5) L.A. Noire – 2011
Estimated cost: $50,000,000
I would be blown away if $49,999,999 of this didn’t go into those facial animations. I mean, look at them. LOOK AT THEIR FACES. Jesus, they’re so real. This game’s three yeas old now, and on a last-gen console, and it’s still outshining every single other game that dares to try and have characters with faces in it. Even famous Hollywood characters with actual faces like Ellen Page and Willem Dafoe. Cough.
L.A. Noire was impossibly well presented, and a perfectly captured slice of the the dark underbelly of ’40s California. What it was not, on the other hand, was that good of a game. It hurts me to say it, even today, but there’s no escaping the fact that it was simplistic, disjointed, and dare I say it, a bit dull.
[zergpaid]Rising through the ranks of the L.A. Police Department – as well as having free roam of the city itself – sounds like a virtual dream come true, but in practice it was little more than an on-rails point and click adventure. It was Grand Theft Auto with the stabilizers on. Arguably that gameplay choice was within context – to begin with at least – but that context quickly dissolves when you’re running around candlelit sewers looking for a schizophrenic with a flamethrower by the end of the game.
If rumours are to be believed, this technology is coming back in a big way for next-gen, with formerly broke developer Team Bondi’s spiritual sequel Whore of the Orient.