Solving crimes in nice hats
Over the last year or so while I was making a conscious effort to finally clear my conscience of superlarge projects, I built up quite a list of games that I promised people that I would get around to just as soon as I'd finished the one that I was trying to write. I haven't really made any headway into that list at all, but recently we've been playing LA Noire. Or rather, I've been experiencing a massive post-project crash and playing a bit of LA Noire in between lying around and looking at TV Tropes. This was another of Whitney's choices of games, as I have only just emerged from the basement office after not really following any news on that front for the last while.
LA Noire with an E is about being a detective in a reduced version of 1940s Los Angeles built across the vertex of a hypercube, making time speed up and slow down as the plot dictates. In a way slightly like Magicka, when we started it I was first convinced that it was an almost entirely different game from what it actually is, because my mind tried to convince me that it was a skin over Grand Theft Auto 4 - the controls and interface are identifiably the same. But the game around that engine is much more... organized this time - you're still free to drive around as you want if you like (because the temporal anomaly leaves you free to go off and do side quests for ages before rejoining the pursuit of miscreants bound for the harbour, while making short cross-town drives take anything up to half a day if the storyline needs them to) but rather than going through the game seamlessly, it instead almost reintroduces the long-lost concept of "levels" as you advance through different cases with their own short sequences of objectives.
It actually feels sort of like what Police Quest would have evolved into if Sierra had continued making it and had dropped their flat-out psychosis, removing pitfalls like shooting your own kneecaps off if you forget to specifically unholster your gun first, or the possibility of misquoting felony code 1492 stroke C at someone and then spontaneously dying of shame. In each case, you start off by being given somewhere to investigate, where you gather clues and badger a few people, and this can then lead to doing a sequence of multiple sort of minigames, which could be chasing someone on foot, doing a platformy section, trying to stop a getaway car or putting a thinly veiled jigsaw puzzle together. You can, of course, tell it's not a Sierra game because it's really quite generous with the restart points, allowing you to restore yourself not far from your corpse if you ever need to instead of having to do the entire mission, driving and all, again. I was also impressed that the game allowed you to decide how actiony or adventurey it was, with the option to let your companion ferry you around instead of driving yourself, and having it roll its eyes and ask you if you wanted to skip the driving or gunfire sections if you died on them too much (even though that felt faintly insulting).
When you're not leaping around the rooftops or crashing white-wall-tyred cars through the surprisingly sparse Los Angeles traffic, the biggest feature of the game is the interrogation sections. The facial motion technology was one of the main things the game was sold on, and it's very impressive - as much as I keep thinking that graphics have plateauxed with an X, it's not until you see this that you realize how unrealistic human faces have always been in games. Compare it to its brother Grand Theft Auto 4, for example, which tried to give people realistic facial flaws by making it look as if everybody had just been sat on by an elephant. Here, it's as if they scanned the actors directly into the game - it steps right over the Uncanny Valley, and while it doesn't quite reach one hundred percent realism yet, it makes these polygonal people look at least as human as, say, David Cameron.
I couldn't help but think about Phoenix Wright during the investigation phases of the game, where you wander around smearing your fingerprints over everything that isn't bolted to the walls, floor or ceiling and then bother witnesses by challenging them with "Doubt" (Hold it!) or "Lie" (Objection!) options. Apart from those tenuous connections it's really nothing like that other mystery series at all, though - the whole mood is rather more understated than the Ace Attorney games (but then, so is Brian Blessed), and you don't get the luxury of looping a conversation around until you find your way out - you go through the interrogations once, and are left with a curious feeling of what path the case might have taken depending on whether you did worse or better at badgering your suspect.
However, that also leads me into something that I felt was missing from the game - namely, thought on the part of the player. The whole idea of branching the cases started off novel enough when I was unused to how the game worked, but without consequences for doing badly at the questioning, it didn't really feel like I was providing much input apart from trundling the characters from destination to destination and playing various minigame-like challenges in sequence (which it would also say weren't really necessary if I ever did particularly badly at them). I was doing the running, driving and climbing around, but the actual detective work is rather... deterministic - you always know when there are more clues to find, so you just have to wander around hoovering up items until the music stops.
And when those clues are things like discovering a shirt with the victim's blood on it stuck half into the washing machine in someone's house, fingers can be pointed really quite early on. The draw of the Ace Attorney games was in puzzling through the amazingly unlikely sequences of events that led to the crimes, and they gave you immense satisfaction when you realize that the person caught on camera at the other side of the city on the night of the murder must have killed the man who was stashed in the safe to which only he had the combination because the woman in the photograph on his desk wasn't his wife but had actually died eight years ago and her identity had been assumed by her identical twin sister. I wouldn't ask for that - but apart from a couple of slightly ambiguous cases in the later game to which there might not even be a right answer, it feels more like you're watching someone puzzle out the mystery than playing it, sometimes. Having said that, in one climactic case I was suddenly asked to find landmarks (out of several square miles of city) based on poetic clues, and the whole thing was in danger of turning into Silent Hill 3's Hard mode - at that point, I found myself sort of relieved when the game started leading me by the hand again there, making Cole work things out himself if you drive around aimlessly for too long.
The other slightly odd thing is that it seems to reach a climax in the middle instead of the end - that epic mission that I just mentioned is just over halfway through the story. Without revealing any actual storyline here, as Cole Phelps you reach the top of the ziggurat, some other things happen, then the game decides that he's become uninteresting enough to ignore and you play as somebody else for the last few cases of the game.
I'm not joking - control drifts away from the character you've been playing as, and the game turns into Super Insurance Agent. I would never have expected any PS3 title to involve driving down to the council library and looking through the records to compare the land values before and after property development, because that's so far outside any definition of the word 'game' that I can possibly come up with - but one of the longer sections in this has you doing just that, just before shooting the place up and trying to escape without any holes in your trilby. Then it takes the opposite turn and becomes Syphon Filter for the very last mission, with a flamethrower-wielding run through the river tunnels before the main character realizes that the weapon is flamboyant but obviously rubbish and goes back to mowing people down with a shotgun for the last two minutes.
"Personally I can't wait 'til the iPhone's invented."
I didn't dislike playing this game, but I definitely felt that I was in it more for watching than playing. At the beginning of the CD-ROM era, developers started making sort of low-rent Choose Your Own Adventure films because they had no idea what to do with the colossal space that they were suddenly offered. Sometimes - though this will turn out sounding much worse than I intend it to - this feels like a CD-i game, but to its credit it's one that's done well, with a lot of good actual gameplay should you choose to accept it in between the hesitant button-jabbing. It actually brought back memories of Hotel Dusk, another title which interested me enough to play all the way to the end, even though as a game it was a bit of a failure - perhaps it now doesn't even make sense to call these things 'games', a word which implies playing against some competition rather than interacting your way through a story.
There's one last thing that the game reminded me of, and that was just how inconvenient the world was before the turn of the century. Often, you'll have to contact headquarters by finding a police telephone - which, in an acceptable break from reality, seem to always be around when you need them - but even so, you keep on habitually thinking that Cole could just go and look an address up on Mapquest, or Google a business's name rather than waiting around while a telephone operator goes to look it up, before you remember that this is the 1940s. I am absolutely certain that I was alive before the Internet became the worldwide oracle that it is today, and yet I honestly can't recall how we managed before its invention.