Remember growing up with Video Games? Well I don’t. I grew up in a strict Amish family. The Butter Churn was our Pac Man; barn rising, our Super Mario Brothers. Years after the fact, I look back with nostalgia at lazy Saturday afternoons constructing an entire building from scratch. Perhaps it was a simpler time for me, before I got involved with the English and the internet.
Video Games were lost on me. I thought they were just pointless action sequences. Some of my friends began telling me about one particular video game, L.A. Noire, that I might enjoy. According to them it had a compelling storyline, intelligence and a bit more on mid-century economists than you’d expect. Usually I don’t hear about such epic tales about video games. While I’ve heard this isn’t the first time this has happened, it may be the most impressive.
We start in 1940s Los Angeles. Our hero (Cole Phelps) comes from Kansas as a way of righting the evil he sees in the world. Los Angeles to him appears as a place where Satan has taken hold of the poor citizenry. Early in the game, as he’s rising through the ranks of the Police Force, he sees his first murder victim. As they remove the sheet they placed over her, with her body mutilated beyond recognition after she had been murdered to death, he turns to his dog and says “Toto I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore!”
The Midwest comes up a lot in the game. Slowly we learn of Cole Phelps’s background. His family (the Joads) constantly bothers him for money. Apparently they work as sharecroppers trying to scrape by after they left Oklahoma years ago. Compared to the rest of his family, Cole has made it further than anyone would have imagined. As a child, Cole suffered badly from being utterly useless n rural Kansas, conducting investigations of missing corn stalks but not actually picking anything. Occasionally you see how Cole tries to overcome his feelings of inadequacy by frequenting prostitutes. Prostitutes help restore Cole’s health after he gets shot.
A lot of people are working against Cole. Corruption extends to the highest offices in the Los Angeles. You have to avoid being assassinated a few times. To ensure better odds of survival, you’ll need to befriend an Anarchist couple from Turku, Finland: the Dickovers. Full warning though, Cole laughs uncontrollably at the city name Turku, thinking it to be such a silly name.
By the end of the 40s you come close to breaking the Governor’s iron grip on the state government. The final battle requires you to stock up on small puppies to shoot at the Governor, killing him with kindness. Or you can employ a prostitute who will begin singing “Killing me Softly” and moving Governor Nixon to tears. Either way, you will lose the 1978 Chevy Camaro you got from the wormhole in the Red Light district.
I don’t want to give away the entire game’s plot. There are certain touches that make the game more entertaining which avoid giving away further plot details. Whenever you need to make change for a $10 or a $20, you need a Math Blaster. Math Blaster is a game within the game where you save the universe by doing basic addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. Do this enough and you’ll earn your Ph.D in mathematics. Once you earn your Ph.D in Mathematics, you have to choose between working for Friedrich Hayek or John Keynes. Either way, you have to give up working the beat as a police officer.
Overall, I really liked this game. Certainly I am excited for DC McCarthy, where you’re a small-time representative from Minnesota who has to work to clear the names of alleged enemies of the state.