Day#9 and I think I’m flipping the idiot switch on this game. The core mechanics are just starting to get on my nerves. The searching is just annoying pixel-hunting and the interview game is just impenetrable at times. I cannot stand how opaque and misleading this mechanic can be. The set pieces here are not fun at all. The change in cases is just not alleviating the repetitiveness and drudgery of this game, and the narrative (and in this session, the secondary character acting) just is not good enough to make it worth it to suffer through. I’m still here, but I’m not sure why anymore. Spoilers within.

Day#8 of LA Noire and I finally get out of the grind of the same case over and over. A section of the game ends with a mixed attempt at a clever outcome. There are some good ideas and the core premise is good, but there are all these new objectives and none of them are explained. You can imagine how fun it to be thrown without warning into something that kills you for no discernible reason twenty seconds later. The narrative is similar: some interesting settings and ideas, but just not well grounded in the rest of the game’s story. It’s a mixed bag, but at least I don’t have to deal with the seventh version of the same case. Spoilers within.

Day#7 and I have to say that the game is starting to get old for me. The story is dragging a bit now. Clearly there’s something going on, but the game is just dragging it out. I have a pretty good idea where it’s going, so I want it to move already. And the gameplay is totally redundant now. The interview is too opaque, and I feel like I need to use tons of hints to feel confident about victory. The clue searching in houses and crime scenes has become click through boring. This game better start firing some bells and whistles soon, because despite some strengths, it’s getting old fast. And when murder cases are getting old, your game is going off the rails in a BAD way. Spoilers within.

Long time away between conferences and post-conference work catch-up, but here’s my next day with LA Noire. It’s getting a bit routine frankly. It’s another murder case, and it’s more of the same in terms of things to do. The narrative isn’t bad, but the gameplay is getting quite redundant between the evidence search and the interrogations. It’s interesting enough to keep me going, but I really hope the game twists things up a bit soon. Oh, and not abusing women anymore would help too.

One more case and it’s another ugly murder. Again, it’s a disturbing case that I’m not sure I like to play through. The case itself is pretty good, but there is a MASSIVE bug I hit right at the end, and it turns out that LA Noire follows the craptastic tradition of Rockstar games in having the most awful save point structure in the medium. Side quests continue to shine with really varied and interesting content. The overall narrative stays solid with some nice characters and good sense of a social world. Spoilers within.

One big case dominates this session, and it’s a pretty good one. The rhythm of the cases is quite nice. It’s pretty straightforward, but it’s doing a nice job making me feel like a cop. The case on the other hand is right on the border of being too gross for my taste. I mean, it’s a crime story and there are nasty crimes in the world, but I’m not sure it’s the right tact for the game to give me something so raw. Not sure. I also do MUCH better this time at all of the investigation bits, and there’s some nice track laying going on in terms of the relationships of the cops, so maybe I’ve been too hard on LA Noire so far. Spoilers within.

This was a shorter session for me. I basically did one story mission and a couple of street ones. Frankly, I’m getting more and more frustrated with the mechanics of this game. The interrogation does not have a logic I can find, and picking facts to go with lies seems like a straight-up crap shot to me at times. And there is an absolutely pitiful stealth scene. Rockstar games are not meant for stealth play. Still, the story is told well and that is going miles for me in terms of keeping my interest. Spoilers within.

In my second day with LA Noire, I dive into the real gameplay of driving around the city doing my cop thing. It’s still pretty good. The game is just brimming with content. All of the side missions are cutscene equipped short stories, and the missions themselves are multilayered and trying to do something interesting. The mechanics stay mediocre. The interrogation mechanic is still too hard to read and thus is always more guess work than you want, the evidence finding is just too finicky, and the driving is the standard GTA frustration. I’m having fun so far, but jury’s out for me on whether this game is genuinely great yet. Spoilers within.

We’re in a period of extreme narrative experimentation in games, and LA Noire is the next big stab at the frontier.  There has been tons of expectation and hype around this game and its potential. I guess when you throw the ball at noire films, you are raising the stakes to something huge. So how is it holding up in its first day? On the one hand, this is an unprecedented step towards maturity for Rockstar. The game is very serious about the narrative it’s telling, and there is a care shown to maintaining a tone that is both sophisticated and true to an old fictional LA. On the other hand, it’s a Rockstar game. The faces are better, but it’s still Rockstar models. All of the mission structure and core mechanics are totally familiar to other Rockstar games, and have all of the same problems they have in the past. The new mechanics of interrogation don’t fare that much better. But the pure quality in the story is more than enough to make the first session fun. Spoilers within.