L.A. Noire

My feelings towards Rockstar Games are pretty neutral. I have great respect for them for making open-world games what they are today, and for improving their games with each new title. However, they've given plenty of ammo to politicians, pundits, parents and preachers that overlook the artistic merit and educational value that video games can have. ("Hot Coffee" anyone?) Of course, most of this stuff could solely apply to Rockstar's signature franchise, Grand Theft Auto. But if you were expecting L.A. Noire to be anything like the glorified crime frenzy that you'd expect from a GTA title (or a Red Dead title for that matter) you are sorely mistaken.

L.A. Noire is a detective game. Sure, you have an open-world with a control scheme similar to GTA, but that's about as far as it goes. Almost all of the focus is on the main story of the game. You play as Cole Phelps, a haunted war hero and newly promoted ace detective in the 1947 LAPD. You're given different cases to solve and different departments to serve in. The process is kind of repetitive: visit crime scenes, gather clues, and interview suspects and witnesses.

The interviews are probably the best thing about this game. You'll ask people questions and will have to determine whether they're telling the truth. And if you can't prove they're lying, but their body language says they are, you can give them doubt. This encourages you to pay attention during interviews and keeps the gameplay from getting dull over time, especially because the lies get progressively harder to read.

You can gain experience points by finding clues and getting correct answers in interviews. Every time you gain a level, you'll be rewarded with an intuition point. These points can be used to either eliminate an answer in an interview, or reveal the locations of all the clues at a crime scene.

Probably the biggest contrast L.A. Noire has to GTA is that you're not encouraged to do whatever you want. Since your character is an honest cop, you're supposed to focus on solving the case rather than wreaking havoc on the city. There isn't even any real reason to wander around, despite the game's massive size. That is, unless you're obsessed with hidden collectables. You also can't use guns unless you're chasing someone or caught in a firefight.

The only other distraction available is street crimes, which are side quests you can take while on a case. When your police radio goes off, you can volunteer to handle situations that almost always involve chasing or shooting someone. It's a nice way to gain extra experience points, but the crimes often happen on the other side of the map. So if you want to go after a street crime before reaching your next destination, you'll have to go way out of your way to do so. Since this is a game set in the 1940's, a time before cell phones, this was probably the only way Rockstar could replace that annoying minigame from GTA where your friends would want to hang out with you so they'll still like you.

The visuals of this game are fantastic. Like Heavy Rain and James Cameron's Avatar, the faces of the characters were portrayed by real actors in front of video cameras. This allows the facial features and expressions of the game characters to be much more detailed and realistic, and is especially rewarding during interviews.

There's also a good amount of replay value to L.A. Noire. Similar to Heavy Rain, the decisions you make can affect how the plot unfolds. Thankfully, the game allows you to replay cases. This is also great for those of you who have to have 1,000 Gamerscore in every game you play.

Bottom line: L.A. Noire isn't perfect, but it's definitely worth a rent in the very least. As long as you can handle a game that focuses more on story than freedom, I think you'll be quite pleased.

Available for Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. Rated M for Mature. Published by Rockstar Games. Developed by Rockstar Games and Team Bondi.

Image provided courtesy of Wikipedia.org.

Review of Fallout: New Vegas DLC: Honest Hearts

With their recent track record, Bethesda Softworks is becoming one of the most trusted companies in producing quality video games. How do make that claim? Look at what they've done since 2006. Oblivion, Fallout 3, plus several promising games for the coming year.

This brings me to a Bethesda produced (but not developed) title that ate up most of my spare time last fall: Fallout: New Vegas. While it wasn't as great as it's predecessor, New Vegas still gave the addictive, enjoyable experience only a Fallout title can bring. And it looks like fans will receive plenty of encouragement to continue playing with all of the downloads this summer. In case you haven't heard, Bethesda recently announced three...that's right, three New Vegas DLC's for the month of May, June and July 2011. So let's dive right into Honest Hearts.

Honest Hearts takes place in Zion national park, which is located in Utah. (If you've never been, you should check it out. It's gorgeous.) You'll receive a radio signal at the beginning of the DLC that invites anyone willing to work for a caravan company. Once your caravan reaches Zion, they're ambushed by the vicious White Legs tribe. As the only survivor of the attack, you're taken in by the Dead Horses tribe, led by the Burned Man.

If you've played through New Vegas' main game you'd know that the Burned Man is the former general of Caesar's Legion. After he failed to take Hoover Dam from the NCR, Caesar had him burned alive and thrown into the Grand Canyon. Yet only in something as absurd as a video game could the Burned Man somehow survive that fall and make it to Zion. Anyway, the Burned man recruits you into his fight to save Zion from the White Legs.

Along the way you'll have a couple different companions, including a cliche "Indian companion" with an accent so offensive that every time I hear it it makes me think to myself, "We stole their land." There's also a few new weapons to pick up, some new achievements to unlock, and the level cap has been raised to 40. However, you won't be able to begin this adventure until lighten your load to 75 or 100 pounds (depending whether you have the Strong Back perk), and you'll also have leave your regular companions behind.

The missions themselves are honestly kind of boring. It's about seven hours of pretty straight forward kill this guy, find this thing and bring it back, blah blah blah. And I don't know about you, but these DLCs feel less interesting when all of our stuff is still with us. What I liked about Dead Money, as well as a few of the DLCs from Fallout 3, was that all of our gear was taken from us and we were given new gear. This gave players the chance to challenge themselves and try to play the game a bit differently. It became more about survival and less about slowly becoming a walking tank.

Probably the biggest improvement Honest Hearts has following Dead Money is that, once you finish the main story, you can actually come and go as you choose. One of the most frustrating things about Dead Money was that you couldn't go back to the Sierra Casino once you left. Thankfully, that's not the case this time around. Also, there's a lot more plants to harvest in Zion than in the Mojave Wasteland, but that might just be because Obsidian Entertainment wanted to encourage you to make lots of healing powder at campfires because it fits no nicely with the Indiansploitaton (did I just make up a word?) theme of the DLC.

The level design is also pretty nice. The scenery is beautiful, and (like the main game) it kind of made me want to revisit the place it's based off of. Zion is somewhat depicted as a maze, with lots of different elevations to shoot people from.

I was also a bit disappointed about how the Burned Man character was handled. Like Father Elijah in the previous DLC, the Burned Man was the mysterious central character of Honest Hearts. However, he seemed a little too mysterious. And the way the developers tried to indirectly portray him as a vengeful Christian (kind of like a wannabe Boondock Saint) made me a bit uneasy when he talked about how he was serving as a "missionary" to the Dead Horse tribe.

I'd say that if you enjoyed playing Fallout: New Vegas and need excuses to keep it up, go ahead and download Honest Hearts for $10 through the XBL Marketplace, PSN Store or Steam. However, I'd advise you to keep your expectations low, because with the quality of the story and missions, it probably could have been a bit cheaper. Here's hoping next month's DLC will be better.

Rated M for Mature. Produced by Bethesda Softworks, developed by Obsidian Entertainment.

Image provided courtesy of JeuxVideo.com.