L.A. Noire

The best street crime is either that one with the pervert and a camera or the one with a severely disturbed mental patient.

Is that creepy surgeon from scrubs/Cougar Town important?

He shows up as a drunk in almost every case and he got shot in one street crime but I don't know why he keeps appearing.

EDIT: I mean this guy.

edited 8th Jul '12 4:44:12 AM by ShadowScythe

Speeking of street crimes, are they specific to certain cases?

Well once you beat a certain desk you get free roam, so I assume street crimes are specific to Traffic, Homicide, etc.

So I just finished the Traffic desk (including the DLC missions) and I'm really enjoying this so far. Even with the command line the game is a bit choppy and the controls feel stiff but its still pretty solid. The atmosphere and characterization are great and the game does credit to the time period and the Noir films.

I also discovered that I'm pretty good at questioning people and reading them; enough that I got 4 and 5 stars on most cases. I'm sure the difficulty will pick up soon though.

edited 8th Jul '12 9:13:05 AM by Rationalinsanity

Reading the faces, understanding their motives, and deducting who did what is typically easy enough. The problem lies with the system they chose for you to figure out the truth. Either you choose Truth, Lie, or Doubt, and hope that's what the game designers planned for you to do or else you'll screw up the questioning.

Later during the game you'll run into a ton of situations where you can likely deduct what the plot is and figure out what might be an excellent piece of evidence to use during an interrogation, only to find out that the writers believed you couldn't have figured that out yet or that it makes poor evidence. It got annoying enough to the point that I just started to using Game FA Qs to help me answer the interrogation sequences around the time the Vice Cases started.

edited 8th Jul '12 11:01:36 PM by SgtRicko

It hasn't been that hard for me, so far.

So does Captain Donnely remind anyone else of the chief from LA Confidential?

How much damage is allowed before it impacts your final rating? Because I just completed The Golden Butterfly with 5 stars despite doing 1200$ in damage; probably when I hit a civilian full on and he caught fire.

I rack up way too much vehicular damage for my liking...ruined my perfect record with a 4 star rating >=(

I think I racked up around $1200 that time + 1 wrong question.

edited 9th Jul '12 5:39:29 PM by ShadowScythe

You can get your assistant to drive for you. Hold down E when you get into the car.

I know...I just like doing street crimes to give me more intuition.

So my only beef with the game so far is the lack of any manual saving whatsoever. I mean... why? It makes no sense.

Eventually, watching the eyes will blatantly lead you astray, so continuing to gauge from their eyes whether or not they're lying is a good way to screw up eventually, though there are still some suspects who will make some very obvious guilty gestures.

In later cases I've found that the best way to call someone out on a lie is to either use common sense to realize that what they're saying doesn't make sense in some way, or to know enough of the situation to know that what they're saying isn't true. Use the facts, man.

Also, it's important to remember the distinction:

• Truth: Simple enough, though there's occasionally situations where the suspect thinks they're telling the truth despite you knowing it's not the case and/or generally lying and telling the truth about one very specific fact, which though usually under Doubt can sometimes be under Truth.
• Lie: Calling the suspect out on something specific. If you pick lie Cole will occasionally accuse the suspect of something you didn't expect, which may either be a clue to think of the case in a different way or that it isn't Lie at all.
• Doubt: Calling the suspect out on lying itself. For situations where you know they're not telling the truth but don't have anything specific to call them out on. It's also usually in cases where suspects are unsure, or aren't telling you something they don't think is important. It's... sometimes weird.

I'm a perfectionist so I tried to get 100% (minus newspapers in cases where I just couldn't find them) on every case before I moved on to the next one.

As for the game itself, I'd definitely give it a 4/5 - my main complaints are that it creates an open world but doesn't use it. Free Ride is a pointless joke, the street crimes are generally glorified cinematics, the bonus cars are downright useless as your police car is far more necessary, and you find that you can't really do anything outside of the cases in the first place.

But the cases were brilliant, with a great interface, lots of immersion and a great use of environment for things like clues and suspects. I've always wanted a detective game like this, and this is a great start - my dream is to see one of these where the whole city is dynamic, such that real cases can trigger outside the main gameplay, maybe even randomly generated. Well, my idea's a bit more complicated than that, but... eh.

edited 10th Jul '12 5:18:07 AM by KnownUnknown

I finally finished LA Noire.

I actually really enjoyed it, an interesting Adventure game that, gameplaywise, reminded me a lot of Phoenix Wright which is always a good thing.

I really enjoyed the stories in each case and the overarching storyline had serious Chinatown vibes I guess I shouldn't have been surprised then that the ending was something of a downer.

I know Team Bondi was a pretty horrible place to work at but it'd be a shame if we didn't get some kind of sequel (direct or spiritual with the same overall gameplay) that put further emphasis on the adventure game aspects with better designed puzzles etc.

I was honestly pretty satisfied with it.

Meanwhile, I just managed to finish a case (The Set Up) with one. God. Damn. Star.

I am so good at video games.

And im guessing it was because of all the collateral from the shootouts as well as all the wrong guesses during the interrogations, isn't it?

I think it was actually because some people I could have saved died, in addition to what you said.

I got the feeling that the designers deliberately wanted you to screw up badly in that case and feel lost, hence the lack of choices and almost no hints on what to choose. For example, when interrogating your former war buddies you have virtually no evidence to use against them, so it's either Doubt or Truth. Yet if you were to use the Intuition point to remove one of the choices it keeps removing the Lie option. And despite the fact that they're lying about almost everything, the game seems to constantly mix it between Truth and Doubt when it doesn't make sense.

edited 16th Jul '12 11:30:40 PM by SgtRicko

The Set Up is the one with the Boxer. You might be thinking of Manifest Destiny.

Wait, what? I don't remeber meeting any of my former war buddies in that case...

Just completed the Homicide Desk... had to skip an action sequence for the first time. That stupid chandelier had some of the least responsive and consistent controls I've seen in a while; even for a game this stiff.

Well, my brother wanted to pick this up on Steam due to a sale. So we did.

That was at 2 in the morning. It's 1:30 in the afternoon right now and he still doesn't want to wake up.

No wait, he just got up!

edited 19th Jul '12 10:36:47 AM by VutherA

Just finished the traffic desk recently and, my god, this game has great atmosphere.

Wait until you see the crime scenes in the Vice cases and the Nicholson Electroplating DLC, they've got some large areas to investigate and quite a few well-hidden clues.

http://www.avclub.com/articles/tnt-realizes-people-will-never-stop-confusing-fran,91690/

Link's broken.