L.A. Noire
Car chases, gunfights, murder and drugs - all in a day's work for the detectives of the LAPD.
MOVIES
- A handful of movies re-watched:
- Ex Machina, which remains excellent.
- Mission: Impossible: Dead Reckoning, which is a great Matrix movie (seriously, if you take the stuff with Benji and Luther as happening in the real world, and the action sequences as being in the Matrix, it totally works).
- Oppenheimer, which I still think is very very good, but not quite as incredible as some others do.
- And lastly there's Hancock, which I'll write more about next week
GAMES
- Playing through L.A. Noire again was a nice blast from the past, especially as I hadn't touched it since the week of its original release, blasting through the game in just a few days.
- It can be very weird to look at sometimes, with some incredibly detailed facial animation that doesn't mesh all that well with the bodies that just didn't have the same attention given to them.
- The first three-quarters of the game is genuinely good fun too, even though the controls for movement and combat aren't that great.
- It's simply quite addicting to thoroughly scour crime scenes for clues, talk with witnesses and suspects before closing the case satisfactorily.
- The only drawback is that the evidence gathered can only be used at specific times, even if it would make sense to bring it up elsewhere, which led to me getting some questions 'wrong', even if it made perfectly logical sense to me.
- Unfortunately, L.A. Noire's last quarter is the weakest part of the game and most likely will provide the lasting memory for players.
- I'll avoid spoilers, but a... misfortune affects the career of the main character, Cole Phelps (played by Mad Men's Aaron Staton), out of the blue and it's all downhill from there.
- You spend a large amount of time playing with a new main character after that point, and the gameplay becomes far more action-oriented, which the controls just aren't good enough to make enjoyable.
- This drastic change feels like the developers were running out of time, money or both and hastily cobbled something together to wrap things up as soon as possible.
- The ending doesn't ruin the game, but I wouldn't hold it against anyone for finishing it and coming away disappointed.
- I'm still frustrated that with this game, the Hank and Connor sections of Detroit: Become Human, and Disco Elysium that there aren't more big games playing as detectives trying to simply put the pieces together and solve cases, although real life sentiment towards law enforcement these days may be one reason why.
- L.A. Noire's gameplay does suffer from the passing of time making everything feel a little more difficult to do than it should be, but three-quarters of the game is a fantastic detective experience that only falls flat near the end. [7/10]
TV
- Movies and games have taken most of my attention since I finished The Bear's third season, but I'll be starting The West Wing's sixth season in the very near future.
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