Backlog Beatdown: Solving the Mystery with L.A. Noire

About a month ago I came back to and completed L.A. Noire. I bought it for the Xbox 360 back in 2013, got about half way through then switched to something else, probably XCOM! Here’s what I found out:

I can only hope the previous owner of that
blood hasn't got a use for it...

The game has you playing most of it as Cole Phelps, a detective for the LAPD, as he progresses through different departments of the police force – Traffic, Homicide, Vice and Arson. There are a few distinct sections in the game: The open world, where you drive around Los Angeles usually to your next location, though there are side mission and unlockables. There are crime scenes, where you hunt for clues around various locations where crimes have been committed. And there is the interrogation scenes, when you’re interviewing witnesses.

The latter is where most of the effort went into the game’s presentation, as they used motion capture to make the character’s faces move in an almost film-realistic way. They did a good job of this, unfortunately it didn’t have the required effect, as character’s clothes and hair remain stiff throughout. Nonetheless, this is by far the most interesting segment of the game, where you ask a witness a question, and watch their faces for their response. If you think they’re telling the truth, you press A, and potentially get some more information out of them. If they look like they’re hiding something, you press X to doubt them. And if you know they’re lying, you press Y to accuse them; you then have to present a piece of evidence that contradicts the lie. And if you’re not sure one way or the other, you can press B to back out and come back the question later.

Apparently the guy never wore a fedora
even once during production.

I missed a trick here: I found out later that if you accuse them of lying first, then you have the option to back out if they’re not. But if they are, they will very often telegraph the piece of evidence you need to contradict the lie. With the other two options, it might seem that Cole is being ill-proportionately aggressive; you wouldn’t think that shouting someone down constitute “Doubt.” But there was a reason for this, too: When the game was in development, the three options were going to be “Coax,” “Force” and “Lie.” At some point, the first two options were changed to “Truth” and “Doubt,” but most of the game’s dialogue had already been recorded and was left in. Remembering this fact makes some of what Cole says make a lot more sense.

The crime scene sections are handled well too. In order to keep you immersed in what is essentially a hidden object sequence, you still control Cole in third person, and whenever he comes across something that is potentially a clue, the controller vibrates. You pick it up, examine it, and the game will add it to the records if it is relevant.

This might sound like a cross between an adventure game and a Bioware RPG, but the game can’t really afford to be de-railed if you get stuck. Your reward for getting all the clues and asking the right questions are not solving the crime – that happens anyway – but finding out the whole truth about what’s going on. That can lead to a certain dissatisfaction, as there’s no sense of influencing the plot, but rather whether you find out some of its finer points. Ultimately it was better that way around, otherwise you’d be wandering around hopelessly lost and confused.

I did enjoy L.A. Noire. It’s a game that promised much, and due to the limitations of its media, fell just short of delivery. I won’t be aiming for 100% completion, as aiming for a 5-star rating on each case (I didn’t manage this on the first one even after three goes) would suck all the fun out of it, and a lot of the achievement points are tied up in DLC that I have no intention of buying. But with a lot of focus-tested military shooters out at the time, and rinse-and-repeat open world games taking up a lot of triple-A games today, I’m glad I tried the one that tried to do things a little bit differently.

Last Week's Games: Cluckles' Adventure and L.A. Noire

This week worked out significantly differently to expectations! While I wasn’t expecting to have much time to play video games this week, I had arranged with Warlords in Netherton to run a Ticket to Ride demo event for them on Sunday. The idea was that I’d run some games of the demo version of Ticket to Ride, hand out their promotional Golden Tickets to anybody who plays and generally have a great time.

Two things altered this plan: Firstly, I was off sick on Friday, and took advantage of that to play some games which I’ll talk about in a minute, and secondly, it snowed. Which won’t mean much to people who live in those parts of the world where it snows all the time, (I have a surprising number of readers in Canada,) but in most of the UK our reaction to snow is to grind our infrastructure to a halt. I wasn’t going to rush to a gaming shop in the middle of the snow, as even if I’d made it, most people who were far more sensible than me would have stayed at home. I also cancelled band practice for similar reasons, and gave myself some time to recover from what had been a pretty heavy week.

I spend far too much time on Youtube watching people talking about video games, and if I see one I like I think “I’d like to try that at some point,” only to forget it moments later. To prevent this, I started writing down all the games I was interested in on a file on my laptop called “Interesting Games.” I’m not sure what that says about me, keeping a record of what games I’ve been interested in so I know which ones to buy, but it meant I could go through the list and see what was on offer on Steam. I downloaded two games: Age of Empires 2 and Cluckles’ Adventure.

I mean, literally, this is it...

I played Cluckles’ Adventure first. It’s a platform game with a pixel-art style that looks almost – but not entirely – quite unlike games released on the NES and Sega Master System. It certainly plays like such a game, with about as ridiculous a premise as most of them. You play as a chicken with a freaking sword, alright, and you’ve got to traverse the different levels. Your goal is to reach the end of the level, but you can also explore the levels to collect all the captured chicks. I played it for an hour and I really enjoyed it. The controls are tight, with one puzzling exception that pressing down make you jump down to the next platform – most games do this by hitting down and jump. The gameplay is fun; the platforming is fine and the enemies are varied and interesting. Most things go down in one hit, including you, and Cluckles’ only attack is a forward dash, so you need to be careful where you do it in case you dash yourself off a cliff. But what I really like about it is that each level is a self-contained challenge. There’s no experience points, no equipment upgrades that are necessary to beat a level: Everything you need to get through a level is there; whether or not you do is dependent on your skill as a player, as it should be.

Beautifully presented, I'll give it that...

The other game I played was L.A. Noire. I played this way back in 2013 and hadn’t touched it since then. I remember liking it at the time but as I needed to give at least an hour to get through even a bit of it, I didn’t come back to it too quickly. I originally intended to go for a 5-star rating on each case but, as doing that without a guide would take me far too long and suck all the fun out of it, I decided to pick up the game from where I left off. I actually finished the story mode in the end, so that’s another one off the list!

Not sure what’s coming next week, though I’ll try and play Cluckles again at some point because it deserves far more of my time than it’s had so far!