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 In 2011, Rockstar Games published an ambitious little title called L.A. Noire. L.A. Noire was the baby of an Australian company named Team Bondi, and its main draw was a technology called MotionScan, which uses a 32-camera array similar to the ones used by The Matrix to create a detailed three-dimensional picture of an actor's face--you might say it's a sort of three-dimensional rotoscoping. Thanks to this technology, the game has by far the best facial detail of any title in the 360/PS3 generation, though it can still look awkward at times when it uses a transform effect to transition between frames, plus the face model tends to have more details than polygons. Unfortunately (at least according to what little information has reached the public ear), Team Bondi was not exactly a well-oiled machine of a company, to the point where Rockstar had to interfere quite a bit in order for L.A. Noire to be any good and even to make sure the game would eventually hit store shelves instead of vanishing like some overreaching piece of vaporware. Regardless of the truth, Team Bondi would wind up self-destructing soon after L.A. Noire's release despite it being a critical and commerical success. Rockstar Games holds the rights to the franchise, so we could eventually see a sequel developed by a different team, but so far Rockstar hasn't been in any hurry. As for the game itself, L.A. Noire is an episodic title which (mostly) follows a man named Cole Phelps as he first rises and then falls through the ranks of the Los Angeles Police Department during the years 1946-47. Players search crime scenes and houses for clues, chase cars and people, get into fistfights and gunfights, and most particularly interview suspects and witnesses (easily the game's centerpiece thanks to the whole MotionScan tech). It's an action-adventure game in the most literal sense, and depending on how well you interview people, how many clues you pick up, and how much damage you deal to the city in the process, you'll earn a rating of between 1-5 stars. You'll also earn experience and gain ranks over time, but since I've already maxed that out on my Rockstar Social Club profile we'll just be ignoring it. Cole Phelps is an unusual protagonist in that he is what a cipher personality would be like in real life: ambitious, goal-driven, calculating, quite often difficult to work with, and enough of a bully that the Doubt and Lie choices don't sound strange coming out of his mouth even when the player picks incorrectly. The stick up Cole's rear end is so huge that he's not the sort of person you can easily identify with, but I choose to take this as a commentary on video game protagonists. On top of that, Cole does grow and develop as the game progresses, so it's not a total loss. Also, I'm going to be spotlighting a different classic film at the end of each episode. You don't need to offer me suggestions since my list is pretty much set at this point, but you're free to guess at what's coming up, offer viewing suggestions to other posters, and provide additional trivia for the films I've reviewed (and even those I haven't). In addition, this thread is a full spoilers allowed environment regarding both L.A. Noire and any film plotlines. You may discuss any and all future events without using spoiler tags, and I will explain the reason why I'm encouraging this in my first video. Bobbin Threadbare fucked around with this message at 01:18 on Mar 29, 2016 |
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Mar 28, 2016 17:03
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Bobbin Threadbare fucked around with this message at 17:00 on Sep 19, 2016 |
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Mar 28, 2016 17:03
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I've already fielded some questions regarding Columbo episodes, so here are a few resources to get you started. http://www.columbo-site.freeuk.com This site has every episode synopsis, including the specials that take place after the series ended. The episodes I mentioned in the video are, in order, "Death Lends a Hand," "By Dawn's Early Light," "Forgotten Lady," and "No Time to Die." If you're looking for stand-out guest stars, there's "A Stitch in Crime" with Leonard Nimoy, "Swan Song" with Johnny Cash, "Lady in Waiting" with Leslie Nielsen, and "Short Fuse" with Roddy McDowall.
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Mar 28, 2016 17:04
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paragon1 posted:Do you have the huge number of DLC cases Bobbin? I have the PC edition, which comes with every DLC mission. Counting the two patrol desk episodes plus one episode for street crimes, this means this LP will be 25 parts long.
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Mar 29, 2016 01:08
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Klaus88 posted:What do you mean, Sergent York was just a movie, that actually happened to Alvin. C. York! I never said it was just a movie. I simply didn't have enough time to say that it was also based on a true story.
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Mar 29, 2016 03:20
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Tasteful Dickpic posted:Okay, I'll bite. What's his best one? Is it the narrator from The Princess Bride? Could be referencing Murder by Death. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AN9SJmS6kv8 I kind of wish I had the chance to cover this one, but it's after the cutoff date and it's not really noir.
