Sunday, September 30, 2012

LA Noire

Posting this month has been down, due mostly to the fact that I've liberated my sister's Xbox 360. The first game I played was LA Noire (a loan from Emily), one of the reasons I wanted to borrow the console in the first place. As might be expected, the period detail is immersive, down to 1940s comedies playing on car radios. The game's real selling point is the investigation mechanics, however, and I'm not aware of any game which has put as much effort into collecting evidence and then using it. It's not enough to suspect things, you have to actually prove that people are lying. Spotting lies is also crucial, thanks to the facial capture technology, which means you spot lies in the same way you will in day-to-day life.

My reservations with the game are twofold: it wasn't entirely clear to me how my results in cases actually affected the overall plot, which makes it feel a little bit like it's on rails - playing some of the cases again might give me a better idea of how true this feeling is. The second is that aspects of the metaplot seem underdeveloped: the dénouement in the "hunt for a serial killer" section is underwhelming, but more important are the relationships of the protagonist with women, which aren't really explored until late in the game. This matters in terms of the choices the protagonist makes, which are significant, but lack impact without a background context.

A minor quibble is that the game is in glorious technicolour: an optional mode allowing you to play it in expressionist, shadowy black-and-white would have been a nice touch. And despite my reservations about some aspects of the plot, LA Noire gets its noir ending spot on. I know that extra cases are available as downloadable content, and I suspect I'll be getting them sooner or later.

5 comments:

Unknown said...

Spoilers here.

It did bother me how the game just decided to tell you that your character was having an affair with a hooker when up to that point you played him as a just man of integrity. It also bothered me that halfway through they all but abandoned the idea of investigating cases through clues and just made it a series of awkward shootouts.

Having said that, the detail is incredible and it is so immersive. The ending was indeed spot on.

TM said...

There is a black and white option. I think it's on the in-game menu.
I use it when replaying cases since I found it easier to spot things in colour on the first play through.

I'd recommend the DLC cases. One of them lets you walk around in the Spruce Goose!

TM said...

The Out of the Past film noir podcast had an episode about LA Noire, which is quite good: http://outofthepast.libsyn.com/episode-51-l-a-noire

Stephen said...

Rob: Yes, it's slightly disappointing that the best they could come up with for the final challenge was a big gun battle. It doesn't really matter how corrupt you can prove the police force is, killing about 50 detectives is going to land you in a lot of trouble.

Tom: Ah, I've found it - for some reason I expected it to be under "Extras". It does just monochrome everything though, rather than doing anything with lighting. I do realise that would be a *lot* more coding, however.

A better approach to the plot would probably have been to have you alternate between Phelps and Kelso from the very beginning - play through the run-ins with organised crime and the morphine investigation, rather than just seeing them, and have the mysterious accidents etc. introduced much earlier.

I don't want to be too hard on the game, as I really enjoyed it, and I think the investigation aspect was a real breakthrough. A sequel, or further development, would be welcome. I suspect a "Consulting Detective" game using these mechanics and set in an open-world 1880s London would sell *many* copies.

TM said...

Yes, I think switching characters earlier would have helped with Robert's problem.
Clute & Edwards like the 3rd person perspective because they think of it as a distancing device - you're not Phelps, you're just guiding/following him - but more experienced gamers, or just people younger than them, don't necessarily get that experience.

We are distanced from Phelps quite early on by the knowledge that he isn't necessarily what we see. I think that from the very beginning he is evasive about his war record, for example, and I haven't played it for a while but I *think* we find out he is (sort of but not exactly) a fraud shortly after he meets the singer and shortly before he begins his relationship with her.

So our understanding of the character is altered significantly right around the same time that happens, but it has been building to that point. I would say it's also reasonable to say that Phelps is portrayed as trying to play the all-American hero/family man/crimebuster roles all at once and that he latches onto the cop part of that as the one that can be real. His understanding of what being a cop actually is then takes a beating, as does his already fragile self-image, so that by the time he meets Elsa everything is in place for him to start the affair.

Having an alternate character - and Kelso's low opinion of Phelps coming from a viewpoint character - earlier on might have gone a long way towards making the affair with Elsa seems a less jarring plot point.


Like both of you, I found the ending a bit weak. However, much later, having replayed the odd mission to get over some dreadful one-star performances, and having watched some more classic films noirs I hadn't seen before, I warmed to it a bit. Though I still don't think it's great.

I don't think Rockstar did it intentionally, but I have come to think that bad endings are something of a feature of film noir, though by no means always. An example is GILDA, which has a dreadful, obviously tacked-on Hays Code ending, although the film is careful to telegraph what the ending should have been.

I suspect LA Noire's ending may have been a reaction to widespread complaints about Red Dead Redemption's, which I thought was pitch perfect and wonderfully in-genre.