Being a gamer has never been an affordable habit. So unlike most of the masses out there, I finally got around to purchasing L.A. Noire, a game I have been eagerly anticipating since its first details and screenshots trickled out nearly two years ago. I was intrigued by the idea of Rockstar pushing a game that was more about logic than its usual GTA-style action. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a huge fan of the more visceral games but a change of pace is always welcome. And being that I was raised on adventure game classics like King’s Quest and Monkey Island, I had sincerely missed the cerebral aspects of gaming.
It wasn't long into my first few missions of L.A. Noire when I started to think of Heavy Rain, another very well done detective game. Even though I haven't spent too much time with Quantic Dream's interactive title, I loved the way it was presented: incredibly cinematic and very well written. It certainly seemed like a great time for detective-type games. Even Batman, the world’s greatest detective, was finally able to shine; he should just be doing more than stomping goon ass in an asylum. But this is where my cynicism comes in, a terrible realization: we've seen all this before.
When Grand Theft Auto III became a hit it wasn't long before True Crime and Dead to Rights (or even worse, Driver 3) saturated the market. Even movies that didn’t need to be licensed were plugged into the formula and hoped for the same sort of profitable outcome, i.e. The Godfather and Scarface. It’s the nature of entertainment. When something becomes successful, it is prone to lower-quality knocks off which do more harm than good. And Rockstar's latest success story may be another excuse for developers to ruin the detective genre.
There is no sense in hiding the fact that gaming companies long for a piece of the money cake as big and satisfying as Rockstar's. Gaming successes however have catalyzed corporate greed. Take Guitar Hero for example. Here was a game that came out and was a surprise hit, and was immediately given a sequel that improved upon it. The sequel was even more successful, so the next year saw the release of two separate Guitar Hero games. Then four the following year, then six the next, and before they knew it, the GH franchise suffocated under its own weight. And this is all to say nothing of the Rock Band series and the soul crushingly terrible games like Rock Revolution and Power Gig.
So far nothing is on the horizon, but everything is eventual: the poorly-plotted games that instead of playing like a feature film instead play out like an amateur high school production, the well meaning games with mediocre controls and counter-intuitive clue systems. And due to the critical and commercial successes of the great games, the cash-hungry Wii clones won't follow too far behind.
In all honesty, I don’t want to be negative . For now, I’m going to enjoy the quality games before the proverbial crud hits the fan. I’m just not too thrilled by the prospect of a perfectly good genre being strip-mined by the industry. So enjoy it while it lasts. Because somewhere, in a boardroom far away, someone just stood up and exclaimed, “We’ll call it Kinective!”