Who is Cole Phelps?
Oh, I can recount the dry facts easily enough: lousy Marine officer who got a Silver Star anyway, good case man for the LAPD, affair with a German junkie, etc. What I'm curious about is the emotional life of the fellow. I spent upwards of twenty hours plodding around a sterile version of L.A. with the guy and I still don't have a clue. He's a lump, as unreadable and impenetrable as a copy of Kant's Kritik der reinen Vernunft written in cuneiform on a lead brick. And we can't even blame it on lousy animation. L.A. Noire's problem is, instead, structural. It exists at the unhappiest place along the spectrum from movie to game, where the developers don't do enough to create characters, and fail to give the players any tools to do it themselves.
Oh, I can recount the dry facts easily enough: lousy Marine officer who got a Silver Star anyway, good case man for the LAPD, affair with a German junkie, etc. What I'm curious about is the emotional life of the fellow. I spent upwards of twenty hours plodding around a sterile version of L.A. with the guy and I still don't have a clue. He's a lump, as unreadable and impenetrable as a copy of Kant's Kritik der reinen Vernunft written in cuneiform on a lead brick. And we can't even blame it on lousy animation. L.A. Noire's problem is, instead, structural. It exists at the unhappiest place along the spectrum from movie to game, where the developers don't do enough to create characters, and fail to give the players any tools to do it themselves.
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