I have waited a long time for LA Noire to come out on PC. I got it on the steam sale and have been very happy with the evocative 40s setting and character development.

My one critique is that the firefights are too plentiful and too, well, frivolous. The game emphasizes that your character is a combat vet, and other characters comment when he is not eager to engage in a firefight. There are references to veterans' problems after the war such as addiction and unemployment. So the narrative of the game would have been much tighter if there had been less firefights, and they were grittier and more realisitic. How can we take the character's unwillingness to talk about the war seriously when he kills dozens of men a day as a cop and regenerates from bullet wounds?

Instead they should have had the shootouts be more climactic, the dramatic end of a case. The injury decals could stay on your character and he wouldn't regenerate from wounds. The weapons would be deadly and the battles would require tactics. And it could be assumed that time passes before the next case so that could explain why your character has recovered from his injuries in time for the next level. Maybe your character gets the historically appropriate LAPD medal for being wounded in the line of duty.

Some of the firefights that just came up in the "street crime" missions were so extreme that they dwarf the real Hollywood shootout. How can they dwarf a historical shootout and yet no one comments on them in-game?

If we consider World War 2 in the Pacific, there is so much harrowing material available historically. Look at casualty statistics. Look at assaulting fortified islands. Look at the bushido ethic of Japanese forces. There is so much there the game could have used for a strong narrative treating violence and veterans' issues seriously and realistically.

Yeah. But you have to feed the Max Payne and FPS crowd to get the sales up enough to warrant what the rest of the game is. You and I would have loved a game like that, but I come from the days of Text-Based Gaming... I'd be happy with a Command Line and a Story!

Hell, even having Cole go more in depth to the Japanese's reason for engaging the US in WWII would have been nice as well.

In addition, the Homicide Desk seemed... Tacked on. The rest of the desks connect together, but Homicide seems like they just wanted to add in Hollywood's "Jack The Ripper".

The Street Crime... I have no idea why those were included at all, to be honest.

It's a good game, and a direction I want game developers to go in (Story-driven as opposed to action), but it seems like they tried to balance the two and didn't quite make it.

I snagged LA Noire the other day when Steam had it at half price, but haven't installed it yet, mostly due to preoccupation with Arkham City. How well does the whole "reading characters' faces" thing work? They made a big noise about that; are the faces actually animated well enough that you can read them like a person?

There are obvious facial expressions that clue you in when someone is lying. It is much easier than in real life, but beautifully done technically.

I had some difficulty getting LA Noire to run (in which I am not alone, judging by the Steam users' forum), but prevailed in the end. I'm not far along, just made detective, but so far my overall impression is very positive. Interviewing witnesses and suspects has been hit-or-miss for me, but maybe I'll get better at it as I go along.

Just made it to the Homicide desk, and just found out that Team Bondi went under not long ago. I really hope Rockstar can find another developer to continue the franchise, because I'm really enjoying L.A. Noire. It's been a long time since a game posed this kind of cerebral challenge for me, and I like it.

Yeah, Team Bondi did the "The flogging will continue until the game is done" bit far more than most game developers at Crunch Time, rather than pushing back the release date, and, um, the Government took offense. As I understand it, at least.

Yeah, that's the impression I get. I think it's a real shame, because there's so much possibility for a great franchise here. You can stick with the "film noir" conceit, be the anti-Grand Theft Auto and put out games set in different cities (Chicago Noire, New York Noire); you can branch out into different eras and fields of law enforcement (raiding speakeasies and fighting gangsters in Prohibition-era Chicago, chasing cocaine runners in 1980s Miami, chasing serial killers as an FBI profiler)... the basic gameplay can be adapted to tell so many different stories. Advancing through different eras would be a good way to expand and deepen the game, as well: more sophisticated policing techniques, better tools for analyzing evidence.

Think about a Harry Dresden mod! Though I guess lately he's less investigating and more..uh, well I won't say in case someone isn't up to date.

Alright, Zombie T-Rex Riding to a crime scene!!!

Ego dominant bastard didn't think his staff deserved pay for overtime worked. It burns me up!

I just couldn't get into it, I played through the second set of cases or so and kept waiting for the game to really hook me, it never really did. At the risk of bieng too harsh on it it's an adventure game with some rather uninspired pistol and chase sequences. That and like every rockstar game it relies too heavily on scripted chase sequences where the bad guy runs faster then you until your ordained to catch him. Just once I wanted to make good on the thread of "Stop or i'll shoot."

I did the "Stop or I'll shoot" a number of times.

Agreed. The shoot outs and chases were pretty unoriginal. It pained me to see a lot of innovation in the interrogation department but then utterly forgettable firefights making up nearly half the game.