Zero Punctuation: L.A. Noire

WanderingFool

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MB202 said:
WanderingFool said:
I cant help but feel that Yahtzee will never find a game he loves... besides Saints Row 2...
What about Portal? What about Silent Hill 2? What about Prince of Persia: Sands of Time? What about Shadow of the Colossus, Batman: Arkham Asylum, BioShock, Psychonauts, Painkiller, Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, Thief: The Dark Project, or Fallout 3?

...Granted, most of those are games he grudgingly admitted to liking, but still, they're pretty much on the same level as Saints Row 2.
While I knew there were more games... fuck em. SAINT ROW 2!!! Also, HE actually liked COD4 and FO3? I need to watch those videos again...
 

Avistew

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SandroTheMaster said:
I studied linguistics and have a good grasp of french, so yeah, this makes sense. Except for the fact that "Los Angeles" translates (from spanish, in french there's no "los", but "les") to "The Angels" in the male genre so basically the title only works as a play on words but not at all on a grammatical sense.
If it was supposed to make grammatical sense, as in "the black angels" or something, "noire" would be in plural anyways, since with Latin languages adjectives don't only agree in gender but in number as well.

Falseprophet said:
I think Los Angeles/L.A. is feminine, as are all cities in the French language, IIRC.
It depends. It's certainly correct to use feminine for cities it the subject is "the city of" since the word "city" is feminine, then again it's usually correct to use masculine as well if the subject is the name of the city itself.
This page [http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Los_Angeles] for instance about the Greater Los Angeles Area calls it "Le Grand Los Angeles", and "grand" is masculine.
 

frans909

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Derelict Frog said:
I think you're missing the point. Mr Croshaw never said any of those things.
If I wanted to repeat his exact words, I'd just post a link to the video.
 

Shamanic Rhythm

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I'm roughly halfway through this game, and while I really like what they're trying to do with it and I enjoy a breath of originality amidst a billion cover based shooters, the gameplay can, as Russ Pitts put it in his review, frequently piss me right the fuck off. It's the worst kind of annoyance because you can see the potential, but it never quite reaches it.

I couldn't really care less about the shooting and driving mechanics; I'm prepared to suffer through their vagrancies if I can get to some serious detective work. But the clue gathering mechanic and the interviews, which should be the meat and bones of the game, are seriously underwhelming. You find so much evidence that you never.ever.use, and once you realise that only a magic handful of the supposed 'clues' are going to come up in interviews, you stop paying attention to their particular nuances and just let the game hold your hand the whole way. And the interviewing - oh, the interviewing. I agree with everything Yahtzee has said here, but moreover, I'd like to add that the truth/doubt/lie system is completely wasted in this game because it's either piss easy or ridiculously hard. And we're not talking hard because you run into any super-skilled actors, it's hard because you sit there trying to figure out what kind of logic was running through the writer's head when they penned this script.

Honestly, half the time you're not trying to figure out whether what the person has said is true or not: you're trying to figure out which way they programmed Cole to get the information. Sometimes he will use 'truth' to get more information out of people in the exact same manner as he uses 'doubt'. Sometimes he'll completely change his bloody question during 'lie', which leaves me wondering 'am I saying their response to the first question is a lie, or the second one?' And the choice of evidence you use to prove them wrong is sometimes ridiculous. For example: Cole asks a guy if anyone would want to harm his wife. He says no. I went through doubt and truth and both times got them wrong, so I reloaded and hit lie. Suddenly Cole is accusing him of using rope from his boat to strangle her. What.The.Hell. Completely different question! At no point have you come across any motive for the husband to kill her, much less have any evidence to support that motive.

It's such a shame, because otherwise this could be one of the best games I have ever played.
 

Nabirius

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I find it amusing that he essentially wanted the final boss of this game to be more like a Phoenix Wright boss.
 

Marik Bentusi

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Flamethrowers? Really?

I heard this game had some substantial flaws, but ultimately succeeded in what it wanted to do. Apparently every reviewer agreed however that shootings and cars were pretty much unnecessary, but it's the first time I heard about it ripping off L.A. Confidential. So much for the plot I guess, but apparently the interrogations were fun mostly.
(Not like I could get it if I wanted without any consoles aside from my GBC)

I wonder if there will be a sequel or spiritual successor without the shooting and driving that apparently was just forced onto it.
 

gphjr14

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I'll probably pick this up later on when its cheaper, I'm interested in the concept but the whole ending sounds kind of lame.
 

