Losing Games
I’m not a quick game player. I don’t rush out a buy the latest games and complete them on the same weekend. Currently I’m most of the way through both Alan Wake and L.A. Noire.
Alan Wake is a survival horror game where you’re fighting off hordes of people possessed by darkness. L.A. Noire is a detective story that has you solving crimes in 1940s Los Angeles. Both feature an over the shoulder third person camera, and both have excellent graphics. They also both have a film like quality to the story. In Alan Wake the action is divided up in six tv style “episodes”, with a title sequence between each one. It also has a number of cut scenes and narration by the title character sprinkled throughout the game which help to drive the story forward.
In L.A. Noire you are detective try to solve crimes and rise up the ranks of the police force. The game features cut scenes to introduce and close each case. During each case you head from location to location and interviewing suspects and witnesses. The big breakthrough in L.A. Noire is the facial animation in the game. Rather than being animated by hand the faces of characters were recorded directly from actor’s faces. This gives the faces a lifelike quality that has not been seen in games before.
Despite the extensive similarities between the game my opinion of the two could hardly be more different. Alan Wake is one of the best games I’ve ever played, while L.A. Noire is really quite boring. I was trying to work out why I felt so differently about them when I read the following quote in Making Isometric Social Real-Time Games with HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript by Mario Andres Pagella.
This recent surge in isometric real-time games was caused partly by Zynga’s incredible ability to “keep the positive things and get rid of the negative things” in this particular genre of games, and partly by a shift in consumer interests. They took away the frustration of figuring out why no one was “moving to your city” (in the case of SimCity) and replaced it with adding friends to be your growing neighbours.
The need for the face of characters in L. A. Noire to be recorded from real actors limits one of the best things about games: their dynamic nature. Even if you get every question wrong you still solve the case and make progress. Initially you don’t really notice this, but quickly I found it meant that the questioning, the key game mechanic, became superfluous.
Alan Wake is a fairly standard game in that there’s really only one way to progress. This is well disguised though so you don’t notice. The atmosphere in the game forces you to keep moving and the story progresses at quite a pace.
Ultimately it’s not for me to criticise what games people want to play. FarmVille and the rest of Zynga’s games are enormously popular. What disappoints me most about L.A. Noire is that it’s such a technically advanced game, but falls down on such a simple piece of game mechanics. Alan Wake on the other hand succeeds mostly based on story and atmosphere, and that’s the way it should be.
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