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My LA Noire Rant
14 years ago
LA Noire is a new game form Rockstar that is set in post-war 1940's Los Angeles and depicts an adventure game style police detective story. Spoilers ahead.
Not very fond of Rockstar games lately. They all seem to be trying too hard. Too hard to shock, too hard to be sophisticated, and too hard to be snarky and wise all at once. The genuinely clever wit of the early GTA games was replaced with crass humor designed to appeal to the lowest of the lowest common denominator in the more recent games. And their historical fiction efforts weasel in a few too many modern perspectives to not crack the immersiveness of the worlds they are otherwise trying to faithfully recreate, as if trying to show how modern they are, even while depicting the past. I'm reminded of movies like the historical fiction that usually comes out of Hollywood. Decent films, and with some amazing historical accuracy...in the props department. But with stories that are either implausible or that reek of a modern sensibility that would be out of place in the actual time being depicted.
Remember the Hollywood adaptation of the Name of the Rose? One of the key elements of the novel the film was based on was that, in the actual middle ages being depicted, the characters would be powerless against the systems in place of the time to prevent certain injustices from happening, and therefore didn't pointlessly stick their necks out at the wrong moments, when they knew it would make absolutely no difference in their world. By contrast, in the movie version, Sean Connery openly makes proclamations against injustice and defies authority right and left. This completely misses the point, and doesn't feel very real for the times being depicted.
Likewise, if you are looking for a 1940's simulation in LA Noire, and the game seems to want you to think that's what it is on some level, you run into some similar problems with modern sensibilities coming out of 1940's mouths. The characters make references to oil as a motivation for wars (oh wow, a timely political reference, my mind is so...blown by the deep writing!), and to American future hegemony in ways that just don't feel very 1940's America at all (even one of the radio stations is named "American Century"), and remind you that the game was made in 2011 Australia. They also have characters often making cold war references when the cold war would not have been in such full swing yet. Then there's references to the H-bomb, when it hadn't been invented yet (A-bomb used in WW II, not H-bomb.), and another scene where a character refers to the lottery as being a tax on poor people in a way that sounds more like a modern article in the Times rather than something someone from the bad part of town in 1946 would have actually said.
It's like they want to show us the 1940's while showing off that they hired modern liberal professors to do the game writing at the same time. Augh. I suppose we are lucky they didn't squeeze a nice tasteful reference to 9/11 in the middle of the 1940's just to show how edgy they could be to boot. Yes, I realize that the writers can't help sounding at times like the modern people they are, but I think it could have been less obvious and less clunkily inserted at times.
I mean, hell, they not only have the main character expressing sympathy for the Japanese during the war, but they have to go one better and show him having an affair with a German after the war, just in case you didn't get it how enlightened and open minded he is, unlike those racist simpleton cretins that supposedly filled all of the rest of 1940's America. Even the arguments they use when trying to show enlightenment don't quite add up, like the old saw of how the Japanese were supposedly just invading most of Asia cause they needed natural resources to fuel their cars. Really, Rockstar? Really?? I'm supposed to think they didn't need oil for the racism and militarism driven war machine they were using to slaughter and enslave their neighbors too? And I guess the Germans just needed lebensraum? I didn't like the Bush admin's war for oil in Iraq either, but I don't make such grasping arguments about a totally different war just to make cheap shots against it.
The things the game gets right are borrowed, though admittedly in a well executed way, from earlier source material. Some of the cases depicted seem similar to old episodes of Dragnet. The radio plays were from the late forties, not long after the time period of the game, and the 50's television show often merely rehashed those 1940's episodes with scenes added for the camera. So either way, whether borrowing from the radio show or the televised version, you can't go wrong, these are stories of 1940's crime in LA. This isn't a bad thing though. Dragnet really was mostly based on true stories and Jack Webb was sincere about wanting to keep things realistic. If they did crib from Dragnet, they couldn't have picked a better source for inspiration.
