I’m always eager for another reason to reinstall and open up Hitman 2 again, and a new level seemed like the perfect excuse. Even better, turns out that new level continues directly off of the campaign from the base game, so let’s get right to it.
Back when I was running through Hitman (2016), my biggest criticism was that as much as I loved the episodic model, it had a glaring flaw in that the updates have to be substantive. Anything less than a massive, sprawling map would give off the impression that IO wasn’t creating “enough content” for the players.
While I love that game, and have spent tons of time in those maps, mastering them and taking on targets as they are added to the game, they didn’t leave much room for smaller, more intimate Hitman levels. Some of my favorite missions in the older games took place in more enclosed spaces, like the birthday party in Blood Money. Those missions also served to break up the larger levels for pacing purposes.
The base campaign of Hitman 2 went back to that with the tutorial level, and the suburban stage, and it’s good to see them continuing to make stages at this size. It gives them another tool in the toolbox to make use of as they see fit.
It’s also, quite honestly, just good to be playing new story missions in Hitman again. This is one of my favorite franchises, and to see it keep being supporting like this warms the heart.
At last, we finally complete the Homicide desk in this episode, resolving the lingering plot threads and arriving at the end of this long, tiresome road.
I want to start off by saying that I’m glad I was able to demonstrate the problem I talked about in my last LA Noire post, where we need to pin the murder on one of the two suspects despite the fact that there’s clearly another person who committed the crime, with evidence that is circumstantial at best. I was afraid I’d never get the chance to explain it on video.
In addition, it’s getting harder to ignore how many technical issues I’ve having with the PC version of the game. I’ve played LA Noire on PS3 numerous times, and never before have I had issues like I do now. The investigation music never concluding has been a problem since the start of the playthrough, but the visual glitches seen throughout the final Homicide case were new to me. This is, to be blunt, a bad version of the game, and I’d recommend playing it on any other platform than PC.
One of the people in chat made a great point that the open world aspect of the game doesn’t add to the game much, if at all, and they were spot on in that analysis. Even in the last case for Homicide, where you have to deduce which location is being referred to in each new clue, doesn’t benefit from having an open world. There are collectibles and side missions, but they don’t meaningfully add to the story in the way that something like the Artifacts in Tomb Raider (2015) did.
My final point is regarding the actual conclusion of Homicide and why it’s a disappointment. The entire questline is based on the infamous Black Dhalia case, one of the most well-known unsolved murders in American history. In the fiction of LA Noire, this is but one in a series of serial murder cases perpetrated by a single individual.
However, since the true killer in the real life was never caught, the related cases that Cole Phelps investigates also can’t be solved “correctly”. This final case is framed as the great denouement of the whole desk, where after all of the false convictions, we can at last get it right and bring a menace to justice. And we do…
…except that it’s quietly covered up because the killer is related to an (unnamed) politician. There’s no catharsis, and no real pay off other than the fact that no more women will fall victim to him. It falls flat, but it has to because the source material is a case that was never solved.
And this is largely why the whole desk falls flat in turn. We spend so much time chasing phantoms and when we finally catch them nothing comes of it. It feels lame, and underwhelming to the extreme.
It’s been a while since we last saw everyone’s favorite murder-comedian. And yet, here we are with another Elusive Target.
Watch me execute another perfect, flawless hit where I only kill the necessary targets.
I swear to you, it was completely necessary to kill all of those guards.
In all seriousness, this just goes to show one that sometimes, all it takes is just one mistake to make things fall completely off the rails. Things were going so well, and I had successfully poisoned the target I thought would be hardest to take out. (Ironically, I think this exact same scenario happened when I took this guy out in Hitman 1, just with a big fat failure instead.)
Going from completely stealthy to… almost every guard on campus coming after me at the same time was quite the experience. And during that very protracted shoot out, there were several moments where I could have lost everything if I got reckless. Any moment I had to travel forward, into the pile of bodies, was a moment where I could have been easily ambushed.
At the same time, this also goes to show that one can, in fact, recover from mistakes. Sure, this wasn’t my most elegant performance in Hitman. However, it was still a successful run. Once the guards stopped coming after me, it was relatively easy to steal a uniform from the pile of bodies sitting there, and just walk away as if nothing happened. I was even able to execute the target with next to no resistance on account of the carnage.
So yeah. Not the best run of an Elusive Target, but a successful kill is a successful kill.
First off, I’m disappointed that I lost my cool like that in the middle of the stream. In hindsight, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with the deck itself. Rather, the problem was that I was piloting a midrange deck in a best-of-one format, which isn’t conducive to the strength of the deck.
The real magic of a midrange deck occurs in the sideboard, during a best-of-three. While the first match in a best-of-three can be a bit of a tossup, midrange decks excel and their ability to transform themselves in between the rounds of a match.
When going up against an aggressive deck, they can slot in more draw cards, lifegain, and board clear to change themselves in a more control-oriented setup. This lets them withstand the initial surge and swoop in for the win through sustaining themselves. Likewise, doing up again a control deck can let them switch in cards to force a more aggressive strategy.