MB202

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WanderingFool said:
MB202 said:
WanderingFool said:
I cant help but feel that Yahtzee will never find a game he loves... besides Saints Row 2...
What about Portal? What about Silent Hill 2? What about Prince of Persia: Sands of Time? What about Shadow of the Colossus, Batman: Arkham Asylum, BioShock, Psychonauts, Painkiller, Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, Thief: The Dark Project, or Fallout 3?

...Granted, most of those are games he grudgingly admitted to liking, but still, they're pretty much on the same level as Saints Row 2.
While I knew there were more games... fuck em. SAINT ROW 2!!! Also, HE actually liked COD4 and FO3? I need to watch those videos again...
To quote from his COD4 review:

"It deserves the praise it gets... mostly."

And

"There are two kinds of games: games that I've stopped playing because I've been bored or frustrated to a state of rigor mortis, and games that I've stopped playing because I noticed I should of had dinner two hours ago, and Call of Duty 4 is in the latter category."

To quote his FO3 review:

"...Yeah it's alright, I guess."

Basically, you need to actually pay attention to what he's saying and look beyond the mountains of complaints.
 

DanDeFool

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Aug 19, 2009
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Now I just know I'm going to insult someone by calling them a "discarded fag package", in spite of the fact that I live in one of those countries where 'fag' hasn't meant 'cigarette' in at least fifty years.
 

Sylveria

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This is one of those games that you'll get the same experience by watching someone else play it while occasionally tossing on Gears of War. There's really no reason to buy it. Irony of it is Take Two realized this also and did their best to shut down streams of L.A. Noire for the first day or two. Never a good sign when even the studio realizes that letting people watch the game completely negates the need to actually purchase it.

This should have been a budget title but instead they pumped too much money into the facial expression stuff and ultimately ended up with a $60 Police Quest 360.
 

ACman

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Apr 21, 2011
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SandroTheMaster said:
Nautical Honors Society said:
Uh spoiler alert? Thanks...

Anyway decent review it seems like you actually really liked it.

By the way Noire is spelt with an "e" for the game because it is play on words. "Noire" is the feminine form of "noir", so it's supposed to be like La Noire and L.A. Noire.
Beaten to the punch.

I studied linguistics and have a good grasp of french, so yeah, this makes sense. Except for the fact tha "Los Angeles" translates (from spanish, in french there's no "los", but "les") to "The Angels" in the male genre so basically the title only works as a play on words but not at all on a grammatical sense. It probably relied on an American audience ignorance on french or maybe it is just true that it was originally a misspell they liked to keep.
It's actually a noun referring to the film noir style. Technically this would not have an 'e' on the end but who's quibbling.

OT: So in summation an interesting game mechanic let down by inconsistent dialog selection, a dull sand-box, and ridiculous ending sequence....

I haven't played it so...
 

Sabinfrost

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Mar 2, 2011
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Brilliant. Personally I loved it as I miss the days of Monkey Island. It wasn't completely faithful to those days but I don't hate cover based shooting.

One thing I do want to make clear is that the whole body thing was because of 1. how long the game was and 2. heads took lots of processing power.

Basically, you want it to be as realistic as the head all over, tell Sony to hurry up and make the PS3. Team Bondi did a phenomenal job working with the resources they had, just saying.
 

Sabinfrost

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Mar 2, 2011
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Marik Bentusi said:
Flamethrowers? Really?

I heard this game had some substantial flaws, but ultimately succeeded in what it wanted to do. Apparently every reviewer agreed however that shootings and cars were pretty much unnecessary, but it's the first time I heard about it ripping off L.A. Confidential. So much for the plot I guess, but apparently the interrogations were fun mostly.
(Not like I could get it if I wanted without any consoles aside from my GBC)

I wonder if there will be a sequel or spiritual successor without the shooting and driving that apparently was just forced onto it.
Take everything Yahtzee says with a grain of salt. Like L.A Confidential it is faithful to the Noire period of film, the plot is not a rip off it just adheres to a particular style of story telling and actual events of the period. For the most part....
 

jpoon

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Mar 26, 2009
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Spot fucking on ZP, once again. This game just wasn't all that great, regardless of how most people rave on about it. Nice facial animations but meh, that just doesn't do it for me.