Review: L.A. Noire

It's June and L.A. Noire is the first game I've actually played this year. Would've been Dead Space 2 except a bizarre bug prevented me from getting very far, so, great jobs guys. I'll try to keep the spoilers to a minimum in this review.

I'm trying to decide whether it's possible to enjoy a game but not actually like it. Rockstar Games has put out some bestselling titles over the years, and L.A. Noire is bound to be a strong Game of the Year contender. But L.A. Noire is a bit like Avatar - you can be dazzled by the visual world you're immersed in if you can also overlook some serious issues.

L.A. Noire has a solid plot. In fact, the narrative is one of the best part of the game, weaving together several storylines in a way that works in a videogame. You play as Cole Phelps, a young detective who moves through different parts of the LAPD, from patrol to traffic, homicide, vice, and arson. Unlike the Grand Theft Auto games, you're on a different side of the law now and you're spending most of your time solving crimes. Although it's released by Rockstar, this isn't much of a car chasing game (although there are a few of those); the key game mechanic here is using your intuition to solve crimes.

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Review: Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age

I was reading Delete by Victor Mayer-Schonberger when I recalled a movie with Robin Williams called The Final Cut, a forgettable pseudo-scifi movie about cameras being implanted in people that records everything they see, which Williams has to edit in order to cut out all the bad parts after people die so that they could preserve all their nice memories for those in mourning; this movie, which I had forgotten about until I read Mayer-Schonberger's book on the difficulties (and virtues) of forgetting in a digital age.

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