So, this Friday I wandered round to Game and bought a Game. L.A. Noir. I didn't listen very closely to the sneak previews so I thought I was going to be a hard-boiled gumshoe who shoots people in the face. Well, I was wrong. I'm an annoying cop who shoots people in the face. The game is slightly weird- the big cases that I work usually result in suspects being taken alive and Due Process being served. However, as I drive from location to location, I pass random "street crimes" and almost without exception these result in hilarious bloodbaths whether I want them to or not. The Street Crimes don't mesh well with the main plot- In a main mission, I get commended for heroism for facing off against a couple of mooks with .38 pistols. In a street crime mission, I shoot up an entire gang of bank-robbers armed with semi-automatic rifles and tommy guns and no-one ever mentions it!
Speaking of things getting shot up, I'm glad I wear a hat in the game, because apparently it is magnetic and attracts bullets away from my face. Every time there's a gun-battle someone WILL shoot my hat off at least once. Yes, I can get my hat shot multiple times because like Indiana Jones, my character will risk life and limb in pursuit of sartorial elegance. Hat shot off? Well, let's stop shooting back at the three gangsters packing submachine guns and go hunting for my damn fedora, even if it means stepping out from cover and into the hot lead hailstorm. Who would do that? I wouldn't do it even in a videogame, but the game itself thinks I should, so I do so even though I'm hauling at the controller going "NOOO! DAMMIT! WHO WEARS HATS ANNNYYWAAAAAYYY???"
The developers have put a lot of effort into making the facial animation as lifelike as possible so that when I'm questioning people, I can pick up on facial cues to work out how much the lying bastard is lying to me. It works rather well for male characters, but for females, it has the side effect of making them all look like hideous wizened trolls, even when they're supposed to be fifteen years old or movie stars or something.
I could do without so much CSI:1946 poking around dead naked female murder victims who may or may not have been killed by the Black Dahlia killer, or by copycats thereof. It's creepy and will probably make the game the year's best seller in Japan.
When not mauling corpses, the clue-hunting sequences are interesting but have one minor problem- when you are near a clue, the jiggler thing in the controlller jiggles to let you know something interesting is nearby. This is fine except that the initial release of the PS3 (which I am playing the game on, not XBox360 for various reasons) came with controllers that don't have jiggly things in them. I got my PS3 on release and have been too skinflint to get the new jiggletrollers so hunting for clues is rather tricky. In the last case, I only found 11 out of 12 clues and got shouted at by the crazy Liam Neeson-a-like who runs Homicide and spouts pseudo-religious wrath-of-god nonsense in lieu of being an interesting, well-developed character.
Speaking of crazy pseudo-religious types, I note with some amusement but not much surprise that as far as I can tell, the May 21st Rapture did not occur and the world has not yet ended. Hardly surprising; ignoring the bit of the bibble that says something along the lines of none can know the hour of his coming because the lord cares not for your dental appointment, if I were an an omnipotent deity, I would have much more interesting things to do than choose 200,000 of the planet's most insufferable wossnames to come live with me at Chez God so they can all stand around being smug at the suffering of all the billions who didn't make the cut. Indeed, assuming that a God would want to choose 200,000 actually decent people, there's going to be a lot of empty heavenly housing-stock. A bit like post-crunch Ireland, but without so much of an impact on the Eurozone and the Queen hasn't made a visit. Yet.
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