I'm playing L.A. Noire. I was going to wait and pick it up later, after the price came down some, but since it is something a bit different, I caved and decided to go ahead and support the release at full price. I'm not really sure what I feel about the game yet since I'm only a few cases in. The driving sections are a bit... well, they have that typical Rockstar effect ie it feels like I'm trying to steer a drunken rhino who happens to be rollerskating downhill on a frozen road. The character responds a little better than that at least, but still feels clunky to move around.
The characters, with all the talk about the new method for capturing facial performances, tend to look a little weird. There is a big disconnect between the level of detail present in the facial expressions and the poly count of the rest of the model. It's kind of like how Gabriel Knight 3 had a lot of really impressive texture work, except for the fact they were pasted onto crap geometry. A few of the characters so far have had really dead eyes, not sure if it is intentional or an oversight, considering how well some of them are done.
The hats look a bit off as well, but that's really digging for gripes. So far I've noticed the in-game radio station has at least one song in common with Fallout 3 which gave a nice burst of nostalgia.
As for actually being able to read the people that you're trying to interview, it seemed to be hit or miss at first. I was trying to use my n.l.p. stuff to dissect every little nuance, and I was wrong a good bit of the time. They seem have a lot of little tells for lying worked into the base-line "I'm telling the truth" performances, or maybe it just seems that way because the actors were lying, in essence, since they were just following a script. In any case, once I turned off the Adrian Monk section of my brain and just watched for the over-emphasized "woooo, I'm hiding something" emotes I started to breeze through the interview sections.
Speaking of the defective detective, it seems like the first case in the Traffic section was lifted almost verbatim from an episode of Monk. It seems like Team Bondi even winked at the player about it, since one of the characters involved in it was named Adrian. It was actually a little annoying though, because I had the case worked out in the first scene and I still had to plod my way through twenty some odd minutes of stuff to get back to conclusion I'd made as a snap judgment.
When things do click though, the game gets really good, but it has a bad habit of chopping itself up in such a way that it doesn't really get to build up enough momentum to keep me rooted. It seems like every time it starts to really draw me in, it kicks up something that reminds me I'm playing a game, or just does a time jump and completely breaks the flow.
Despite never having played them, I get the vague impression that LA.NOIRE was an attempt at a mature audience re-skin of the Phoenix Wright games, albeit with considerably less toupee throwing. From the couple of videos I watched (a delayed attempt at trying to figure out why most of GW had PW themed avatars at one point) it seems there are a lot of similarities. Someone just took a Rockstar style "open world" and grafted 90% of the gameplay from PW into it.
Then again for what is essentially a police procedural, it isn't nearly as soul crushing in its tedium as Police Quest 4 was.
I like the world, I like the acting, and when it works I really enjoy the interrogations, but it's easy to put down between cases. Also, the inability to skip certain lengthy scenes, say when you decide you want to attempt disabling an enemy gunman without killing him to see if it changes your evaluation and have to start the whole case over from the opening movie, is really annoying. With the emphasis on the character's performances, the fair amount of hand-holding the game provides, and the preponderance of impossible to skip scenes, it is almost like the game desperately wants to be a film and gets ticked off when the player tries to interfere.
Vagrancy - Be careful who you wake up in a twenty four hour parking lot.
His name was Not Johnny - A young man becomes a sort of superhero after a crippling injury. He
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