On the other hand, this reminds me of how this has all been done before, even as I get the impression that the game would like us to think that this subject matter would never have been touched in a 1940's show. I notice that some gamers have mentioned that the game seems to be trying to be shocking, when it would have been better served by more careful story execution in general. And I think they have a point there. The case in the game about a teen getting taken advantage of during a supposed photo shoot in Hollywood may seem slimy and sort of shocking, even today, but there was a 1940's episode of Dragnet that had pretty much the same plot, photo shoot and all.
Pedophilia is used for shock value a couple of times in the story, yet they always depict the victims as being nonchalant about what has happened to them. I guess that's supposed to be a shocking modern take on the theme as well? Yes, I know young teens have sexualities, Rockstar, but depicting them being almost cool with having been drugged and raped seems a little off somehow.
They also seem to have borrowed the former adversaries in a potential love triangle becoming cooperating pals idea for the game from a more recent noire source - LA Confidential. But, again, such homages are forgivable, and perhaps even appropriate for this sort of thing. Though I was slightly disappointed to not see even one 1940's style Hammett or Agatha Christie style plot line, complete with an inheritance and gathering everyone at dinner to reveal the murderer etc. This is much less a noire of the period, and more of a realistic police procedural throughout.
Still, featuring the evidently rather educated lead character feels like a thin excuse for said character saying "enlightened" things about the times that remind you that it's the game's writers who are actually talking. And the way he reminds everyone around him of his education in such cliche ways (Predictable quoting of latin, plus Shakespeare references ahead!) feels clunky. Yes, I get it that he is supposed to come off as a bit of an uptight asshole anyway, but it's still too constant a barrage. College education may have been less common in the 1940's, but I'm guessing it didn't instantly turn people into megageeks when they were exposed to it.
And oh yes, he does have a dark secret in his past from his war experience. You know, kind of like a certain character named Niko, from another Rockstar game. In one webcast I saw of someone playing the game, the player laughingly suggested that he must have killed some puppies when he was younger. Gamers just don't care about this maneuver anymore in a game's "dark" plot line. Time to come up with a new "twist", Rockstar.
To be fair, having the lead character be someone so flawed is indeed new territory for a game from Rockstar, where the leads are often the only cool characters in the games. In this game, the lead starts out all stuffy and defensive with his new partners, but slowly learns to respect and appreciate most of them, up to a point. It's a nice new approach, though it does get repetitive.
A few other things get repetitive too, like the chase scenes, and the way every damn pedestrian notes that he has seen your picture in the newspapers.
Some of the action scenes are skippable though. The game really does emphasize detective work and mystery solving above all else, and this emphasis serves it well. The game's depiction of facial movements is uncanny and allows you to interpret how characters react to your questioning. This is innovative and effective.
But then, as many gamers have pointed out (Most critics are too busy drooling over how the game has some innovative features and bothers to have a story to begin with to say much that is actually critical in their analysis. Pro reviewers who have to give a number score and have seen everything twice are so starved for innovation that they instantly uprate anything remotely new.), the story falls apart even more completely as the player reaches the last fourth or so of the game. They throw in even worse flaws for the main character that, importantly, go unexplained. Some players have complained of how the jerk corrupt cop character was monotone and had no character development, leaving his speech at the end of the game pointlessly ironic rather than truly hard hitting. But I find it worse that the perspective in the game suddenly shifts from your previous main to an entirely different character. Innovative? Or just "What were they thinking??" I think most gamers came down on the "WTF?" side of that issue.
LA Noire starts out as a fairly fun game, and then it gets too ambitious yet misguided in its storytelling, unsatisfying in its conclusion, and repetitive in its gameplay. If they wanted to do a point-and-click adventure game, then maybe they should have just done that and avoided the whole sandbox world thing, which they approached in a more halfhearted way this time than was done in the GTA series.
It seems as if Rockstar is still struggling with the whole telling of a serious story thing. They keep trying to make The Great American (But made in Scotland or Australia.) Video Game story of our time, and just end up falling into their own set of cliches. The main character was a good example - they try to make him a sophisticated voice of the game writer, but also a flawed character. But as many gamers have pointed out, you never get to see his flaws fleshed out in a sensible way that one can follow, like showing us how his affair happened, or even how his mistake during the war happened. We are told things rather than shown them, and then expected to take them at face value. A rather rookie writing mistake for a game that had millions of development dollars spent on it, and now wants forty of your dollars for the privilege of playing it.
