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Sheppard's Video-Game Pie - L.A. Noire

L.A. NOIRE
Platform: Xbox 360
Publisher: Rockstar Game
L.A. Noire is an open-world crime thriller set in post-WWII Los Angeles, developed by Team Bondi and published by Rockstar. It's getting a lot of press as "From the makers of Grand Theft Auto" but they didn't make it. The game stars Cole Phelps, a former Marine turned police officer. It's set during the era when men wore hats.

It also stars a new motion-capture technology, where actors' performances are studied in greater detail than ever before and mapped onto the in-game models, producing much more expressive virtual people than in other games.

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The game plays, in theory, a bit like your standard third-person shooter/open world driving simulator, except that it's divided into discreet missions and you're not encouraged to drive around exploring the city. The city is there, but you'll get a fade-in to driving around, hear a radio say "Crime in progress, such-and-such location," and then you go there, collect evidence, talk to people, or maybe shoot at criminals on-scene, and after that you'll drive to the next location to continue the investigation, and eventually you'll solve (or fail to solve) the case you're on and it'll fade out to the next case. Eventually you unlock a free-driving mode (actually four) but they're not the focus.

The game is built around an interrogation mechanic. The evidence you gather in the field, you use in these interrogations—you question suspects and people of interest, and when they reply, you respond to their reply with one of three options: "Truth" (you take what they say at face value), "Lie" (you think they're lying and can prove it with evidence you've gathered) or "Doubt" (you think they're lying but can't prove it).

The second interrogation you go through—the one where you put the lessons learned in the tutorial into practice—involves trying to wring a confession out of a Jewish shopkeeper who you're pretty sure gunned down another shopkeeper, an anti-Semite. Over the course of this conversation, the subject calls the victim a "Jew-hating motherfucker" and other similar things several times. Then, near the end, you can select "Possible religious motive for crime" as a question, and your character says "I think you killed him because he hated Jews." The suspect then says, in essence, "What? I don't know what you're talking about."

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"Lie" is the wrong answer because you don't have evidence in your notebook that says the victim was anti-Semitic. Just the repeated statements by the suspect. The game doesn't let you call him on his contradiction.

That was the exact moment when I realized that in order to play the game, I'd likely have to fight against the interface and second-guess the writers at every turn. On reflection, the reaction I was supposed to have to that was "Oh, I guess since that's an obvious lie but there's no evidence recorded in my notebook that I can use to refute it, I should pick the Doubt option," but what I actually experienced was a powerful and visceral revulsion to the interface and the idea of engaging with it for any longer. I played a bit further along, out of feelings of obligation, but stopped when I realized I was having no fun at all and my resentment toward the game, for eating time I could instead spend on more enjoyable activities, would only grow from then on. Such a botched example of the interrogation system wouldn't have bothered me if I'd encountered it halfway through the game, but front and center, during the exam that followed the tutorial? No. If you show me two interrogations and one does nothing but show off the weaknesses of the engine, I'm done.

So this is my review of L.A. Noire. I have no idea if it's a good game in its entirety; all I know is I personally can't stand it. Slow, sarcastic clap, Team Bondi.

This review is based on a retail copy of L.A. Noire provided by Rockstar for review purposes, thus proving I don't always give positive reviews to games I get for free.