

I really hope someone makes a video of Dan in this new version

1 out of 5 stars for the video deck

6 years after this game came out and Brad and Ben are still like "This is really weird for a Rockstar game, you can't pull your gun out".

I mean, it's not as if the game wasn't even made by Rockstar, that it could've possibly have been made by an entirely unrelated Australian team and only then published by Rockstar.

@recaliber: Cut Jan a break, considering that this was Jason's very first Quick Look deck, the bar has been set very very high.

In this game you investigate around 2 dozen wrongful deaths, but in my game by the 3/4 mark the stats screen showed the main character had gunned down 204 people during the execution of his duties

"It's a hard shoulder to reach"
dammit it Ben :)

Found the old man on his porch!

If I didnt know any better, I'd say that thumbnail makes it look like Vinny is behind the wheel.

Do they try to run over Dan? If not, they failed the Quick Look.

I love(d) this game to bits. My favourite of the year when I played it on PS3 back in... 2009/10? I saw it for sale on PC recently, and I'm sorely tempted to play through it again. God Phelps is the best... and ah, the escalation music during interrogations! Just stellar.

This game is still such a shallow mess.

I laughed way too hard at Ben's "shoulder to cry on" comment. Way too hard.

dan isn't in this this is such a fail wtf

I love this game. The concept is exactly what I want. A big budget phoenix wright.

My question is if there is any point picking this up if you played the PC version. Has it been improved over that at all?

Never played the game, but I'm guessing the husband staged his own murder by slaughtering the pig in the car, then ran off to Seattle to be with his mistress.

Why is everyone talking about this as if it was developed by Rockstar? It was not - Team Bondi made this game. Rockstar published it. There is a slight influence but the game feels completely different from GTA games. For me, even at the time this game was new, the open world aspect felt like rubbish - lifeless, clunky. It would have been a better game if it was linear, but the option to have your partner drive, which played the dialog and then skipped to destination, helped to mitigate this issue. Also the interogation system is super clunky no matter how you label the buttons, the game is about figuring the system out and then exploiting it, instead of actually paying attention to suspects and the conversations. It's a good game, it's not great though.

If you're going to bring an old game to a much more powerful platform either make it 60 fps or don't do it at all.

Between this and Skyrim Switch port, it's been a good week for 2011 games.

Usually I'd be 100% with you but I bet that facial capture footage was never even recorded above 30 fps in the first place. Would be really jarring for people to move around at 60hz while their faces animate at half of that.

I bought this day one on ps4 and didn't get very far.

To be fair - after being apart of a murder trial, we scoured the garbage for receipts to put this person at a certain in place at a certain time - all while he left notes around about his thoughts to his girlfriend.

Rockstar didn't make this upgrade....or the game.

It's interesting seeing the prompts changed to Good Cop and Bad Cop. During development the prompts were Coax, Force and Lie. In the original release it ended up as Truth, Doubt and Lie.

“A lot of people say that [Phelps] goes a little bit psycho with some of the questions you ask in the game. When we originally wrote it, the questions you asked were Coax, Force and Lie. So Force was a more aggressive answer, and that’s where we actually recorded it…But when the game came out, it was Truth, Doubt and Lie, so everyone says that [Phelps] on the second question goes psycho, but that’s just the way we wrote it from before.”

- Brendan McNamara (former member of Team Bondi)

Considering anesthesiologists need twelve years of schooling, learning how NOT to kill you - I highly doubt they take any pleasure in knocking you out, lol. And if they do, I'm betting it's a feeling akin to a pilot successfully landing a plane.

I've seen some of their text books, and good lord...

Ben makes a random Deadly Premonition reference due to the amount of blood in the car. Brad searches the trunk and finds a receipt signed "Mr. F. Morgan." Spooky.

This is one of my favorite games of all time. As Brad was saying throughout the video, it's an adventure game, not an open-world action game; be prepared for lots of slow-paced clue finding and interrogations. The story, characters, and recreation of 1940s L.A. are all utterly brilliant; this is my favorite environment/world in any game.

@brad the partner driving was in the original game. I tried to drive myself everywhere at the start, but I found the rules of the road and the cars not all that appealing. Having come to the same realization as everyone else who played this game that it was an adventure game wrapped in a fairly lifeless open world (and as one of the people who really enjoyed the story) I used the partner driving for most of the game. The nice thing about that feature is, if there is a story-related conversation you would've heard on the drive over, the game stays with the ride and you can look around the city until the conversation is over and then it'll fade to black and load the next crime scene.

Ah LA Noire, one of the few games I have every achievement in across all DLC. Fun game at 1st, but definitely become pretty rote and guess work orientated quite quickly. Narratively it has a good central mystery.

I would love a Blade Runner style, cyber punk L.A. Noire.

I picked LA Noire up on a whim for $20 on PS3 via Amazon during black friday. Didn't realize that coincidence til writing this.

Anyway, it sat on my shelf for a bit and eventually I got into it. Enjoyed it a lot more than I expected. Very interesting, cool game.

I wish they'd make a new one though as there isn't much of a reason to replay this.

Yeah that guy "works" for the "railway." Uh huh.

Got both this and skyrim for the Switch. Been having an awesome week

Picked this up again, but just took a few screenshots on the X so far. Already completed on 360 so this is at the bottom of my stack rn. Great game though, I really enjoyed originally.

@benpack@m16mojo2

You know what? Sedating and anaesthetising people is actually one of those things where you do get a bit of a kick. And if you've gotten into that job, then chances are you enjoy it somewhat. I get some amount of pleasure in putting people under.

100% Correct. Goes to show how much attention they were paying if you got this from the video alone

Say what? Brad never knew about letting your partner drive everywhere? That's the best way to play this game. You also sit there and ride while you and your partner talk about plot stuff, so you won't miss any dialogue. Cuts out the long drives with awkward silences in the almost pointless open world.

Man I really liked this game. There's a lot of it that isn't very deep or whatever, but just going through the motions of it all was always so enjoyable.

Yeah this game wasn't made by Rockstar. They just published it.

@zabant: Yes and No. The husband is actually hiding in his friend's house, the one you get to interrogate at the bar. But yes that's the real reason why he tried to stage his murder

@alucitary: Dan is just the best. I laugh so much during his streams.

@recaliber: Tagline? Description? Even subtitle maybe? Never heard it called a video deck before.

The open world is only pointless because you didn't drive yourself; there are a ton of side missions you get over the radio when you drive.

Would be interesting to see a Switch vs PS4 comparison, guess that dig into Digital Foundry territory :)