So, I finished up L.A. Noire, at least the main storyline cases.

Overall, I really enjoyed it. The game has plenty of problems and there are a number of elements I wish had been handled differently, but I have to give Rockstar and Team Bondi some kudos for trying something a little different and succeeding where they did. Looks like it took me about 27 hours to finish the cases, handle about half the street crimes, and just muck around in general: well worth the price, and I’ll probably play a little more from time to time until there’s some DLC.

As for where they failed and succeeded, well, I don’t want to get specific. There’s some mostly general, non-spoilery stuff below.

• I didn’t really care for the detective you play, Cole Phelps. That isn’t to say he wasn’t well-written or performed; he was. I just didn’t like him much, and even with his back-story revealed, I just didn’t care that much about him. I think I felt more empathy for Niko Bellic, which is kinda weird.
• Cole’s partners were very well done. You get a few different partners depending on which desk you’re working, and I thought they were great and evolved nicely as the game proceeded.
• Examining clues was just plain fun. I will never, ever tire of having a roomful of stuff to pick up and examine. If you could have picked up an examined every single object in the world, I would have done so. It’s just neat, even with items that have no relevance to the case.
• Someone should make a detective mod for Oblivion or Fallout 3, where you actually can pick up and interact with every single object in the world. I would play the shit out of that.
• A couple bugs: there was a remaining clue in a location in a certain case, but even using the intuition feature that told me exactly where it was, there was nothing there. Unless it was buried in the floor, but I didn’t have a jackhammer either way.
• At one point while driving through a neighborhood, I pulled into the driveway of a large house, just to look at it. When I stopped, a large, closed gate rendered directly behind me, meaning I couldn’t exit the driveway, and had to restart.
• During one chase, an empty car materialized in the sky, and plummeted about fifty feet down onto the street. Not complaining: it was funny as hell. I think the script called for the fleeing suspect to crash into someone, and there was no one around, so the game just created a car in mid-air to satisfy its requirements.
• The overall story didn’t please me that much. Part of it was that I figured out something way ahead of where the game apparently wanted me to (I’ve seen a lot of people complaining about the same thing, so I’m not saying I’m some kind of detective genius). Part of it was not really caring much about Phelps. Part of it was just kind of weird.
• I can see what they were going for with the overall story, though. I just don’t think it was a success. I can’t really be any more specific than that without spoilers. I’ll probably do a spoiler-heavy article in the future when more people have played and finished.
• There are some genuine, eye-rollingly clunky moments in the game. It feels like they threw a lot of ideas into a pan but didn’t bake them long enough.
• There’s a lot more action in the game than I originally thought. This is fine: I like shooting people. It makes a nice change of pace from closely examining hairbrushes and carrots. But there is so much action in places it just feels a little incongruous with the general slow, deliberate pace of the game.
• I never really got very good at interrogating people. Lies, I get: they say something, I have evidence that shows otherwise, I confront them with it. Truth vs. Doubt seems a little wiggly, though, and Doubt always seems to end with my blowing my top when perhaps a more cool-headed approach seems in order. Maybe some sort of interrogation strategy option would have been good: Make Nice vs. Intimidate. Good Cop vs. Bad Cop. That kinda thing. I know from reading books and stuff that a lot of successful interrogations result from making the suspect feel like you completely understand and agree with what they did, or from telling them you know stuff that you don’t actually know. There wasn’t much of that in the game. Mainly, Phelps just yelled at people.
• I wish there was more to do, I guess — Los Angeles, for me, remains largely unexplored.
• I can walk into restaurants, and sit down, but I can’t figure out how to order drinks or food. Maybe some games of darts or pool or bowling, like in GTA, would have been nice. Though I’m glad Phelps doesn’t have to go on dates.
• Street crime is fun enough, but I wish there were a few of those “people in need” from GTA, where you could stop, talk to an informant or acquaintance, maybe help out or get involved in some off-the-books crime solving or muscle work.
• Definitely looking forward to DLC. I welcome more individual, stand-alone cases.

Something that’s cool and shows just how different this game is from GTA, according to my stats:

My time spent brawling: 12 minutes

My time spent gunfighting: 1 hour, 55 minutes

My time spent examining clues: 3 hours, 16 minutes

(For any newcomers: My wife, Kris, writes a weekly column under the heading “Lady Business”, giving her perspective on movies, television, pop-culture, and in this instance, video games!)

My attempt at playing L.A. Noire ended in tragedy…more than a few times.

