L.A. Noire

Apparantly this game is not run on the GTA4 engine and it was originally a PS3 exclusive game until last year.

Also, all footages are from the PS3 version and none from the 360 version. If the 360 version produced better graphics/framerates, i am sure they would promote the 360 version more so then the ps3 version.

Also read below:

PS3 has an exclusive case, which is an additional ~hour worth of gameplay.

L.A. Noire was an PS3 exclusive till last year. Team Bondi is made up of ex-Sony Computer Entertainment Studio developers. All the videos so far was from the PS3
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in that case, it may be worth getting it on the ps3 instead
 
I believe it was only announced as a non-PS3 exclusive last year, but going back at least 2 years there were strong rumours that it was going to be multiformat just not announced.
 
i am skeptical about the "movie like" genre(i see no point in pressing a button to brush my teeth like in HR) and rockstar has a long history of personal disappointments (gta4 and rdd being the latest).

they tend to use stereotypical characters and average scripts.

Let's hope this time around the are gonna kick asses
 
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I thought everyone knew it used to be a PS3 exclusive? Team Bondi was formed out of The Getaway team at SCEE. They agreed to make a PS3 game for Sony way back in 2005. SCEE funded the operation but got annoyed when Brandon McNamara and his team took way too long to produce anything substantial. Thats when Rockstar walked in and decided to take over the project and make it multiplatform.

The agreement between Rockstar and SCEE was Rockstar would take over the game without having to pay SCEE back for all their wasted investment money. Instead of this Rockstar were to make a brand new PS3 exclusive franchise similar in tradition to GTA. That game became Agent, which we still havent seen. Hopefully it will be revealed at this years E3.
 
jaygrim said:
I was talking about installing them. Could you do that?
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If I remember correctly, you still have to swap disk. I think it's for piracy protection.
The 360 has to confirm you own the full game so it would be stupid if you could play disk 2 with disk 1 inside the console.
 
Next Tuesday a Rockstar Pass will be available to download for L.A. Noire on Xbox Live.

This Pass costs 800 Microsoft Points.

But what is it? There's no explanation given.

The name Rockstar Pass suggests an emulation of the EA Online Pass - a code that must be entered either to play multiplayer or download additional game content. In L.A. Noire's case, this is presumably the latter, as Rockstar will add more crime capers called Cases for players to download and solve.

We've put a query into Rockstar.

L.A. Noire arrives next Friday. It's a detective game spun from film noire inspiration, hence the name. The boast of L.A. Noire is an unprecedented approach to facial motion capture, whereby an actor's performance is mapped almost 1:1 into the final game. The impressive result is a necessity: readable expressions - can you spot the liar?
 
"facial motion capture, whereby an actor's performance is mapped almost 1:1 into the final game. The impressive result is a necessity: readable expressions - can you spot the liar?". Very, very looking forward to this :)
 
Does anybody have any idea about the game-play in this game? I haven't seen one video of it. Are the missions akin to the GTA style?

I know they've put a lot of work into the animations here but i don't get why as such. I know a lot of films with real facial animations but that doesn't stop a lot of films from being rubbish. For a video game it might have a good story but that doesn't mean much. I'm sure the story will still be somewhat riddled with cliche and frankly i don't even expect anything from or care about stories in games because i know this to usually be the case. If i want a good story with character development and great acting then i'll go watch a film, a classic, something like The Asphalt Jungle. This game seems to be taking itself pretty seriously, GTA took itself seriously and the story in that was tiresome. I watched the trailer on TV and didn't think the voice acting or dialogue sounded particularly interesting. Wendetta seems to have the same opinion as me regarding the story in that he doesn't understand the 'movie-like' approach.

That is why i opened up by asking about the gameplay because that's what i am interested in and i've heard zilch about that. I'm far from optimistic about video games ever really being able to astound us with original narratives, and i don't think following the Hollywood approach of narrative fiction, knowing how recycled that mostly is, is something that is a good idea. This game looks like it intends to do just that. Rather than over-expecting i'm doing the opposite i guess. Heavy Rain's gameplay bored me but i'll accept that it's narrative was alright. Nothing special or original though for a visual medium, just a cut above the rest.

At the end of the day is this game going to be held up as a technical marvel and be graded as such overlooking everything else. GTAIV certainly was.
 
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There are a few videos showing gameplay, but they haven't released a video showing some guy running around playing the game to show how well everything links up together, anyone who preorders will be considering it a bit of a gamble but with Rockstar you never get let down really, worst case I can resell my UK pre-order for more here anyways as 360 games in Sweden cost £50-£60 new.
 
O ok cool. just throwing that on the table as we should not get mislead by the fact that rockstar are the publishers. This game has no bearings on past GTA or Read dead games.

I think i will wait a few days after release and see what others think of this game. Could turn out to be a poor game. So far the videos and trailers i have seen makes the game look like a PS2 game if i am completely honest.

Off topic but do you still play Arma 2 Placebo?
 
I am glad i am not the only one who thinks this game looks "meh". poor texture.

I wish we had more old school great games like uncharted and batman.

i'll give it a rent for sure, but i can see myself getting bored easily going around interviewing people.
 
LA Noire video details stuff to do outside main story

IGN’s gone live with a video preview of LA Noire, detailing how events outside the game’s main story works. You’ll be free to roam Los Angeles, with 40 unassigned cases around LA that you’ll be able to attend to. Ongoing robberies, gunfights, car chases and more are all part of the CV. You can get the video below. LA Noire launches next week for PS3 and 360.

YouTube - LA Noire: Side Quests Exclusive

I'm too old to get videos to work.
 
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Guardian review is up :

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
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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
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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
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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.

Score: 5/5
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