Review L.A Noire

Developed by Team Bondi, distributed by the recognised Rockstar Games and released in 2011, L.A Noire transport us to Los Angeles of 1947 where we will take the role of Cole Phelps officer of the LAPD (Los Angeles Police Department)  investigating a series of crimes while we unreveal a dark conspiration. The game is crearly a tribute to the noir genre of stories, with a plot full of mysteries and a dark and sordid ambientation. 

The main storyline of the game is divided in multiple chapters, each one of the dealing with a new crime with resolution is reached at the end of the chapter. At the same time, a bigger story arc develope in the background and as we reach the end of the game it will slowly take more importance until finally reaching an exciting climax. Each crime themselves are very interesting, full of twists and even some action sequences here and there, but focusing mainly on the dialogue between the characters. There are also a great number of sidestories wich are very short, but fun and help to take a breath and change the pace once in a while.

And one of the strong points is the dialogue which is not only well written, but it also is the core of the gameplay. The main objective of the game is to find the right solution of the crime and for that there are two main course of actions: finding evidences and interrogating. The last is the most important and is a masterful combination of graphics, story writting and gameplay. Thanks to an impressive game engine and state of the art facial motion capture technology, the characters of the game have an oustanding range of realistics emotions, full of little tics and subtle gestures and it will be the player duty to find out if someone is lying by examining the way the suspects act and the inconsistencies of their declaration. All of this leads to a very inmersive expirence, where the player has to actually solve the mistery by himself and as a side effect grab his attention to the plot.

While the story itself is very good, full of interesting characters and a intricate plot, it is not without is flaws. There are some dramatic actions taken by the protagonist that may come out of the blue and feel inconsistent, created by the lack of exposition by the writers. The climax feels a little bit rushed and the number of action sequences increment suddenly, letting the main atraction to the game, the mistery solving, a little more in the background at the end. The ending itself, while surprising, may leave the spectator unsatisfied and feels a little too sudden.

There are also some problems with the integration of the plot in the gameplay. While we have control over the investigation of the individual crimes and change some of the sequences, in the end the consequences for failing is a scold from our superior and lower points, while the plot overall is unaffected by this, although not learning the truth may be incentive enough for the player to try their best.

All of this shows that there is a clear tendency on imitating and recreating a movie or tv series and make them interactive. Although this per se is not bad, it do not take advantage of the unique capacities of videogames to tell a story, limiting greatly the range of choices the player can make and decreasing the significance of the choices he make.

Despite all of that, I really recommend this game. Not only is easy to play because it does not requires great skill of experience with a controller, Is also, by itself, a very interesting and unique noir story and videogame. The characters are well written and feel genuine, but with little nods to the classic characters archetype of classic noir. It may be a little short but completing all the side stories and getting the best result in each case help prolonging the life of the game. Sadly, by the nature of the game, it does not offer to much replayability value, atleast not more than a good thriller film may offer.

Storytelling punctuation: 6.75 out of 10. A very good  and interesting plot, but the integration with the gameplay could have been better, lack of consequences in our decisions.

Overall punctuation: 8 out of 10. The gameplay is good and easy, the graphics outstanding and the plot really interesting.

My favourite Place

My favourite place

My favourite place would be quiet, somewhere where you can rest anytime of the day. You will have quick access to all sort of facilities, but at the same time be able to go to natural places like big parks or even forest. The weather would be mostly wet and rainy and the sky woulb be of beautiful grey color, with the soothing shadows of the clouds being only broken sometimes by the weak warm lights of a lethargic sun. My work site would be close and from it's windows you could admire the relaxing surroundings.

The natural life will be of vast greens plains with some smalls forest of lush vegetation, with some smalls hills and even mountains. When it comes to the urban area, the building would be for the most part of medium size, taking as big size New York buildings and small size houses like bungalows, and they will stand out for their beautiful architecture, a mix between practicality and estetic. The roads would be wide and their layout simple and easy to remember.

