LA Noire

mystic86

thats the thanks i get for trying

mystic86

that article, yet another reviewer with their lips pressed on rockstars a**hole... team bondi deserve/will deserve lots more praise

Sephiroth_dude

Haha theres still another 3 pages,I'll post them in a bit for a sheehy

Zero-Cool

Sephiroth_dude wrote: »

Haha theres still another 3 pages,I'll post them in a bit for a sheehy

Ah Jaysus man don't, a mod will ban the lot of us!! I'll have a look at it tomorrow when I get home but sound boys!

mystic86

theres no more, i posted all the pages' text content..?

Zero-Cool

mystic86 wrote: »

that article, yet another reviewer with their lips pressed on rockstars a**hole... team bondi deserve/will deserve lots more praise

Dead right man, Bondi must be getting fair pissed off. At the same time, the R* name is getting them a lot of press tho as everyone wants to jump on anything attached to them.

grizzly

A glowing review up on the Guardian

It has all the period charm of Boardwalk Empire or Mad Men and it seasons the gameplay with a healthy dash of CSI.

mystic86

thats the first review is it?!

wuhoo

can't wait

Zero-Cool

Vid of the 1st 15 minutes of gameplay. Obvious spoilers are obvious!

I skimmed through it to see the mechanics at work but not enough happening so I would suggest not to watch it but its mad to see the game actually being played. I remember watching a loada red dead vids before it was released and kinda wrecked the experience for me so not gonna watch any more vids of this. Gonna be a long week!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=INPyXVWL1OM

grizzly

grizzly wrote: »

A glowing review up on the Guardian

It's down now, must have gone up too early.

5/5

cdb

The review was posted on the game blog. The poster had this to say about it:

Also, I dont know if anyone subscribes to the Tech blog twitter stream, but they must have posted the LA Noire review early accidentally.
The good news is that the review was very good.
The bad news is that Steve Boxer reviewed it.

Review. Warning: may contain spoilers!

Ever since it first worked out how to assemble pixels so that they resembled something more recognisable than aliens, the games industry has dreamed of creating one thing above all else –a game that is indistinguishable from a film, except that you can control the lead character. With LA Noire, it just might, finally, have found the embodiment of that particular holy grail.

From start to finish, LA Noire feels like a film –LA Confidential, in fact, along with any similarly hard-boiled example of film noir adapted from stories by the likes of Chandler and Hammett. Set in a gloriously convincing depiction of Los Angeles in 1947 (which is much more attractive than today's LA), it casts you as Cole Phelps, returning war hero turned cop.

Instantly, you plunge deeply and satisfyingly into his working life, solving a vast number of cases as he becomes the LAPD's poster-boy, first in Homicide, then in Vice. And your immersion in Phelps' affairs ratchets up even further when he is hung out to dry by his dubious superiors.

There have been plenty of games with cinematic pretensions in the past, so what is it that enables LA Noire to make a transcendental leap? Inevitably, technology is involved: the new MotionScan system used to capture actors' performances simply produces more convincing facial animation than we have ever seen in a game.

Couple that with the obsessive attention to detail for which Rockstar's existing games such as Grand Theft Auto and Red Dead Redemption are famed, and the end result rings true to a greater extent than anything that has gone before. The familiar need to suspend disbelief has been all but eliminated.

Real-life gameplay

LA Noire's gameplay capitalises cleverly on this breakthrough technology. Essentially, it sees you playing through Phelps's working life, doing what you imagine a real-life LAPD detective would have done in 1947. Thus, you have to drive to crime scenes, root around for clues and examine bodies, then follow the resulting leads.

It's when you question suspects and witnesses that things get interesting. You have to analyse facial responses and bodily tics like a poker-player seeking tells, then choose one of three tones to adopt for each question. These are marked Truth, Doubt and Lying, but Sympathetic, Dubious and Accusatory would perhaps be more rigorous.

If you accuse a suspect of lying, you must back that up by producing evidence (all accessed, along with along with your records of each case and details of suspects from your standard cop's notebook). If you don't adopt the correct tone, the character you're quizzing will, at the very least, take longer to give you the crucial information you seek.

As you rise through the ranks, you earn Intuition points, which can be cashed in to eliminate one wrong question-tone (or reveal the location of all the clues at a location). Luckily, LA Noire is pretty forgiving, so if your body language-assessment skills aren't up to CSI standards, you should still get the right result in the end, although you risk a chewing-out from your boss for shoddy police work, which is genuinely mortifying.

Beautiful pacing

The game's pacing and narrative arc impress as much as its believability. The bog-standard detective work, fun though it is, is punctuated judiciously by action sequences including car chases, pursuing suspects on foot, climbing around inaccessible areas, puzzle-solving and, of course, shoot-outs.

Between cases, you either get a flashback to Phelps' war experiences in Japan or a glimpse into his off-duty life; both those elements end up feeding back into the overarching storyline. The oeuvres of Shelley and even anarchist author Piotr Kropotkin are fed into the mix. Newspapers that you find when hunting for clues trigger yet another backstory (this time involving ongoing LA skullduggery), which yet again intersects with the main storyline in the game's later stages.

A fascinating snapshot of an America struggling to readjust to everyday life in the aftermath of the second world war emerges, reinforced by the attitudes of your fellow cops (many of whom would be ejected from the Sweeney for political incorrectness, although Phelps's keen sense of morality keeps them sufficiently in check to appease modern moral arbiters seeking outrage).

