Alex and I worked together to finish L.A. Noire, a story about an officer named Cole Phelps who worked his way up the rankings from a patrol officer to working the vice beat as a detective. It's a riveting plot that brings you to the heights of elation only to make you crash to the bottom even harder.

The only major problem with the game is interviewing. The usual routine is to gather evidence as much as possible and then talk to witnesses, associates, or suspects. The interviewee would make a statement and the player as an option to think they're telling the truth, to doubt them (which in reality is just pressing harder for information), or they're lying. There's only one right answer out of the three, and messing up could change the outcome of the case. Rockstar touted new technology for this game called "MotionScan," which captured several actors' faces and replicated them realistically. That way the player could read a person's facial expression, eye movements, or body language to tell if they're telling the truth or not. Alex and I found this to be helpful some of the time. The problem is we don't know what their natural state looks like, so when someone is somewhat stoic, we could see that there were some clues that they perhaps were lying, but that could just be the natural movement of the body as it sits there.

Choosing the lying option was particularly problematic. At that point you have to present evidence to prove their false statement, but we never were certain whether we were choosing the right one. Normally the suspect would say something, we'd say "lie," there would be some dialogue, and then we would be very confused. Let me give an example:

Suspect: No, I wasn't there on Thursday.
Player: (choose "lie")
Phelps: I think you were. You're on the Jewish mafia's payroll.
Suspect: Oh yeah? Prove it.

And then Alex and I are like, "?????????? Do we show evidence that he was there or show evidence he's connected to the Jewish mafia?" The setup with these interviews are difficult because many times they either would do shit like this with multiple aspects so we're not certain what option the game is looking for or they would make such vague statements that weren't really factual enough for us to say anything either way. And even if we knew he was lying, we had several pieces of evidence proving that so it was just a guessing game as to which was the right one. Instead of just going with logic, we have to try to figure out the game designers' logic.

Writing overall was quite good, but there were a couple of misses. One memorable moment was when we conveniently happened to find a film reel of every single villain in the game openly talking about their plot. It was so excessive that it just blasted me out of the suspended reality.

Rockstar probably realized the premise doesn't really have any action outside of the end of each case, and even then the guy you capture may not even try to fight or flee. So to avoid disappointing people coming from Grand Theft Auto or Red Dead Redemption, they made people really willing to fight the cops, even to the point of ridiculousness. Innocent people would think it's a good time to punch Phelps in the face. Or in between traveling to locations, we'd get a dispatch and four out of five times it'd be a crazy, brazen shootout, making Los Angeles the most violent city in America in 1947.

Even with these gripes, I'd still heartily recommend L.A. Noire. It's interesting to follow Phelps' career, learn about his past, and find out how it all ties together. There are many interesting characters, especially your partners, and the dialogue is serious yet hilarious. Play it if you've got time.