It's been a hot minute since we last gathered round the RPS Time Capsule vault (thanks, Gamescom), but at long last we have returned with another cracking year of PC games to preserve: 2011. In hindsight, it's a bit of an interesting year for Time Capsuling purposes, as we're now getting to the point where games from this era are getting their own remakes and remasters, or fancier, super duper director's cut special editions. We've included the original 2011 release of one of these games in this month's Time Capsule, but there's another notable exception we've decided to save for further down the line. I mean, seriously, would you really recommend vanilla Skyrim from 2011 over 2016's Special Edition?
]]>It sure has been a week for the Rockstar games vault. After accidentally pulling a bunch of their games off Steam on Monday, then bringing them back, some other older Rockstar games got a treat. The PC versions of Max Payne 3 and L.A. Noire now include all their DLCs for free. A nice little treat for the back catalogue.
]]>Rockstar’s first foray into the uneven world of virtual reality isn’t a GTA spin-off, or a brand new game, but instead VR version of Rockstar and Team Bondi's 2011 detective romp, L.A. Noire [official site]. While the current generation of consoles are getting the whole game with added 4K support and the like, over on PC we're in for a trimmed-down version redone as a Vive exclusive.
]]>If you played Ryse: Son of Rome you may remember it for the serviceably clangy combat. My friend “Jack”, a police officer from northern England of several years standing, recalls the game for other reasons. “There are those bits where you join a shield wall - you're in a tortoise formation. There are public order situations that are like that. Most officers in Yorkshire get riot training, because of the riots in Bradford. And that sense in Ryse of having all your colleagues alongside, you're all behind your shields, getting pelted with stuff, there are flames going off everywhere and you've got your enemies in front of you... That's real! That happens.”
City riots are, he adds, scenarios that could be “great” in a third-person action game - our wide-ranging conversation is rife with jarring transitions of this sort, where talk of broken bones and drug dealing flips over abruptly into talk of reward mechanics and hardware specs. “Certainly with the advances in technology, the latest consoles and PCs could cope very easily with the amount of animation required, the particle stuff like smoke, all the crap that comes up off the floor, people getting hurt all around you. It's like that and it's scary.”
]]>Every Sunday, we reach deep into Rock, Paper, Shotgun's 141-year history to pull out one of the best moments from the archive. This week, Adam's 2012 article singing the praises of videogame cities which are more than mere reconstruction, but are built from the bricks and mortar of ideas.
I've been visiting various cities recently, which always fill me with confusion and wonder, then Dishonored made me think about how much I miss Looking Glass. Put the two together and this happens. Join me in a meandering word-search for cohesion and theme in the use of the city across Thief, and the selected works of Rockstar and Charles Dickens. Be warned, there are spoilers for all three Thief games.
]]>Here's something I never thought of when playing LA Noire. Whatever its other merits and failings, the stuff it does with facial animation and performance capture was amazing, and something the whole industry can benefit from presuming it's not drowning in a thousand million unbreakable patents (which it probably is). However, all it was being used for was to, essentially, just achieve a slightly better version of something games and especially their cutscenes already did. We can find rehearsed, scripted dialogue and, to wildly varying degrees, attendant facial emotion and animation, all over the place. What we can't find is naturalistic, unrehearsed performances - people being people, as opposed to be people being videogame characters. Take a look at this to see how big the difference can be.
]]>The British Academy Video Game Awards took place on Friday night and Portal 2 was awarded highest honours, taking home little gold faces not only for Best Game, but also for Story and Design. Congratulations to Valve, who by this point must be making plans to put up some new shelves of award-bearing load strength. The popular vote went to Battlefield 3, which also won awards for Online Multiplayer and Audio Achievement.
The full list is celebrating after the jump.
]]>I've been visiting various cities recently, which always fill me with confusion and wonder, then Dishonored made me think about how much I miss Looking Glass. Put the two together and this happens. Join me in a meandering word-search for cohesion and theme in the use of the city across Thief, and the selected works of Rockstar and Charles Dickens. Be warned, there are spoilers for all three Thief games.
]]>This year has been unusually rich in the kind of game that I most enjoy: those that are open-ended, or provide a sandbox world for me to mess about in. We usually get a couple of these every year, but in 2011 we seem to have run into a minor bounty of the open stuff, which is good news for explorers and meanderers alike. I've gone into a bit more detail about why this pleases me below.