I can only really get my mind around two video game controllers. The first being the Atari 2600 joystick, because the thing had a single stick and button. The second being the Wii controller, because if you want to move forward you just push your arm forward. Both are beautifully simple. L.A. Noire for X-box means that Iâ€m stuck attempting to click on a whole host of buttons, all of which seem to be super sensitive.

On Friday night, Chris manned the controller while I made the choices on where to go and what to do. We solved the cases fairly quickly, though I felt squirmy about calling a suspect a liar even though they were clearly lying. Turns out my wussy non-confrontational side calls the shots in video games as well as real life.

Since I wake up at the crack o†dawn, I thought Iâ€d attempt to play it on my own Saturday morning. I chose a traffic case involving a suspicious car crash. For starters, it was hard to get my guy out of the building. He kept walking into walls, but not to worry…no one even noticed. Even though they mentioned that the crime scene was across the street, I still got in my car and began to destroy the city. I ran over light poles, smashed into the sides of tunnels and generally made the pedestrians of old-timey L.A. very nervous.

I found my way to the scene. Luckily, I figured out how to get the guy to run because he had to go up a crap-ton of stairs. On the way, people would randomly say things like “Thatâ€s the cop who cracked the big case!” or “Are you drunk?” I admit, I was bobbing and weaving. I knocked more than a few people over, but they didnâ€t seem to mind much. Theyâ€d just get back up and move along.

It took me way longer than Iâ€d like to admit to figure out how to get down to the crime scene. Even though there was a map, I kept running in circles and trying to run off cliffs. I get to the crash site one hundred years later, and gather some clues. My interrogation of a woman involved in the accident was botched because I couldnâ€t bring myself to call her a liar. She didnâ€t tell me much.

After that, I also botched the questioning of a witness and was supposed to follow the woman. Thatâ€s when things really started to turn sour. I tried tailing her, but my driving skills made me a little obvious. I would try to creep up on her, but then suddenly floor it and bash through street signs and run over citizens. Fail. A re-start had me driving so slowly that I lost her. Another re-start had me get to the café, but then my guy got out of the car and was promptly run over. He screamed like a woman when he fell down, and I laughed so hard that I woke Chris up.

With his help, I learned how to commandeer cars, which was good because my car was a smoking pile of junk at this point. The driver would tell me to be careful with it, and Iâ€d immediately smash it into a building. Then, Iâ€d reverse and smash it into another building. Confession: I donâ€t know which button controls the brakes in this game.

A very long period of kicking down doors and picking up items that meant nothing followed. My partner didnâ€t do much of anything other than get his hat shot off in a car chase. (My hat remained dapper.) The best thing about the car chase was that my horrible driving seemed to pay off. I ripped off the suspectâ€s bumper. Then, I accidentally re-created a scene from Worldâ€s Deadliest Police Chases where I somehow caused him to spin his car around. I knew watching that junk would pay off one day.

I finished by killing my guy as he was chasing a suspect on top of a three story structure that was shoddily built. I was going to give it another go, but I realized I hadnâ€t bothered to learn how to shoot a gun, duck behind objects or any of the other important things needed to get me out of this endless loop of dying.

I didnâ€t save the game and attempt to finish later because my detective work was pretty awful and I didnâ€t want Chris to get stuck with a score of negative flobbidy-jillion points. However, I would have liked to know my cash value of damage to the city. I bet it was a doozy.

Los Angeles. Nineteen-forty-something-or-so. My name? Chris Livingston. I’m a police officer. My name? Cole Phelps. So, uh… forget about the Chris Livingston thing. I got confused.

I’m investigating a murder. It’s not just any old murder. It’s a tutorial murder. Maybe it’s the damn heat, or maybe it’s just this damn city, but tutorial murders are up 23% on my beat. Damn these tutorials! They cost too many lives. Lives this damn city can’t afford.

I find a gun, and take it to a gun dealer to see what’s what. The gun dealer won’t give me a damn thing, except for the fact that he had the gun in his shop, that he sold the gun, the name of the person he sold it to, and that person’s home address. Fine, play it cool, Buster. Let’s see how cool you are when I closely examine all the DECORATIVE WOODEN DUCKS you’ve got in your store. Feel like talking now? Oh, wait, you did talk, and you’ve been extremely helpful. I’ll just put all your decorative wooden ducks back and leave. Thank you for your time, sir.

So, yeah! I started playing L.A. Noire yesterday on X-Box 360, and here are my thoughts in bullet-point form. I won’t spoil any specifics of the cases (I’ve only played through three of them so far).