In a best-of-one matchup, the pilot doesn’t have the ability to make this pivot. And as a result, their performance suffers. This is what likely happened during my session.
So, lesson learned. The next time I show off a midrange deck, I’ll need to enter a best-of-three to really show off what it can do.
Our exploits at the Homicide desk continue as we investigate the Black Dhal…. I mean, we investigate a series of random, completely unrelated murders that all just happen to have very similar MOs.
There are two things that truly hold the Homicide desk back, aside from the fact that your partner is just one or the worst people.
The first one is a problem that we so ineptly dodged in The Golden Butterfly (the case wrapped up at the start of this episode). While in the recording, Hugo Moller ran away because he was afraid of a murder charge, there is another way the case can wrap up.
As you could see, the evidence for both of the suspects was circumstantial at best, and could be interpreted as implicating either one. Without anything that can effectively tie either of them to the crime, it’s essentially up to the player’s questioning skills. Proper interrogating will allow the player to choose which of the two suspects that charge with murder.
A high ranking is only achieved in this case if the player successfully accues Eli Rooney of the murder. This isn’t because he’s the killer, but rather he’s a pedophile. The police will accept this as the most desirable outcome because although the real killer is still at large, this case serves as an excellent excuse to take a pedophile off the streets.
Now, to be clear, pedophiles are vile and I agree that such evil people should be taken off the streets and rehabilitated because of the damage they do to the lives of young people. However, it is frustrating that the game active gives the player a bad rating for “booking the wrong guy” when it’s obvious to everyone that neither of the two suspects actually committed the crime. It’s hard to not think of these kinds of choices as “false” for that reason. After all, the story goes on even if the “wrong” choice is made.
Which is the other problem with Homicide desk is that this kind of investigation, even if the cases where the player don’t get a choice in which killer they indicts. Aside from Finbarr “Rusty” Galloway, absolutely everyone else knows or suspects that all of the murders being investigated are the result of one serial killer. However, we have to pretend they aren’t just so they we can investigate the case and falsely accuse another husband or secret admirer of the dead woman. There’s not one case that’s unrelated to the Black Dhalia killings, and one begins to feel it as they wear on.
I can’t wait to be done with it so that I can get on to Vice, one of the game’s better desks.
Cole Phelps (Badge One-Two-Four-Seven) has finally graduated from the machinations and diverse plots of the Traffic desk and onto the grim, yet fulfilling work of a Homicide Detective.
Unfortunately, it’s the worst desk in the entire game, and with the second worst partner: Rusty Galloway.
The problems with Homicide will become more evident later on, but for now take my word that the arc for the desk is unsatisfying. For now, I’d like to say that the reason I gave Rusty any compliments in the beginning of this stream is that I completely forgot what an irredeemable piece of human filth he is. He’s a wife-beating, lazy, misogynistic drunkard who always takes the easy route when investigating a murder.
This interestingly puts him at odds with Cole, which does offer an interesting dynamic between them, since Cole is a straight-laced by-the-book type. Rusty also takes up the duty of getting Cole’s head out of the clouds. Hot off the heels of Traffic (and the cut Burglary) desk, we see that he’s become obsessed with rising through the ranks. When he sees a sign that his murder cases might be part of a high-profile serial murder case (the Black Dhalia killings), he immediately wants to try to use it as a springboard to rise through the ranks.
It’s the classic Rockstar dynamic of two truly bad people’s very specific flaws somehow create a gestalt that doesn’t immediately crumble under its own weight. Cole’s go-getting attitude balances out Rusty’s unbelievable laziness.
And to be honest, I’m not sure how I feel about that. On one hand, I think it’s true to life that flawed people can come together and make some truly awesome things happen. On the other hand, these exact flaws are very unhealthy, especially in investigative work where a level head is one of the most crucial skills of the job. Neither one of them are the kind of person one would trust to keep people safe, which becomes clear as the story progresses. The blatant corruption we see in the LAPD (which was apparently very real from what I’ve heard) only further compounds the issue.
Versions of this deck have been around ever since Domanaria, thanks to Teferi, Hero of Dominaria. That card is the backbone of the deck, and the win condition. The end goal is to play him, and eventually get to his -8 ultimate. From there, his -3 can shuffle himself back into the deck so that his owner will never deck out, as the opponent slowly withers away while their permanents and lands get exiled.
Thanks to War of the Spark, the new Liliana can be played as a 1-of to offer another possible path to victory. And aside from that the rest of the deck exists either to deal with threats, maintain the player’s life total, and draw through the deck to gain the resources to play and protect it’s big win conditions.
It’s a very effective deck. While I will always love my big, evil dragon Nicol Bolas, one can’t deny that this deck does work, getting the job done.
After a miraculous recovery from the mysterious poison that nearly claimed his life, I regret to inform you once again that critically acclaimed actor Seam Bean has passed away.
I won’t deny that I was somewhat disappointed about how this mission was a near exact duplication of the very first Elusive Target against The Undying.
