Run To The Hills

LA. Noire is no doubt one of the most anticipated games of 2011. There’s a very good reason for this – it’s because Rockstar are good at making faces, or something. I kid, the real reason is that they’ve managed to get their paws on some newfangled camera thing that tracks the movement and expressions of a person’s face and translates it into a realistic facial animation on a character in a game. If it doesn’t sound that impressive, come here while I give you a slap have a look at this video and make your own mind up about it. Definitely looks amazing to me!

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q2EG5J05048[/youtube]

However, having that kind of technology behind the scenes is all well and good, but what worries me is that Rockstar has had a hand making the game at all. “What’s so bad about that?”, I hear you cry. Well, when it boils down to it, not much is bad about it all. Rockstar have always made brilliant games that keep you enchanted from beginning to end, but there’s one problem I’ve always had with their games and I can’t think of a single occasion in which this particular annoyance of mine hasn’t been present:

“Hold A to run”. Or holding A to gallop as well, in the case of Red Dead Redemption.

Does this not annoy anyone else? It annoys the hell out me because I forget to do it. Crazy, isn’t it? A gamer forgetting to press buttons – it’s like a cyclist forgetting how to pedal. It’s at its worst when I’m in the middle of a fight too; I’ll be taking shots at varmints in Red Dead only to have to leg it out of there at a moment’s notice. I’ll be too busy trying to get a few shots off that I’ll be reduced to casually sauntering away, with my enemy and death following close behind. In a game where maneuverability can be the difference between life and death, it’s frustrating that such a rudimentary movement system is used.

The baffling thing about it is that Rockstar isn’t the only developer to have used it. Gears of War 3 and all the previous Gears of War titles have used it, but at least Epic Games’ effort didn’t suck. Instead, holding A to sprint in Gears of War is seamlessly integrated with the cover system and the grisly, in-your-face approach to combat – not to mention the smaller, more claustrophobic maps. In comparison, Red Dead Redemption‘s maps are all quite open and you can be attacked from almost literally every direction, sometimes seemingly every direction at once. Having that kind of limited control over movement in Red Dead Redemption‘s case just doesn’t make sense to me.

It almost strikes me as if Rockstar haven’t properly figured out to implement pressure-sensitive thumbstick controls, but I know that’s not the case because they’ve actually implemented it like that a few times. What annoys me even more is that on the few occasions where the more traditional method of having all movement controlled by the thumbsticks is used, it works well. And it works well, because it has always worked. Holding A to run feels like such an antiquated and aggravating way to move your character that I almost completely abhor the use of it. Don’t even get me started on the whole “tap A to sprint” fiasco!

Is it too much to ask that something as simple movement should have an equally simple method of input like, oh, I don’t know, nearly every other game on the planet? I hope that LA Noire is the game that breaks this mould, but at the same time I’m willing to bet that it won’t.