LA Noire

[Jessweeee♪]

My boyfriend received this game for his birthday a week ago and we've been playing it together. It was one of those games I was really interested in but for some reason never thought to actually get! It's very interesting. Right now I'm on the case The Golden Butterfly.

(SPOILER)I charged Moller with the crime and then the cutscene that follows led me to believe I made the wrong choice. I loaded it up again and paid more attention, and I realized that yes, Moller is the more likely suspect, but Cole is being pressured into charging Rooney because he's a pedo and Moller, who isn't an immediate danger anymore unlike Rooney, has a daughter to look after. I think I will still charge Moller, even though my rating will suffer. Though I have a feeling it will come back to bite me later. The evidence is all circumstantial in both cases.

[Psychotic]

It really hurt my feelings when I got shouted at and I quit the force

[edczxcvbnm]

I got the game on a Steam Sale and played through it. I like the small scale individual missions and everything but I hate that nothing holds them together. It might look like it does at first but it becomes obvious that how you do on one mission has no effect on the next. They want to tell their story and how you play be damned. The story will just move on.

Now for my thoughts on the over all story (SPOILER)

Black Dahlia fan fiction followed by a subpar Chinatown. I know that this takes place at a much later date than Chinatown and that both deal with some of the real world problems of land ownership from the era but Chinatown was still a far superior story. It also doesn't help that Chinatown is Noir in style as well.

I am gonna start a new game sometime soon and be the world's worst cop and still get promotions! Bust guys with next to no evidence and be a total loser at interrogation. If only I could drink and drive in this game. Wait a minute...bad at everything? Corrupt as hell? No wonder I moved to the top =D

[Shiny]

Chinatown was pretty great. There should be a Chinatown video game with Jack Nicholson.

This seriously had one of the most anti-climatic endings I've ever seen in a game to date.

[Sephex]

I liked it for what it was. Not a great game, but certainly not bad.

[Vyk]

I loved the idea. The execution was a tad lacking. And it really bugged me that every girl in the game looked the exact same. Also, Rockstar still can't turn in a good driving mechanic in a game. This one was better than GTAIV, but I don't understand why they have to design all their driving physics like the roads are covered with ice. It shouldn't take an entire city block to come to a stop when you're only going 40'ish mph. It just makes me wish Volition would make a Saints Row version of retro noir mystery. So I could actually drive places without being ultra careful with the handling xD /rant

[Madonna]

I loved and hated LA Noire. I have four big thoughts about the game in reflection. No spoilers, fret not.

Getting around town is the absolute pits. You do a whole lot of driving and it is a whole lot of boring. Oh, I know you can get your partner to do all the driving, but then where do you get to experience the city? Los Angeles, for all that it is hyped up to be, is a boring, boring, borrrrrrrring city with absolutely no life about it. I hate driving through blandsville, and I hate the idea that I need to suck up to the idea of blandsville and if I hate it so much, I need to turn my partner into my chauffeur.

The only thing worse than this are all the cars they included for the period piece. There are a ton of cars, and all of them are worthless. Keep your cop car; it has a radio and there are guns in the boot. What does any other car have? A whole lot of nothing. Even the cool cars you can find in those out-of-the-way garages are crap because a) they are in out-of-the-way garages and b) still no radio or guns. I would have loved to drive any of the bonus cars provided once I found them, they went into a personal garage right by whichever precinct I worked out of. Otherwise, they are on the other side of L.A., and I think I recently explained that driving through that town sucks, so it is not happening.

One of the things I loved were the side-quests dispatch radioed you while driving between crime scenes and relevant locations. Again, driving blows, but if you did not drive, you would miss the radio dispatches and a chance to do something fun. The side-quests are generally about some goon or a group of goons up to no good, and you get to riddle them with bullet holes faster than Kent follows Clark. They are fun, make you feel like a cop, and add a little variety to your main case. Good on them, and the only thing they could have done to make the side-quests better would have been to include more of them.

I love working cases. The main story and the plots of some of the cases are ripped off and a little cliche at times, but are pretty fun to tear into and find a bad guy at the end of them. You get to interrogate suspects and their associates, investigate crime scenes and areas of interest, chase people in cars (the only time cars matter) and chase people on foot (suckier than cars, really), and be an absolute badass of a cop. I found the stories compelling, pushing me to find all the evidence I could, suck dry the people in interviews, and do my best to shut up that damn music.

[Psychotic]

Getting around town is the absolute pits. You do a whole lot of driving and it is a whole lot of boring. Oh, I know you can get your partner to do all the driving, but then where do you get to experience the city? Los Angeles, for all that it is hyped up to be, is a boring, boring, borrrrrrrring city with absolutely no life about it. I hate driving through blandsville, and I hate the idea that I need to suck up to the idea of blandsville and if I hate it so much, I need to turn my partner into my chauffeur.

You are 100% spot on here. Los Angeles was so dull and lacklustre. It was such a huge massive city and I had no desire to explore any of it.

[Jessweeee♪]

I'm too afraid to explore it! Busting up my car and running over pedestrians is bad now. At least the pedestrians are really really good at dodging cars.

[Vyk]

Glad to know I wasn't the only one sorta "meh" about the execution of a lot of their ideas. Everyone thought I was insane for hating GTAIV for most of the same reasons

[edczxcvbnm]

I think the problem with the town in LA Noire is that it is trying to recreate real life to an extent and that is boring. In GTA they start you off real small and give you missions in a small section. Let you get to know the streets and land marks in the area and then expand. No so in this game. They tell you to smurf off and go all the way across this huge city scape that looks largely the same.

Semi spoilers but not really

During the missions to find....THE GUY! You have to guess clues about where to go....I don't smurfing know LA or what the landmarks are. That was bulltit as I don't even have this stuff on my map. I couldn't make heads or tails of a town I know nothing about. It is just poor design...PERIOD! This is the exact same problem that True Crime: The Streets of LA had but that was ramped up even worse than LA Noire is.

[Sephex]

I think the problem with the town in LA Noire is that it is trying to recreate real life to an extent and that is boring. In GTA they start you off real small and give you missions in a small section. Let you get to know the streets and land marks in the area and then expand. No so in this game. They tell you to smurf off and go all the way across this huge city scape that looks largely the same.

Semi spoilers but not really

During the missions to find....THE GUY! You have to guess clues about where to go....I don't smurfing know LA or what the landmarks are. That was bulltit as I don't even have this stuff on my map. I couldn't make heads or tails of a town I know nothing about. It is just poor design...PERIOD! This is the exact same problem that True Crime: The Streets of LA had but that was ramped up even worse than LA Noire is.

More like LA NOPE, right?!

Yeah, that part of the game rubbed me the wrong way as well. I also thought the mystery behind...THE GUY was kind of an anti climax.

[Jessweeee♪]

Just finished the game. I loved it! I thought the ending was pretty amazing. I'm still all

Also, THE GUY. That one was probably my favorite case. I didn't find it all that annoying! All the landmarks were there on my map. If I hadn't actually found it yet, it had a question mark label with a picture and info just like the ones I had found. I'd look at the poem, set the landmark that fit the description best as my destination, and if it said "New Objective: Go to that place you just marked just now" then I knew I picked the right one. If not, I just opened up the map and picked again. Maybe it was patched?