Rave
Not very fond of Rockstar games lately. They all seem to be trying too hard. Too hard to shock, too hard to be sophisticated, and too hard to be snarky and wise all at once. The genuinely clever wit of the early GTA games was replaced with crass humor designed to appeal to the lowest of the lowest common denominator in the more recent games. And their historical fiction efforts weasel in a few too many modern perspectives to not crack the immersiveness of the worlds they are otherwise trying to faithfully recreate, as if trying to show how modern they are, even while depicting the past. I'm reminded of movies like the historical fiction that usually comes out of Hollywood. Decent films, and with some amazing historical accuracy...in the props department. But with stories that are either implausible or that reek of a modern sensibility that would be out of place in the actual time being depicted.
Remember the Hollywood adaptation of the Name of the Rose? One of the key elements of the novel the film was based on was that, in the actual middle ages being depicted, the characters would be powerless against the systems in place of the time to prevent certain injustices from happening, and therefore didn't pointlessly stick their necks out at the wrong moments, when they knew it would make absolutely no difference in their world. By contrast, in the movie version, Sean Connery openly makes proclamations against injustice and defies authority right and left. This completely misses the point, and doesn't feel very real for the times being depicted.
Likewise, if you are looking for a 1940's simulation in LA Noire, and the game seems to want you to think that's what it is on some level, you run into some similar problems with modern sensibilities coming out of 1940's mouths. The characters make references to oil as a motivation for wars (oh wow, a timely political reference, my mind is so...blown by the deep writing!), and to American future hegemony in ways that just don't feel very 1940's America at all (even one of the radio stations is named "American Century"), and remind you that the game was made in 2011 Australia. They also have characters often making cold war references when the cold war would not have been in such full swing yet. Then there's references to the H-bomb, when it hadn't been invented yet (A-bomb used in WW II, not H-bomb.), and another scene where a character refers to the lottery as being a tax on poor people in a way that sounds more like a modern article in the Times rather than something someone from the bad part of town in 1946 would have actually said.
It's like they want to show us the 1940's while showing off that they hired modern liberal professors to do the game writing at the same time. Augh. I suppose we are lucky they didn't squeeze a nice tasteful reference to 9/11 in the middle of the 1940's just to show how edgy they could be to boot. Yes, I realize that the writers can't help sounding at times like the modern people they are, but I think it could have been less obvious and less clunkily inserted at times.
I mean, hell, they not only have the main character expressing sympathy for the Japanese during the war, but they have to go one better and show him having an affair with a German after the war, just in case you didn't get it how enlightened and open minded he is, unlike those racist simpleton cretins that supposedly filled all of the rest of 1940's America. Even the arguments they use when trying to show enlightenment don't quite add up, like the old saw of how the Japanese were supposedly just invading most of Asia cause they needed natural resources to fuel their cars. Really, Rockstar? Really?? I'm supposed to think they didn't need oil for the racism and militarism driven war machine they were using to slaughter and enslave their neighbors too? And I guess the Germans just needed lebensraum? I didn't like the Bush admin's war for oil in Iraq either, but I don't make such grasping arguments about a totally different war just to make cheap shots against it.
The things the game gets right are borrowed, though admittedly in a well executed way, from earlier source material. Some of the cases depicted seem similar to old episodes of Dragnet. The radio plays were from the late forties, not long after the time period of the game, and the 50's television show often merely rehashed those 1940's episodes with scenes added for the camera. So either way, whether borrowing from the radio show or the televised version, you can't go wrong, these are stories of 1940's crime in LA. This isn't a bad thing though. Dragnet really was mostly based on true stories and Jack Webb was sincere about wanting to keep things realistic. If they did crib from Dragnet, they couldn't have picked a better source for inspiration.
On the other hand, this reminds me of how this has all been done before, even as I get the impression that the game would like us to think that this subject matter would never have been touched in a 1940's show. I notice that some gamers have mentioned that the game seems to be trying to be shocking, when it would have been better served by more careful story execution in general. And I think they have a point there. The case in the game about a teen getting taken advantage of during a supposed photo shoot in Hollywood may seem slimy and sort of shocking, even today, but there was a 1940's episode of Dragnet that had pretty much the same plot, photo shoot and all.
