L.A. Noire
I didn't know I wanted L.A. Noire until exactly 8 1/2 hours before it came out. A couple weeks before that, I was subjected to the same 30-second ad for it (the DLC from Gamestop to be exact) for every video of Catherine I was trying to watch. After watching this ad for the fifth time, Alex and I both swore a blood oath we'd never buy it. Not just because forcing your users to sit through the same 30 second ad for each and every 3 minute clip is the worst way to advertise, but also because the facial textures were hideous.
I should rephrase that - the textures are not hideous. How they lay on the overly flat facial skeleton is. In addition, "His head is way too big for his body," Alex commented, "He looks like an alien baby." And it was true. It was painfully obvious that a lot of love and caring went into this, but that same love wasn't put into connecting it realistically to a body, or keeping the proportions right.
And I don't see why this facial technology deserves all the praise it's been getting. Much has been touted about how nothing is animated, these are the actors' true faces and performances we're seeing. Is that meant to be impressive? I'm way more impressed by a skillfully animated face (bonus points to not creeping me out) that is proportionate and seamless than just watching a video clip of some actor pasted on a flat face polygon. We had this technology in Lawnmower Man, didn't we?
Anyway, back to my point. After watching 300 seconds of the same horrifying clip, I put it out of my mind. When the day before release came around, I thought of the game again, and ended up watching a gameplay video. And then another. And another. I was hooked. What got me past the unnatural character models was how the game itself played; in essence, it was a point and click adventure game. Investigation scenes were your standard pixel hunt; puzzles would have to be done and clues put together. Interrogations were a clever evolution of dialogue trees. And, of course, the combat and gunplay that even adventure games have to have in order to sell more than 10 copies.
I'd made up my mind, and pre-ordered instantly. Thanks to the wonder of Amazon, 14 hours later, I had it in my hands and installed on my hard drive. All 3 discs.
Now, I won't bring up the godawful faces anymore, because I've already spent 400 words doing that.
They are really bad, though.
During my 20 hour playthrough, I ran the gamut of gameplay, and learned a lot of things. I investigated countless crime scenes, conducted a ton of interrogations against suspects (botching most of them), accrued well over $100,000 in vehicle damage, and murdered way more people than I brought to justice. I found out that in L.A., absolutely no one (not even traumatized 15 year olds or kind little old ladies) ever ever tells the truth on everything, or even most things. Going through the game's 21 story-based cases also taught me that I don't do well when I have to learn 10 new people's names and information every hour I start a new case. I also found my new favorite word: gamewell.
Throughout all this, sprinkled between chapters and in newspapers were flashbacks and views of other people's stories, all tying together multiple threads of several stories to one conclusion. I thought the ending, while well built up, fell flat on its face. While I can appreciate what they did, it was more the way they did it that bothered me. It took more than a few internet searches to even find out why, physically, what happened happened.
A game is more than its ending, though (or texture mapping), and this is one I thoroughly enjoyed throughout. And while there are many, many, many, many, many cases I didn't get a perfect 5-star mark on, right now I'm content with how things played out, because every mistake was my mistake, and it made all my cases gel together, lumps and all, in a cohesion that's unique to me. It's rare a well written narrative lets you feel like you influenced things like that.