The people living there would proceed from very differents cultures and backgrounds, but at the same time they wouldn't feel any strong nationalism nor they would let prejuices of any kind affect how they interact with others. There wouldn't be too much poblation, but neither too few. The teaching centers of this place would strongly encourange kids to be creative, to study and be good person, all in equal value, respecting all kind of beliefs and point of views but also encouranging rational discussion and reflexion.

Describe someone

The suited man

The strange suited man of cold eyes was sitting in the corner of the pub as always. Despite sporting such stranges and inappropiate clothes adn being so physical imposing, he seemed to never attracj any kind of attention. His icy blue eyes, always looking around the room as if he was searching for something. He smiled occasionally, always very slightly, enigmatic, without rhyme or reason, as if he had just remembered something funny. The few times he stood up and walked across the room he did it with elegant yet decesive steps, and when he spoke, his voice was deep, strong, it sounded like he was trying to be friendly, but  ended coming of more like somekind of threat, even when he was just asking for a glass of water.

Evolution of Storytelling. Part I

This will be the first of a series of posts in wich we will take a look through the differents generations of videoconsoles and how storytelling has been evolving together with the technology and techniques of videogame design. In this first post we go through the first, second and third generations.

The first generation.

Released in August 1972, the Magnavox Odissey (or just Odissey for short) was the first homeconsole to be realeased. It's graphics were extremely poor, only being able to do extremely basic shapes of white. To compensate for this, a plastic overlay was to be used on the screen to simulate the background the console could not render.

Magnavox Odissey

For the most part, storytelling was almost not existent. There were some brief texts in the manual of the games to set some background for the game and explain what those white squares are suposed to be, and the overlays aimed to create some kind of ambient and help imagine the scenario we were in.

The games were normally about sports, but there were some exceptions like Haunted House. Other videogames consoles would be realeased at the time, and the overabundace of games too similar between them will end causing the crash of the videogame market. It won't recover until the release of the Atari 2600, and the start of the second generation.

The second generation.

In September 1977, the Atari 2600 would be realease by the company of the same name, marking the start of the second generations of videogames. It was a very succesful videogame console, it has become an icon of videogame story and influenced next generations with it's used of microprocessor based hardware and ROM cartridges.

Atari 2600

It graphics were form of  simple shapes and colors used to represent both the scenary and the characters. This will mark the first time were a story could be told, even if extremely simple. A big part of the premise of the videogame was  told through the manual and others external material like tie-in comics. Once inside the game, the player had to use his imagination to both understand and place together the little bits of information given and form the plot.

The first adaptations videogames would appear, from Indiana Jones to Star Wars passing through Superman, comic, movies, television and all kind of media were the source of ideas for some games. For the most part, they limited themselves to reproduce the most emblematic moments of them.

Again, some bad decisions taken by Atari would end leading the videogame market to another crash.

The third generation.

The unknown at the time Nintendo released in 1983 the Family Computer or Famicon in Japan, and later distributed worldwide as the Nintendo Entertaiment System or as it is more commonly known now, NES. It marked the jump to 8-bit graphics, allowing the creators to make user bigger quantity of pixels letting them create more complex compositions and at the same times bigger worlds and more characters. This will be decesive for the born of multitude of games franchise and sagas that would change the digital media and which legacy will had dramatic effects on how storytelling evolves.

Later, the Sega Master System was released by Sega to compete against the NES, and although it had some success, it didn't reach the same level Nintendo did.

The Nintendo Entertaiment System (NES)

The most remarkable games of this generations when it comes to storytelling were:

Final Fantasy: A RPG (Role Playing Game) released
by Square in December 18 of 1987 and the first

of the long franchise . Althought there were some intervention of the narrator through the game, the story was told mostly through dialogue. Inspired greatly by tabletop roleplaying games, in particular Dungeons and Dragons, the game inmersed the player into a world of magic and fantasy, were four chosen heroes had to save the world. Although the premise was rather simple, the at the time unexpected twist of the plot and the complex world with multitude of characters and side stories were unseen before in videogames.