Pedophilia is used for shock value a couple of times in the story, yet they always depict the victims as being nonchalant about what has happened to them. I guess that's supposed to be a shocking modern take on the theme as well? Yes, I know young teens have sexualities, Rockstar, but depicting them being almost cool with having been drugged and raped seems a little off somehow.
They also seem to have borrowed the former adversaries in a potential love triangle becoming cooperating pals idea for the game from a more recent noire source - LA Confidential. But, again, such homages are forgivable, and perhaps even appropriate for this sort of thing. Though I was slightly disappointed to not see even one 1940's style Hammett or Agatha Christie style plot line, complete with an inheritance and gathering everyone at dinner to reveal the murderer etc. This is much less a noire of the period, and more of a realistic police procedural throughout.
Still, featuring the evidently rather educated lead character feels like a thin excuse for said character saying "enlightened" things about the times that remind you that it's the game's writers who are actually talking. And the way he reminds everyone around him of his education in such cliche ways (Predictable quoting of latin, plus Shakespeare references ahead!) feels clunky. Yes, I get it that he is supposed to come off as a bit of an uptight asshole anyway, but it's still too constant a barrage. College education may have been less common in the 1940's, but I'm guessing it didn't instantly turn people into megageeks when they were exposed to it.
And oh yes, he does have a dark secret in his past from his war experience. You know, kind of like a certain character named Niko, from another Rockstar game. In one webcast I saw of someone playing the game, the player laughingly suggested that he must have killed some puppies when he was younger. Gamers just don't care about this maneuver anymore in a game's "dark" plot line. Time to come up with a new "twist", Rockstar.
To be fair, having the lead character be someone so flawed is indeed new territory for a game from Rockstar, where the leads are often the only cool characters in the games. In this game, the lead starts out all stuffy and defensive with his new partners, but slowly learns to respect and appreciate most of them, up to a point. It's a nice new approach, though it does get repetitive.
A few other things get repetitive too, like the chase scenes, and the way every damn pedestrian notes that he has seen your picture in the newspapers.
Some of the action scenes are skippable though. The game really does emphasize detective work and mystery solving above all else, and this emphasis serves it well. The game's depiction of facial movements is uncanny and allows you to interpret how characters react to your questioning. This is innovative and effective.
But then, as many gamers have pointed out (Most critics are too busy drooling over how the game has some innovative features and bothers to have a story to begin with to say much that is actually critical in their analysis. Pro reviewers who have to give a number score and have seen everything twice are so starved for innovation that they instantly uprate anything remotely new.), the story falls apart even more completely as the player reaches the last fourth or so of the game. They throw in even worse flaws for the main character that, importantly, go unexplained. Some players have complained of how the jerk corrupt cop character was monotone and had no character development, leaving his speech at the end of the game pointlessly ironic rather than truly hard hitting. But I find it worse that the perspective in the game suddenly shifts from your previous main to an entirely different character. Innovative? Or just "What were they thinking??" I think most gamers came down on the "WTF?" side of that issue.
LA Noire starts out as a fairly fun game, and then it gets too ambitious yet misguided in its storytelling, unsatisfying in its conclusion, and repetitive in its gameplay. If they wanted to do a point-and-click adventure game, then maybe they should have just done that and avoided the whole sandbox world thing, which they approached in a more halfhearted way this time than was done in the GTA series.
It seems as if Rockstar is still struggling with the whole telling of a serious story thing. They keep trying to make The Great American (But made in Scotland or Australia.) Video Game story of our time, and just end up falling into their own set of cliches. The main character was a good example - they try to make him a sophisticated voice of the game writer, but also a flawed character. But as many gamers have pointed out, you never get to see his flaws fleshed out in a sensible way that one can follow, like showing us how his affair happened, or even how his mistake during the war happened. We are told things rather than shown them, and then expected to take them at face value. A rather rookie writing mistake for a game that had millions of development dollars spent on it, and now wants forty of your dollars for the privilege of playing it.
Rave