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Mar 29, 2016 15:18
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Xander77 posted:Wait, does that mean you won't cover L.A Confidential? That's kind of insane, because that's... let's be charitable an call it "the game's most direct influence". I may be acting coy about the full list, but I doubt I'll shock anyone when I say L.A. Confidential has a prominent spot on it. The cutoff date I'm referring to is only one of the four criteria I'm using to select films; the other three are "noir," "Los Angeles crime/law enforcement," and "set in LA during the noir period." On top of being such an inspiration that L.A. Noire ripped off the name, Confidential also fits the other three requirements, so there you go. Incidentally, be prepared for a lot of films that aren't noir but which do say a lot about Post-War America. Bobbin Threadbare fucked around with this message at 19:44 on Mar 29, 2016 |
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Mar 29, 2016 19:41
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Jay Rust posted:What are you going to do about the copious amounts of nudity in the game? To the game's credit, it's always shocking yet never titillating, but it's also kind of exploitative. Put up a warning. Like you say, it's forensic nudity rather than anything remotely pornographic, so I figure a five-second warning card at the start of the video should cover my rear end quite nicely.
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Mar 30, 2016 05:46
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Those of you who follow me regularly know that I always like to do something special on April 1st. Since I could hardly delay a Monday update to Friday, I decided to do something completely unrelated which I incidentally have wanted to do for literal years now. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y2xx8br6OGU
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Apr 1, 2016 16:57
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SirDifferential posted:Hopefully you'll do an episode with the "black and white" mode enabled. The saturation does seem to be a bit on the higher end, although I'm not sure it's an issue. That was the plan. I was thinking of going black and white for the last Homicide Desk case, but I'm open to suggestions.
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Apr 1, 2016 20:30
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Apr 4, 2016 16:58
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chitoryu12 posted:I never saw a problem watching early LPs of the game, but it became apparent playing with lower settings on a 1920x1080 monitor. The faces are essentially "painted" on textures, yes, but the way the animation works is that it actually shifts between distinct frames rather than making smooth changes (I think the frame rate for the cameras that filmed the actors is lower than the frame rate of the game itself), causing the faces to "blur" between fragments of expressions instead of making human changes. I suppose it's worth noting, then, that the game also locks you into 30fps. But yeah, LA Noire's biggest problem is that it has far more detail than it has polygons. Just wait until we see our first overweight dude, because once you add a second chin you really step into Clayface territory.
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Apr 5, 2016 02:58
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I'm reasonably certain the developers found a list of obscure American names, because they're only going to get more unusual from here.
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Apr 5, 2016 22:44
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Wanamingo posted:America didn't even really have an emergency medical system in place until the 1970s, all the ambulance would have done was take the bodies to the morgue. There wasn't any hurry for them to get there. You have to admit that's still depressing.
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Apr 9, 2016 15:40
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Air is lava! posted:To be fair, sometimes the person in need has to make the call themselves. Remembering stuff is hard when you're about to black out from a concussion. I believe Spork is referring to how phone numbers were six digits at this point in history, but that's not the result of a mnemonic device so much as it was the evolution of the four-digit phone number. It used to be that you had to ask an operator to connect you to a specific exchange and then you could dial the four-digit code of a specific number, and because of this the exchanges used names instead of numbers. However, better phone technology led to direct exchange dialing, and so the exchanges were abbreviated to two letters and the letters were added to the phone dial. Eventually, big cities had to use three letters for their exchanges, and once long-distance lines and area codes standardized the phone network the seven digit number became universal. This history is why phone numbers are always formatted as 123-4567.
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Apr 11, 2016 09:29
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I suppose I should have thrown the word "American" somewhere into that explanation, huh? Oh well.
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Apr 11, 2016 16:41
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I can confirm that the missing clue was a radio dispatch call about the pig's blood which you can only receive by driving a police vehicle away from Cavanagh's. None of the police boxes or phones lit up, so that wasn't an alternative in this case, but I imagine that's because it wasn't a critical clue or anything that would be hard to piece together from the rest of the evidence.
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Apr 11, 2016 20:12
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Kopijeger posted:Yeah, but wouldn't he be considered over-qualified for the job and rejected? I got the impression that the other police officers are blue-collar types without higher education. What were real-life recruitment critera like back in the 1940s? I suspect his time in college is part of the reason he was fast-tracked to detective.
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Apr 11, 2016 22:08
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SpookyLizard posted:Honestly, the one thing I don't like about the lies so far is how every single time someone will say either "you can't prove that" or "you better have proof". Which may not feel as bad if you accuse people of lying at the correct time, but watching Bobbin show off Cole's mood swings really makes it obvious and seems really weird to me. I believe in one of the future episodes I've recorded we'll meet someone who's pretty good at not being so direct about it.