Metal Gear: Created by Hideo Kojima, Metal Gear
 marked the start of a saga most recognised for its

unique gameplay, innovatives ideas and rememorable plots and characters. What stand out of the first entry, Metal Gear, was it's intricrated plot, greatly influenced by action and spies movies of the time, we followed our main protagonist Snake rookie member of the special forces group FOXHOUND sent of his first mission, to rescue Gray Fox who infiltrated the terrorist base of Outer Heaven and aided through radio by his mentor and superior Big Boss. What make it most interesting is the combination of stealth gameplay, where the focus was on survival, and the story, make a whole between the two.

Metroid: A science fiction videogame characterized for
it's big world to explored, designed in a maze

like way in which the player had resolve both skill and mental challenges to progress. This in conjuction with it's graphic and sound design made a game where it's story didn't stand out for it's complexity or deep, but rather for it's ability to immerse the player. Even more remarkable was it's main character, Samus Aran. When the game was release little did the player know about Metroid's main character, apart from the iconic armor and being a mortal enemy of the Space pirates and the Metroids who murdered Samus' family. So when at the end of the game Samus toke out it's armor and revealed that, in fact, Samus was a woman, it was a shocking twist in a time were female character were exclusively the reward for the male main character. Samus would, despite controversy with the charater nowadays, become an icon of feminisn and equality in videogames for women.

The Legend of Zelda: A fantasy adventure game released by Nintendo, it became one of the most

recognised franchise of all time. The player took control of Link, a young boy who explore the vast kingdom of Hyrule to save princess Zelda from the hands of the monster Ganon. The world of the game was full of mistery and secrets and the player was given seamless freedom to explore it with little directions about were to go next. This led to an unique experience only found in videogames, where the player is led to create a personal experience with the game, becoming and explorer of the game's world lifting the shroud of mistery that uncovers it and creating his own story, thanks to the great level of interaction with it's setting and characters.

To be continue in the next part, Evolution of Storytelling, Part II.

What defines interactive storytelling ?

When we speak about interactive stories, we refer basically to all kind of narrative work in wich the spectator has somekind of input in the experience. Nowadays the most predominantly media in wich we can find such kind of narration are videogames, wich is the reason this blog focus on them.

The main characteristic of interactive stories is the control of the spectator over the experience. He can explore the world as he please, changing the flow of the narrative by choosing how to deal with what is presented to him and even leave the main narration suddenly just to come back as fast as he want. But more significant is the power of choice this kind of storytelling offers, sometimes letting the consumer to choose different options sets by the creator of the work, or even sometimes total new ones depending of the design of the same, changing how the plot develop or changing its world,

In return, this let the experience to be more personal, each person won't enjoy the story the same way, and even part of ourselves can, in a very curious way, be reflected in how we decide to affect the interactive work. How we deal with obstacles, what we decide to do, what we are best at and what we decide to focus on can be an impression of ourselves we leave in the world of the interactive story.

Other particularity of this kind of narrative is that, in contrast to other forms of storytelling, the size of the "world" of the story can be as big as the creator desires, because the player choose how fast he want to experience it and when it is going to end.

And yet, after all that has been said, the creator can limit the freedom of the spectator to such a degree that they cannot exit the main narrative nor explore at his heart content, or he can even force him to not stop the flow of the narration in any time. This unique freedom to create a story, limited mostly by the creator creativity and our current technology, cannot be found in any other form of storytelling.

To conclude this post, it has to be pointed out that one of the main traits of interactive storytelling is the significant levels of immersion it can offer, letting the spectator to make very peculiar bonds with the characters and the world they experience, and although the freedom of control can also means that the vision of the creator can be tharnised and his messaged ignored, is hard not to show some curiosity for such a peculiar way of telling stories, wich is still in a very young age.