IN THE GAME

by James Lincoln Warren

Last month, my wife Margaret surprised me by suggesting that we buy a video game console. The stimulus for this was something she’d read on facebook by Gregory Han, my niece Emily’s boyfriend here in L.A., about a new video game called “L.A. Noire” [sic] and his link to a trailer for the game on YouTube (above). Coincidentally, I had that very morning read an article about the game in the Los Angeles Times. She thought I’d be interested in it, and she was right.

But buy a video game console? My nephews in Texas (my other sister’s kids, that is, not Emily’s siblings) played video games incessantly when they were in junior high and high school, but they were all combat games featuring excessive ordnance ridding the Earth of aliens and the like. (Their father, a Marine Corps Vietnam veteran who served as a tunnel rat, wisely flatly forbade them to play any games that simulated actual wars.) The last time Margaret and I were both in Texas visiting family, the game console with all its beeping and explosions and gunfire had driven her nuts, and she had heretofore expressed nothing but contempt for them.

But this—this was different. “L.A. Noire” is an atmospheric police procedural. First of all, although the game features any number of car chases and gun battles and other mayhem, its focus is on investigation and interrogation rather than on action. Secondly, and this was a big selling point, the game designers (Rockstar Games and Team Bondi) had painstakingly recreated three large neighborhoods in Los Angeles, which is of course my town, almost exactly as it appeared in the late 1940s: Hollywood, Wilshire (now mostly known as Koreatown), and Downtown. To do so, they had scanned thousands of pictures of L.A. (The only real liberty they deliberately took was making L.A.’s ubiquitous palm trees much taller in the game than they were in the 40s, but I can live with that. There are also seem to be a lot of dumpsters. Did they even have dumpsters in the 40s? And there aren’t any smudge pots, still a common roadside attraction when I was a kid in the 60s.)

They have made the closest thing to a time machine for the city I live in, and bundled it with a genre mystery game. How could I resist that?

So I did a little research, and opted for the Sony PlayStation 3 instead of the marginally less expensive Microsoft XBox. Off to Best Buy, where I also placed a pre-release order for “L.A. Noire” and bought another game (“Portal 2”, if you must know—it was fun) to practice with before getting the game I was truly after. The day “L.A. Noire” arrived, I showed up at Best Buy and tremblingly took it home for a test run.

We’re about 20% through “L.A. Noire” by now (I usually have the controller, but Margaret and I decide together what moves to make), and I have to say that it is, well, not to overstate the obvious, COMPLETELY BITCHIN’!

Although I must confess that my gaming console skills are not those of my nephews. Every time I get into a gun battle, I get creamed. Every time I get behind the wheel of an automobile, I turn the game into an inadvertent demolition derby. But still. The game is very engaging, and uses a new facial scanning technology that renders the faces and expressions of all the actors who contributed to the game extremely lifelike (the star, playing the part of Cole Phelps, our hero working his way up the LAPD heirarchy as a detective, is Aaron Staton, probably familiar to the Gentle Reader as Ken Cosgrove on “Mad Men”), which is important when interviewing witnesses and suspects, as the characters usually have tells to indicate how truthful they are in their answers. The investigations so far are interesting and challenging without being insurmountable, and are essentially on the same scale as crime fiction short stories. You know I’m going to like that.

But the real star of the game is 1947 Los Angeles. Sometimes Margaret and I will ignore the plot entirely and just cruise around, taking in the sights, comparing the city in the game to the one we live in. Margaret grew up in Los Angeles, and says it very much reminds her of what L.A. was like when she was a very little girl in the 50s. (She was disappointed, though, that the concrete slabs at Grauman’s Chinese Theater didn’t have the hand- and footprints of any movie stars.)

In a word, it’s superb. A word of warning, though: the game contains considerable profanity and features adult themes, so it’s categorically not for young children. And I’m still wondering where that “E” at the end of “noire” came from, but what the hell.

This is the city. Los Angeles, California.