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Apr 12, 2016 17:48
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If you guys are talking about the thing I think you're talking about, I've already missed my opportunity to sail through the sky. On the bright side, I think my gormless fumbling to try and get around is entertaining in its own way.
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Apr 15, 2016 17:37
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Apr 18, 2016 18:57
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Psychotic Weasel posted:We haven't come across any of the real burn outs or crooked cops yet - the worst of which is such a god damned rear end in a top hat but you just can't help but love his banter. He's like the mirror opposite of Cole, what he would be if he was evil. Yeah, I was just going to point out that as far as Post War crime and corruption goes, the Traffic Desk is still very much part of the easing in period. We'll be seeing much worse from both cops and criminals as time goes on.
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Apr 19, 2016 03:46
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The patrol partner is the real boring one, but then you hardly get any chance to banter with him.
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Apr 19, 2016 06:34
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Kopijeger posted:I got to wondering about the phrase used in the first tutorial case "stick our schlongs into a hornet's nest". "Schlong" is of Yiddish origin, literally meaning "snake" (compare High German "Schlange") and is of course used as a slang term for penis. Thing is, it seemed out of place for 1940s California, and looking it up in online dictionaries it is not recorded in general usage before 1969. Also, they use the term "Hispanic" when wikipedia indicates that the term only became widespread after 1970 and "Latino" is more likely to be used on the West Coast anyway. There are probably more examples of linguistic anachronisms in the game, but I supposed the developers have done better than you would expect considering they were from Australia. Funny you should bring up the language inconsistencies, because I remember how people kept doing it for Mad Men. And that's a funny coincidence because goddamn. 
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Apr 20, 2016 11:02
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SelenicMartian posted:Is there a playthrough where Phelps selects lie and picks wrong evidence for every single question? There's an LP on the Archive where the player wasn't aiming to 100% every case the way I am. It's nowhere near a DSP-level failure run, but it does show off some of the non-optimal paths and alternate dialog.
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Apr 21, 2016 19:03
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Stare-Out posted:Really, something like "Intimidate" or "Threaten" would have been better. If you play the game and mentally replace "Doubt" with either of those it'll make a whole lot more sense. But then that might have led people to not use it enough on witnesses, plus sometimes Cole doesn't actually threaten people with the Doubt option. Honestly, it doesn't seem like any one word would have fully described the option.
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Apr 22, 2016 00:01
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Hope y'all appreciate the special touch I added.
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Apr 25, 2016 19:20
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Kopijeger posted:Notes for this case: It is possible to skip Sheldon's place, and the text at the end will lament that you let him get away with a Failure to Stop charge, which is what he's getting even after Cole clears up the whole murder thing. As for why he's in LA and not SF, I get the feeling that he might not be up to facing his parents after what happened on Iwo Jima. His wife might live in LA, too. paragon1 posted:It most certainly is! At the time I simply assumed Cole was referring to something historical, or maybe it was simply the game's way of letting me know that Cole and his partners work on cases that the player doesn't see. Turns out nope, in fact I was just missing a mission I didn't even know about because someone thought ripping out a level and selling it as DLC would be a great idea. I can also confirm this. I had trouble getting the DLC cases to work at first back when I bought the game because apparently you need to be logged into Rockstar's social interface-website thing in order to actually play the DLC cases. Bobbin Threadbare fucked around with this message at 01:09 on Apr 26, 2016 |
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Apr 26, 2016 01:05
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Kopijeger posted:Okinawa, surely? Also, his wife appears to be a homemaker, so she would likely move wherever he moves. I always get those two confused. And 1. just because Mrs. Phelps is a homemaker doesn't mean that she can't make demands about living close to her family and 2. it doesn't mean Cole can't use that as an excuse to avoid his own family. And I think we initially switched to lower-contrast ink as a countermeasure against Xerox copying.
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Apr 26, 2016 17:45
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Psychotic Weasel posted:From the way the road was laid out it looked like the curb lane had room for live traffic and space for cars to park on the street (there just happened to be no parked cars around). It's still really strange for him to be racing down the street that close to the curb considering he'd have to swerve out of the way of any parked cars he came across. Obviously it wouldn't have been as dramatic if Lester stumbled for a solid minute into the middle of the road then got hit, but it still looks weird... Like Thesaya mentioned, Sheldon is a terrible driver and has gotten in trouble for reckless driving before. Considering how much planning went into the murder, he may have been a known factor: if he always drives by the bar at around the same time each night, it would explain how Lorna knew she could use an otherwise random occurrence to cover up a murder. And I wouldn't say the developers forgot about the story until the Arson desk. Aside from Traffic, each desk has its own overarching story, even if it's not always clear.
