Technology, Intelligence, and balls for days can all be attributed to Rockstar’s summer release: L.A. Noire. Rockstar has turned its name into a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Nostalgiac Composition
For as many games as we’ve played, it’s few and extremely far between when we play a current-gen game and are taken back twenty years ago. Remember Dick Tracy for the NES? You couldn’t pin it on Flat Top or The Brow (classic names by the way) without the evidence to prove it. Side scrolling with tear gas and tommy guns, Dick Tracy had to collect evidence and make arrests, and pass through unusually hard levels for its time. We’ve eclipsed right/left movements and square bullets, but the ambiance is the same, if not heightened by the time-period music and attire of Cole Phelps.

Also, one person very simply and aptly described L.A. Noire as “Monkey Island with cars and tits.” How great is that? Fantastically great, we might say.

Change Of Pace
In an industry of games where the player is used to blowing something up at the rate of once every 2.4 seconds, L.A. Noire forces us to re-channel our inner gangster from gunslinger to mind-reader. Well, body-reader at least.

Want to call someone out for lying? You better have the evidence. Doubt where the suspect tells you she was the previous night? That’s ok, but if you’re wrong, you’ll pay, and she’s not the only one who will chew your ass out for coming across like a prick. Odds are the Captain will make an example of you by screaming the paint off the walls.

Rockstar’s Evolution
Last year’s release of Red Dead Redemption showed us that Rockstar share the stage with Bioware when telling convincing narrative. With L.A. Noire, we can see that Rockstar is not suffering from an identity crisis; rather, they are perfecting their craft. Integrating MotionScan technology to help the player decide if the person interrogated is lying or telling the truth is so good that it works. Like when you have a really good idea but in your head you think to yourself, “There’s no fucking way I can pull that off.” Well, Rockstar does.

One of the secondary outcomes of Rockstar’s evolution is that everything seems uncommonly easy. A close friend of mine, who works at Apple headquarters in Cupertino, CA, during a conversation about the creation of the Glitchoris iPhone App (soon to come!), said, and I paraphrase, if it’s not intuitively easy to work and navigate through, people aren’t going to use it.” When playing the first few hours of L.A. Noire, I felt that everything felt intuitively easy to control: the car, crime scenes, camera angles, interrogations, and the combat system.

Mid-game thoughts on Tuesday!