Tau Vs Cole Phelps: Masterminds Clash

 

Last night I started playing L.A. Noire as part of my viewer request segment on the stream.  I'm usually not taken with games from Rockstar if I'm being honest and I didn't think I'd enjoy this one that much, but after 4 hours I'm pleasantly surprised.  I basically had to rip myself from the stream last night because I was so engrossed in playing detective.

I won't comment concretely on the quality of the game just yet because I'm still pretty early on in the story I think but there's something quite annoying about this game that really stands out in a game about being a detective.  You may think that the goal of this game is to use clues and information to work out who did whatever crime your working on but that's not really true.  Your job as the player is to work out what the hell Cole, the main character, is thinking and make sure that the answers you give to a situation match what's going through his mind.

For example, there's a case very early on where you find a car crashed an abandoned in a train yard.  The car is full of blood but there's no body.  In the trunk of the car you find a receipt for the sale of a live pig and by the car you find a bloody pipe and a dropped wallet with, what you assume, is the victims address.  So fine, maybe its a murder or maybe something else is going on.  The next step of this case is to go to the victims house and tell the wife that her husband has been killed...

Now hold on there, Cole

There's no fucking body, I don't KNOW that the husband is dead.  It MIGHT be the victims blood, it MIGHT be someone else's blood or, for all we know, it might be pigs blood.  But no, because Cole thinks the man is dead, I'm not allowed to explore any other avenue, I HAVE to go to the house and tell the wife her husband is dead.  When exploring the house you find evidence of an unhappy marriage, separate bedrooms, train tickets to Seattle and, most damning, a missing pipe from a boiler outside the house that matches the pipe at the scene.  The wife seems to cooperate and tells you about a shifty friend of the victim.  If the guy is dead, this guy might have something to do with it, so down to a bar to go find him and ask him a few questions.

So you get to the bar, ask the guy some stuff and find out that while on trips to Seattle he's fallen in love with another woman and this guy used the pig to "help him out"

OH OK! I GET IT! This guy crashed a car and bludgeoned the live pig in order to fake this dudes death so that he can escape to Seattle and spend his time with his new lover.  So Cole asks the obvious question of where is this guy, and in response you get a sort of roundabout answer where's like "I can't say my hands are tied".  When I pressed the Doubt button on this dialogue, Cole immediately gets mad and starts accusing the guy of bloody murder.  Me as the player meanwhile am facepalming at my monitor screaming "No Cole you fucking idiot, he killed the Pig, we just want the location of the guy, HES NOT FUCKING DEAD"

This sequence ends and you tail the guy to his apartment, find him with the "victim" and then make your arrest and beat the chapter.  Yeah great, but I was penalized at multiple points during the case because my train of logic of the guy not being dead didn't match with Coles' logic of there being a murder.  It's annoying when you get told your wrong during the investigation because your logic doesn't match the game, only to be COMPLETELY CORRECT come the conclusion.  It's an irritating disconnect between character and player and it's exasperated by the fact that the only options you get during an interrogation are Truth, Doubt and Lie and the difference between Doubt and Lie is pretty fucking abstract. 

This isn't a problem exclusive to L.A. Noire.  Personally I find it most common in horror games with no combat where you'll be running from whatever it is through hundreds of rooms and corridors FILLED with blunt and sharp objects that would make an effective weapon but you aren't allowed to pick them up because the dumbass you're controlling isn't allowed to.  Only in L.A. Noires case the problem is made way more obvious because you're supposed to be solving puzzles but you're sort of limited in your approach by Cole's smooth brain.

But despite how much I just wrote about it, I'm still really enjoying the game and I'm VERY excited for another session.  You can come check out the rest of my playthrough and watch me berate Cole for being a dipshit some more a www.twitch.tv/taurinensis 

I Don't Understand Midnight Launches

Recently Grand Theft Auto 5 got released and the release of this game is easily one of the biggest things to happen in gaming this year.  The amount of hype people have for this game is astounding and while I don't share quite the same amount of excitement, I am looking forward to eventually picking it up and playing it through.

So I'm not here to pass judgement on the quality of the game but I really don't understand this whole midnight release stuff.  I went to a midnight release once, for Modern Warfare 2, and it was shit.  I went down to the local GAME store with my buddies from university and we were surrounded on all sides by idiots and there was a thick smell of weed in the air, it was most unpleasant.  Even then when I eventually got it home I thought that I couldn't really enjoy it all that much because I was tired so I ended up playing it in the morning anyway and if I was going to do that I didn't need to go to the midnight release at all.

It's not like the stores are going to run out of pre order copies anyway, they realise how much of these big title games they need to get in and how many orders they need to meet so it's not like your pre order is just going to vanish over the course of 2 hours at midnight and they aren't going to sell it off either if the store is any good.

Also GTA5 was released on a Tuesday which makes the whole thing even more confusing to me.  Sure, if it's a Friday midnight release at least you can stay up all night and recover on Saturday, but surely a great deal of people who went to go grab GTA as early as possible have jobs or school or some kind of mid week responsibility?  So wouldn't that mean one wouldn't have all that much time to play it anyway?  I don't get why these people can't just wait a few days or whatever and then really sink their teeth into it.  With a game with this much hype you'd think that's what people would want to do.

Still, who am I to judge? I'm sure there were plenty of happy customers that day and a great majority are enjoying the game right now.  For me, if GTA5 turns out to be anything like GTA4 I'm going to be underwhelmed and disappointed but like I said, no judgement until I have a copy.

Red Dead Redemption

I was so wrong about this game, so damn wrong, and that doesn't happen very often.  Red Dead Redemption is a game that was sitting in my backlog for a long time, mostly ignored because anyone that I talked to about it just said "oh, it's like GTA with horses".  That to me meant it's probably pretty fuckin' good, but not THAT good, so it got shelved for other titles.

God. Damn.  I wish I played it at release and not listen to 5 word reviews from friends.  This game, is probably one of the best games I have had the joy of playing.  The gameplay is pretty much what you would expect from a Rockstar sandbox game, apart from the setting it's nothing all that different in terms of gameplay, but they really REALLY outdid themselves when it came to the story.

There might be spoilers from this point, so if you care about spoilers for a game released in 2010, I'd suggest you go fuckin' play it right now.

The game follows John Marston, wild west superhero on his quest to get his family back from the government by bringing members of his old outlaw gang to justice.  The core story is nice and simple, but you meet so many characters that will just throw spanners into the mix that it stops being as black and white as you might think pretty early on.

I could write for pages about why each individual character was so good, but I'll sum it up by saying that what Rockstar did here, better than any recent game I have played, is make me invested in the story.  I actually cared about John Marstons family about as much as he did. I mean he (and by he I mean me) was busting his ass so bad for them you couldn't help but sympathise. 

One of the best things this game does though is making the player hate the "bad guys".  The villains in this game are all really good but the ones that fuck you over, you REALLY want to get back at.  It feels so good when you're doing a mission and the objective says something like "kill that fucknut", you get hyped so damn hard.

The ending is also really fucking good, with the final scene having me shouting at the TV in disbelief.  I would describe it to you, but you really need to experience it as a whole for the full effect, but it's REALLY good.

There isn't enough space in one post for all my gushing, but mark my words you'll hear me gush about this again in the future.  Guess I didn't spoil anything after all, which is good, so now you can go play it if you haven't already! Get to it!