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Apr 27, 2016 02:50
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Xander77 posted:I'm not a theater person, but I'm fairly sure that was a really terrible explanation of Method acting. (Performances always included gestures, for instance) Not in the scripts they don't. From Shakespearian plays to modern plays, scripts almost always limit themselves to the broadest of the blocking and only sometimes indicate what emotion is supposed to be behind a certain line. The rest is for the actors and the director to figure out, and Method acting is about trying to get inside the character's head (or more precisely to find the character inside of you) and decide on the details based on this analysis. It's not that gestures were absent from the stage, it's that they were often perfunctory and didn't inform the character. Method actors will admit that you don't need the Method to put on a great performance, but the purpose behind the Method is to get a great performance more consistently.
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Apr 27, 2016 18:15
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The Youtube comments have already beaten you guys to the punch, and so I've already arranged for a compromise: I'll be picking the Lie options sometimes, but not nearly as often as I have up to this point. With that in mind, if any of you want to recommend particularly out-there Lie branchings for future cases, I will greatly appreciate hearing about them. The one that was posted already doesn't count because that's actually the correct choice for that conversation.
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May 1, 2016 04:20
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May 2, 2016 17:51
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What I'm wondering is where all the Asian-Americans are. I don't seem to recall meeting any Asian-descent characters of any sort in any of the cases. Even the Japanese on Okinawa are mostly an off-camera menace.
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May 3, 2016 14:48
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People who don't think Bekowsky is an awesome partner have forgotten his pep talk in this mission. Dailymotion doesn't accept videos over an hour long, so I uploaded the film segment separately. Expect to see this happen a few more times in the future.
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May 9, 2016 17:01
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Aces High posted:Too bad Cole isn't damaged enough to just go in and shoot up the production offices with reckless abandon, just going to go and run around a decrepit movie set instead I'd have settled for setting fire to the "sound stage" behind the prop store.
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May 9, 2016 20:59
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Chimera-gui posted:I was hoping someone else would say it so I wouldn't have to but yeah the reason people stop trying to treat stupidity with anything other than contempt is because historically speaking trying to do otherwise does not work because any attempt to provide minority perspectives is going to be immediately tossed out just on the principal of being the opposition to status quo. Well, that's why I didn't say "this is how you improve minority rights." Regarding that, alternate perspectives and evidence of success have their place, but only as part of a larger effort. I was specifically discussing how something like the film Intolerance could have made its point without being utterly hypocritical.
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May 11, 2016 06:10
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Welcome to Homicide, where every case is a "The Adjective Noun" case! Also, let me remind everyone that this is an untagged spoilers thread, and there's a giant-rear end reveal at the end of the Homicide desk. If you don't want to know what that is before then, I recommend you stick with the front page for the next five weeks. Bobbin Threadbare fucked around with this message at 17:07 on May 16, 2016 |
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May 16, 2016 17:02
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Kopijeger posted:Notes for this case: Her husband is 45 and her old beau is 52. Chances are her kids are all grown up by this point and in college or elsewhere. Her old husband is as likely dead as he is divorced, but either way it's clear that he's out of the picture by this point.
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May 16, 2016 19:33
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Kopijeger posted:That is a possibility, but Celine's age is given as 43, so her children would have to have been born when she was in her early twenties at the latest. Raising them would have put a damper on her aviation dreams long before she met Jacob, so it is strange that she blames him for her unsatisfying life. You'd also think McColl and/or Jacob would also express concern about the impact her murder will have on them, so this feels like minor plot hole/developer oversight. It kind of seems like Celine Henry has two mashed-together backstories, like she had one history at one point but the developers switched midway through and couldn't remove all the traces of her old past. Her husband is on the old side for being an active member of the Marine Corps in World War II, for one, plus you think more than just her neighbor would mention the fact that she has children, adult or otherwise. Jay Rust posted:This series of cases always annoyed me. There are an awfully large number of men in Los Angeles with unusually tiny feet, I have to say. But if I may speculate, I believe what happened "behind the scenes" was this: Mendez took Henry home and the killer stalked them to his apartment. He then had Henry sleep it off at his place while he used her information to find her empty house and rob it. The killer took the opportunity to sneak up to Mendez's apartment, abduct and kill Celine Henry, and then drop off the box of evidence. Mendez may or may not have known about the box before the police showed up (I assume he would have waited until after dark to get rid of the box), but if he didn't know then he ran because of the robbery.
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May 16, 2016 22:44
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