Since you're at the centre of proceedings, participating in and dictating the action, the overall effect is powerfully immersive. Cleverly, Rockstar has ensured that LA Noire is a thoroughly inclusive game, too. The control system is sufficiently simplified that even the most determined non-gamers shouldn't find it intimidating.

Indeed, the more hardcore gamers may carp that it isn't sufficiently action-packed or precise. The one criticism that could be levelled at the game is that the shooting system has been over-simplified so that it feels clunky compared to thelikes of Grand Theft Auto.

Depth and meatiness

LA Noire largely does away with the free-roaming that enhanced the appeal of Grand Theft Auto and Red Dead Redemption. As you drive around, you do occasionally hear of street crimes to which you can respond, and there are hidden vehicles and LA landmarks that completists can collect and visit, but the overwhelming focus is on the main story.

So it's a good job that, bucking the modern trend for short single-player games, LA Noire is satisfyingly meaty. Rockstar reckons it's roughly equivalent in length to two seasons of a TV series, a claim that feels roughly accurate.

Perhaps, then, it would be more accurate to argue that LA Noire more closely approximates a television show than a film –it beats any film hands down in terms of the sheer amount of entertainment on offer, which of course is an advantage games have always had over films.

It has all the period charm of Boardwalk Empire or Mad Men –indeed, the role of Phelps is played by Mad Men's Aaron Staton and other digitised Mad Men actors crop up sporadically –and it seasons the gameplay with a healthy dash of CSI.

In the past, games with such overwhelming ambitions have floundered on odd, usually peripheral, aspects that jarred –such as unrealistic animation (and especially facial animation), clunky dialogue, poor virtual camerawork or facile characterisation. LA Noire is the first game to lack any such element which naggingly reminds you that you're playing a video game, rather than strolling through a film or TV series.

That's why it marks a breakthrough for games as a whole –and we can't wait to see what Rockstar does with LA Noire's technology in its other blockbuster franchises.

• Game reviewed on PlayStation 3

Rating: 5/5

Icyseanfitz

seems like the game is going to be great, wish they would give bondi a bit more credit though

quarryman

LA Noire largely does away with the free-roaming that enhanced the appeal of Grand Theft Auto and Red Dead Redemption

boo!

The Sparrow

quarryman wrote: »

boo!

YAY!!!

mystic86

Icyseanfitz wrote: »

seems like the game is going to be great, wish they would give bondi a bit more credit though

exactly, this is wat i've been saying too

Sephiroth_dude

quarryman wrote: »

boo!

boo indeed!still looking forward to it though.

maximoose

Cant wait for release day now. Reading the Madeleine McCann thread on AH has actually got me hyped for getting down to some detective work..

humanji

quarryman wrote: »

boo!

In fairness, that kind of free roaming would be incredibly out of place.

mystic86

the ps3 version has mandatory install of 1.3gb

not too bad

also, ps3 was the lead platform for development, which makes sense as its harder to develop for, but its great for us ps3 owners because the game will be maximised for ps3 as opposed to developers who do it the other way around and develop on xbox360 and try port over to ps3, like in black ops, disaster

it was originally gonna be a ps3 exclusive anyway so this also makes sense that ps3 was lead console for development

quarryman

humanji wrote: »

In fairness, that kind of free roaming would be incredibly out of place.

boo!

iMuse

mystic86 wrote: »

the ps3 version has mandatory install of 1.3gb

Thought it would be much more, Went with the ps3 version over the xbox for this one.

Zero-Cool

Are ye saying BOOOO or BOOOOOURNS???

This game is gonna f*cking rock! I think The semi-open world will suit it down to the ground just like mafia 2!

Zero-Cool

Official site has tracks you can listen to from the game:

http://www.rockstargames.com/lanoire/news/16011/la-noire-soundtrack-update-with-new-info-audio-including-stream-.html

Nodferatu

WARNING SPOILER:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vWdyFhumXu0

Zero-Cool

Thats that same vid keeps getting reposted every hour, 1st 14 minutes of the game. damn my weakness for this game! It was class tho when he gets into a car,

there is a little notification of the make of the car and how many he has unlocked (for the achievement)

Nodferatu

its my first time to see any gameplay footage

falan

Nodferatu wrote: »

WARNING SPOILER:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vWdyFhumXu0

I only watched 2 mins of it and then turned it off as i don't want to spoil it for myself....Its reinforced my view that this game is going to be EPIC....

Roll on 20th May...

Edit: I only watched 20 mins ago and it is now down.

Beekay

What is the story with the bonus mission "A slip of the tongue" in Gamestop? Does it have to be ordered online to get it or can I go into the shop on Monday and pre-order it and still get the bonus material?

Zero-Cool

Beekay wrote: »

What is the story with the bonus mission "A slip of the tongue" in Gamestop? Does it have to be ordered online to get it or can I go into the shop on Monday and pre-order it and still get the bonus material?

You can prebook it in the shop for the dlc as well. Most likely you will get a code to download the mission and it will be available when you get to that crimes desk department in the game. Hopefull PSN will be back up by the time that comes around.

iMuse

The games been leaked so all will be revealed soon, Ill be avoiding videos, reviews etc till friday.