I hope that this is the setup for a remixed third target that does something to surprise players. but I don’t have much more to add beyond that.
Our work on the mean streets of 50s LA continues. As Traffic Detective Cole Phelps (Badge Twelve-Fourty-Seven), we’re forging a reputation with each new case we crack. The bigger our exploits, the easier it will be to climb through the rankings.
This is Detective Work: LA Noire.
To clarify points made in the video, while Rockstar published this game, it was developed by Team Bondi in Australia. That said, there are a number of design choices we see in LA Noire that a typical of Rockstar games, so I feel it’s still worth talking about them.
Chief among them is this game’s tendency to value “immersion” over gameplay flow. Part of this is the decision to go open world. Bluntly, the open world added nothing to the experience, and most players will simply choose to let their partner drive from place to place to skip the hassle. The only side activities are the random crimes scattered about the city, and most of them are either gun fights or car chases, and those are some of the worst parts of the game.
In addition, there are minor details, like needing to constantly phone into headquarters for background checks and updates. While it’s true that since detectives in that era didn’t have cell phones, this would be more realistic, it’s not something that I personally enjoy doing. Since every police car has a radio installed as well, it would have been nice if some of these were either taken care of during car rides or implied to have been deal with in the drive between areas of investigation. Rather than halt the forward momentum to have a several minutes long scene of Cole Phelps asking the operator to route him to HQ, then ask for technical services and/or updates, it would be nice if this could be taken care of while the player was mobile.
Lastly, and separate from the above two points, this game takes place in an era where people were much more overtly racist, anti-Semitic, and otherwise discriminatory. I don’t mind that the game brings these elements into the story. However, in usual Rockstar fashion, there is barely any comment on it whatsoever. As someone in the chat said, it feels like it only exists so that the developers can look “edgy” and “mature” by using slurs.
It’s almost disappointing when I think about it. Rockstar has (had in the case of Team Bondi) a team of extremely skilled and talented people working on their games, and yet they have such little desire to make anything of cultural impact with their work beyond the most surface level satire of current/past events. I wish they would do better, though I know that call falls on deaf ears (and a closed Team Bondi).
Lately, thanks to my own personal run of the Ace Attorney games, I’ve had police procedurals on the brain. Though not a detective game in the strictest sense, I was hoping that streaming The Council would help to satisfy that itch.
Turns out I was wrong. As interesting as it was mechanically, The Council doesn’t have much to offer in terms of notable content beyond that initial conversation piece. Thus, it behooves me to move onto a game I know I have much to say about.
Welcome to LA Noire!
LA Noire is a game I have decidedly mixed feelings about. On one hand, I’m a sucker for detective fiction, and it’s a very polished example of that. On the other hand, there are a number of problems I have both with the game and the circumstances surrounding it’s development. We’ll get more into it as we proceed, but this episode lays the groundwork for future discussion.
What I will talk about in this column, however, is the way the interview/interrogation system works. When talking to a person of interest, the player always begins by asking a question. After the witness makes their statement, there are 3 available options:
Truth/Good Cop
Doubt/Bad Cop
Lie/Accuse
By selecting “Truth”, players indicate that they believe the witness’s statement, and attempt to gently coax more information out of them. This is usually easy to figure out.
However, what is more difficult is determining when the correct answer is either “Doubt” or “Lie” (and there is always a correct answer). Either way, players are showing that they sense deception from the witness. The difference being that “Lie” allows one to present direct evidence contrary to the statement made, while “Doubt” is reserved for when no such evidence exists.
This gets complicated for a number of reasons. Some of them are the obvious ones that adventure game players are used to, namely that the developer logic is sometimes obtuse and difficult to understand. (As I said in the video, just changing the options from Truth/Doubt/Lie to Good Cop/Bad Cop/Accuse made the game much easier to read for people, but there are other examples we’ll get to later.)
Less obvious is the fact that players aren’t necessarily guaranteed to possess all the evidence they need to successfully complete an interview. If one goes into an interview without the evidence required to call out a “Lie/Accusation” successfully, then even pressing Doubt will not be sufficient to arrive at the correct answer. There’s no points for partial credit, and once an answer is submitted, there’s no way to undo it. While the game will funnel the player to the end of the case of matter how badly they screw up, it always hurts to botch an interview because there is no second chance.
I can’t but compare this to the Ace Attorney games, since I’ve been playing so much of them lately. Because that game is a visual novel with a set “correct” path through the investigations, the game can guarantee that players have all the evidence they need before a witness makes their statement. And when while the witness is reciting their testimony, they can read and reread through it as many times as they need to, pressing them for information to clarify specific points until they can present the contradiction between said statement and the facts that have been gathered so far. If they screw up, they’ll take a penalty (enough of which will result in a Game Over), but can take another shot at presenting the correct piece.
While LA Noire is certainly fun, I can’t deny that the interrogation system, the game’s biggest defining feature, feels like it was eclipsed by a system that was created well before Team Bondai began development.
