L.A. Noire

Not played it long yet, finally finished downloading it this morning. It's ok, I've been tossed about a bit in the tutorial missions at the start, in that you don't go to the next mission, there has been a little cutscene and then you are at the start of the next mission. I think it's in the spirit of the detective TV shows of the time so I'm not too bothered not that there's really anything wrong with it anyway, just feels slightly disjointed. The controls on the keyboard are a little meh, it is a console port so thats not a shock that it's not great on the keyboard, I think I'll try using my controller.

Since it's a console port the graphic options are pretty limited, they just have preformance/balance/quality as the choices. AA only goes up to three I think, maybe four, one of the settings is three, which is just odd. The game looks ok, nothing breathtaking, the faces are good, the game is known for that so not a shock really.

Forgot about this until I started the game up just now: When I started the game for the first time this morning the Rock Star Social login screen was the first thing I saw, instead of the games menu. It was wanting me to login or make a new account, I could not be assed with remembering my login details but there was no clear option to skip the Social thing, after a bit of clicking I finally got around it (Didn't really take long) and after saying that I would need to make a default profile if I didn't sign into Rock Star Social it finally took me to the menu it should have taken me to in the first place. I'm really pretty angry about this, while you don't need an account and thank goodness for that! I'm angry that it popped up when I started the game and didn't have a clear option to skip it, they should have put it in the options when making a profile. I should have clicked on make a new profile and had it ask me if I would like a Rock Star Social profile or just use the default and for it to list the reasons why it would be best to use the Social profile. But instead I was almost left believing that I HAD to make a Social account just to play the game.

Thankfully that only happened when I started the game for the first time, it doesn't keep badgering me to make a RS Social account. But the game takes forever to start, it gets to a title screen and then takes ages synchronizing with something and checking for DLC. It's bloody irritating having to wait for something like that, why is it checking for DLC, I don't think it's checking what DLC I have, I think it's checking to see what DLC I don't have so it can advertise at me, I very much hate having to wait so long for the game to start for that reason, every single time.

Those things are negatives of the game, once you are in the game it's pretty good. I will say though that the investigation music was really grating on me just now, don't know if thats a fault with the game, might just be me.

Going back to the look/graphics of the game, I was thinking about the face animations and I got a image of the game just being a bunch of floating faces, moving around the game world but like they had bodies. Watching the faces is pretty interesting, and to some degree a little creepy, with some of the better looking faces it's like a real human face has been put on a robots body and the robot completely believes it's the human it stole the face from. It's like that but with a computer game character instead of a robot. Some of the heads look way too big sometimes as well.

I quite like the game though, it's very well done, I've avoided watching much about the game to not get drawn into the hype and also to experience how the game works for myself. It's a bit like Heavy Rain when you are doing the detective stuff, I doubt anyone here played Heavy Rain since it was PS3 exclusive, but you can trust me that it is. I pretty much suck at this game at the moment, quite a lot of that has come down to not knowing what my character will say when I click on options, it would be nice if there was a little bit of text just to give you an idea of what will be said, quite a few times I've picked an option and then said "WHOA WHOA WHOA, WHAT! NO THATS NOT WHAT I THOUGHT WAS GOING TO BE SAID!" (I didn't shout, to be more accurate I just thought "Balls"), and it caused me to mess up the questioning. You get a choice of Truth, Doubt and Lie, I've selected doubt a few times and he's been really agressive and accused people of being murderers, I was expecting his reaction to be more subtle, and simply doubt something thats been said and maybe probe a little more to get a better fix on if they are telling the truth or lying.

It really does make you think, more so I think after watching Sherlock, I'm like looking around for anything even for like little clues that this crime could be linked to a bigger crime in the future of the game, like all these small crimes are part of a bigger picture, like the colour of the paint on the picture frame in the bedroom of the victims sister, and the letters of that colour spell the name of the villains mother who is never spoken of in the game but her name is in his address book among a bunch of other family members who play no part in the story. I suppose it is making me think like a detective, and thats pretty cool.

Yeah there is something with the investigation music, the pitch of the sound is pretty unpleasant for me. I don't know if other people will have a problem with the sound, the radio at work has a high pitch sound and very few people seem to notice it, maybe I'm just a dog. I'm thinking of just muting the music, but I like the 1950's type music that you hear in the car.

I just googled to see if anyone else was having problems with the sound of it and nothing has come up. I suppose it could just be my tinnitus, my ears are ringing quite a lot at the moment, I think I'll have to mute the games music. I wrote that last bit of text with my eyes closed which is pretty weird, I don't look at the keyboard when I type as I'm sure is the case with most people but I've never tried doing it with my eyes closed before.

I just went onto the game and looked in the options, there are options for the investigation music, there's on and auto, but no off... auto I think means the music fades out when you've discovered all the clues in the area. There was also an option to turn off the chime when you get near to a clue, maybe thats part of the problems for my poor hearing (Poor as in "awww poor thing", not as in "What? Speak up sonny I can't hear you).

I haven't had a chance to test it yet when I actually started playing the game it was running like crap, some parts my car was moving in slow mo. I had no problems yesterday doing the same part, there's no way my pc isn't good enough to run this game with ease, and nothings running in the background, and I've had had Minecraft Edit trying to generate a 1 million by 1 million block world which uses a far bit of RAM while playing Skyrim and had no slow down so I don't think it would make much difference if there was.