• I’m almost instantly in love with this game. I have a notebook. A NOTEBOOK. Everything I find — every clue, every detail, every witness statement, every location, every suspect — goes into my notebook. I love my notebook.
• I think Rockstar/Bondi looked into my brain and mapped out exactly how I wanted crime scene investigations to work. It’s great. Examine the body, search the pockets, hunt around for nearby clues. Not everything you find is a clue. Sometimes decorative wooden ducks are just decorative wooden ducks.
• Okay, the much-heralded motion-captured facial expressions. They’re a little weird, especially pasted onto very generic looking computer game bodies. As a complete package, the characters are kind of awkward. It’s sort of like how in The Incredibles, everyone has cartoony bodies but ultra-realistic hair. Doesn’t quite all fit together.
• That mis-match aside, the facial expressions are undeniably great. You can really see the actors’ performances, and it makes a world of difference, not just when interrogating a suspect but when someone — a witness, your partner, another cop — is talking to you. It’s just fantastic. I just stare like a gob-smacked owl anytime anyone is talking to me.
• The interrogation itself is a little lacking. You ask someone about a topic from your notebook, they answer, you can choose to believe them, doubt them, or decide they’re lying, but you have no idea what you’re going to say to the suspect after choosing from those options. I think a Mass Effect dialogue wheel might have been better to let me feel a little more personally involved, for a more tailor-made interrogation.
• Doubting and lying seem to equal yelling like a mean jerk. I was talking to an underage victim and she was clearly lying, and I was a big old mean jerk to her, and I didn’t want to be. So, that’s not so great. At least give me a good cop button and a bad cop button.
• If you decide someone is lying, you need some evidence to confront them with or they can shut you out.
• Sometimes you can talk to someone, gather evidence, and talk to them again. Sometimes you can’t.
• I do love that while looking through your notebook, you can look up at your witness or suspect and observe them squirming. Or not squirming. It’s fun.
• There seem to be multiple ways to solve a case. I screwed up an interrogation: I thought a suspect was lying, but didn’t have evidence to prove it, so the interrogation didn’t lead anywhere. I got to follow the suspect, though, and wound up solving the case that way. Fantastic.
• You can also partially solve cases. In one instance, I nailed one person for a crime, but someone else who was almost definitely guilty got away because I didn’t gather all the evidence I should have.
• Cases you’ve completed are replayable independently from the main menu, so you can try them again as sort of a stand-alone experience: also great.
• Flashbacks! My brain is remembering things and I don’t care about them right now. I just want to solve my case.
• The huge explorable city of 1940’s Los Angeles laid out for me like a glittering whatever. I don’t care about it right now, I just want to solve my case.
• Apparently, there are 95 different cars I can discover and drive! DON’T CARE. WANT SOLVE CASE.
• Seriously. This game could be taking place on gm_flatgrass in Garry’s Mod for all I care. I don’t want to explore, or drive, or remember things about my past. At all. I just want to solve cases!
• There is some shooting in this game. I care about it a little because I like shooting. But mostly, I’d prefer to use my notebook instead of my gun, and most of the game is about your notebook.
• While driving a cop car, you can answer radio calls, which take you to street crimes. I did one street crime, which involved chasing a dude and shooting him. Chasing is kind of fun, and so is shooting.
• There is a pretty big, ridiculous gunfight at one point. It’s entertaining and silly. I guess after a couple hours of walking and talking, it’s nice to see things explode. But I’m still eager to get back to walking and talking.
• Sometimes the instructions flash on the screen too quickly and I miss them, because they’re explaining what to do at the same moment I’m supposed to be doing it. Sometimes they don’t explain things at all, like how to fire warning shots. It took me like five replays to learn how to fire a warning shot because I didn’t know that was what I was supposed to be doing.
• I think this is a pretty ballsy game. I know critics are loving it, and I’m loving it, but it’s almost entirely talking, taking notes, and examining clues. Curious how it’s going to go over with the mainstream crowd who are maybe expecting Grand Theft Auto: Noire and are instead getting Grand Talking To People: About Murders.
• I mean, part of the appeal of GTA and Red Dead Redemption was, that when you didn’t feel like following the story you could go off on destructive rampages for a bit. I don’t know how to rampage in L.A. Noire. There doesn’t even seem to be a way to pull your gun unless a crook is involved. I guess you can drive around fast and crash into things, but that’s about it. Again, ballsy game.
• This would be great on PC.
• What, no multiplayer? Just picture up to 24 homicide detectives wrestling over shell casings and blood spatters, then all of them cramming into a widow’s kitchen, shouting dozens of questions at her, then everyone tearing off in their own cars on the way to the next crime scene.
• Almost entirely loving it. I just wish there were comprehensive dialogue options during interrogations so I could really become my detective, instead of sitting there wondering what my detective is going to say.