]]>L.A. Noire: The Complete Edition, so named due to the PC version of Rockstar's vintage crime opus containing all the DLC from the get-go, launched on Steam not minutes ago in the US, though Brits must wait the traditional three extra days. Retailers, you're bad people. Still: I've been playing it over the last few days, so here is An Opinion.
There's a slight element of redundancy to writing this, isn't there? If you have even the slightest interest in Rockstar's detective-'em-up, you'll surely have read some kind of review of it in the long months since its May release on console. Whatever I'm about to tell you, you probably already know. Like that's going to stop me from droning on about, of course.
L.A. Noire is two distinct games. One is a much more limited take on the traditional Rockstar open urban world/ third person driving/shooting game, but set in the 40s, with angry policemen removed (you are the angry policeman here) and cars that struggle to top 60 miles an hour. Early 20th century LA is a beautiful, richly-detailed place - everything from newsstand vendors to smokey divebars recreated with painstaking detail.
]]>What to say about Rockstar? They’ve made me gnash my teeth in anguish this week by stating, to nobody’s surprise, that Red Dead Redemption is unlikely to grace my PC, your PC or anyone else’s PC. But they are giving us LA Noire. They finally got round to releasing Grand Theft Auto IV but there were technical issues and beyond them it needed a monstrously powerful computer to fully capture its criminal charms. And then they went and annoyed parts of the substantial modding community by releasing a patch which, some claimed, was designed to cripple non-vanilla versions of the game. What to say about Rockstar?
]]>We sent Agent Smee to study the case of the L.A. Noire port to PC. This is the detailed report he sent back. Having studied its contents, we have no reason to suspect foul play.
The notebook I carry around everywhere is an unreadable mess. Written in handwriting so poor I can barely sometimes decipher my own words, it’s a collection of incomprehensible interview notes, indecipherable idle thoughts, scrawled doodles, contact details inevitably copied down incorrectly and shopping lists written over one another in different coloured ink before being scribbled out. It’s a nightmare, is what I’m saying, so playing LA Noire in the presence of the hard-nosed Detective Cole Phelps turns out to be some kind of lurid personal fantasy. His notebook, you see, is beautiful. Meticulous, organised, copperplate writing, lifelike portraits and intricate still life pencil compositions, the perfect tool of organised life. It’s not exactly often I find myself jealous of fictional videogame characters, but boy howdy do I want to be able to organise a notebook as well as Phelps.
]]>Release dates and system specifications: least entertaining of all the PC game-related facts. Oh well, it's worth stating, given this is Rockstar's first PC game in a while. Ambitious but oddball detective puzzle/action saga LA Noire is coming to PC as 'the Complete Collection, which includes all the DLC release to date. In terms of PC-specific features, all we're promised is "increased resolution and graphical detail along with keyboard remapping and gamepad functionality." Plus NVIDIA 3D Vision support, but whatever.
When's it due and what kind of PC will it need? I'm totally going to make you click Read The Rest Of This Entry to find out. SUCKER.
]]>Some sad news, I'm afraid. The Australian Securities and Investments Commission has announced that Team Bondi, developers of LA Noire, have gone into administration. It’s not long since stories of the troubled and prolonged development hit the airwaves and Rockstar had already stated they would not publish the team’s next title. Rockstar do own the rights to LA Noire though and the PC version is in the hands of their Leeds studio. This shouldn’t change anything on that front, though we shall keep an eye on the situation. As for Team Bondi, judging from what conditions were apparently like in the studio, it’s amazing to see the ambition that still made it into LA Noire. Sad times indeed for those hardworking people who may undeservedly lose their jobs.
]]>Oh dear. Oh deary dear. All is not well between L.A. Noire developer Team Bondi and publisher Rockstar. Rockstar Leeds are busy working away on the PC version, but a report by GamesIndustry.biz, indicates Rockstar have no intention of working with Team Bondi again. Here's the grisly details:
]]>So what should PC gamers expect from L.A. Noire? Well, for a start they should expect a strange hybrid of a point adventure game, a GTA-free roaming driving game with on-foot pursuits and shoot-outs, all hung on an arduous, sometimes perplexing interrogation game. But what else? And what could be fixed? What should be fixed? And what about Red Dead Redemption?
There's lots of things to think about.
]]>Yep. It's happening. L.A. Noire, Rockstar's 1940s crime thriller is coming to PC.
“L.A. Noire is a new type of game that makes players see through a detective’s eyes in 1940s Los Angeles,” said Rockstar's Sam Houser. “Its unique blend of story, action and crime solving will be perfect to play on PC.”
It'll arrive in the Autumn. Other details below.
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