True Crime: New York City

I will admit that this game has been out for awhile, but it was recently recommended to me and I tried it out, here is my review.

Platform: X-Box
Rating: 8.5 out of 10
Game Type: Action

Overview:

This is a game where you can make society whatever you want it to be. You are a police detective for the NYPD and your job is to solve crime in New York City. There is a main mission for those who want to get through the story quickly, and you are always told where to go in order to complete the different scenarios that comprise the main mission.

For the more adventurous of us, there are random calls that come out from dispatch that give you crimes to solve unrelated to the main mission. In addition to that, you can frisk any random civilian you like for weapons or drugs, with or without due cause, but the odds of actually finding anything on a random frisk are around one in fifteen, so it is mostly a waste of time.

Another side quest is to clean up the crime in various precincts in New York, and how clean any given precinct is will be obvious because the cleaner it is, the lighter the color. There is some benefit to cleaning up these precincts because different stores and locations will be open to you as the precinct becomes cleaner.

You get experience points for every crime you resolve, or person you arrest. Even if you plant evidence on someone and then arrest them, you still get experience points. Experience points are necessary because there are five different detective ranks, and the higher your rank, the better cars/guns that you are able to buy and the higher quality special moves you are capable of.

All the killing…None of the paperwork

The point of this game is that you can handle crime in whatever way you deem appropriate. You can use your bare fists in order to neutralize a perpetrator, you can use a light or heavy weapon to try to knock them out, or you can shoot them. The game makes it possible for you to shoot them in the arms or legs for a neutralizing shot, which will down your opponent while earning you good cop points and giving you the opportunity to make an arrest.

I find it more fun to be a bad cop. For instance, if there is a gang brawl going on, the easiest and quickest way to solve a crime is to run over all of them with my automobile, they are all dead and I get my experience points. Besides, they should not have joined a gang anyway.

If there is a domestic going on somewhere, I find it appropriate to go in and shoot both of the parties involved. He should not have abused his wife and she should have known enough to recognize her husband’s abusinve tendencies prior to wedding him. Clearly he is a spouse-abuser and she is an idiot, hence, I kill them both.

If there is a bank hold-up, then I will go in and kill the person holding up the bank clerk, and then I will kill the bank clerk for being a pain in my ass and making me go and save her.

Not only will all of these things earn you experience points, but provided you minimize how many people you kill that are not responsible for the incident, you will be all right. However, going around killing innocent civilians will get you deemed a, “rogue,” cop and you will be hunted down and killed.

Game over…I think not.

In this game, you have unlimited lives and are incapable of permanently dying, there is never a game over. In fact, the only time that you really lose anything as a result of dying is if you were working on a quest in the main mission, in which event, you simply return to the beginning of the quest.

If you are killed while rogue, (there is a meter on the right-bottom of your screen and if your rogue meter goes past 3/6 bars, you are considered a rogue cop. If you are at 2/6 bars, the cops will still attack you, but they will not really go out of their way to go after you) you will be temporarily demoted to beat patrol where you must make three, “good cop,” arrests (no planting evidence, or killing anyone) and then you will be returned to detective status.

The game will expect you to immediately continue with the main mission after your beat patrol duty provided you make three good cop arrests, you can avoid doing so by saving your game, and then loading it. When you do this, you will be back in your detective clothes, but you will not be forced into continuing with the mission.

Which is good, because the main mission is one of only two downsides to this game. The problem with the main mission is that you are playing this game from the standpoint of a detective, but you do not have to solve anything. 95% of the various quests that make up the main mission have you just going around and shooting people. There are a few booby traps hidden here and there, but nothing really to figure out. It almost defeats the purpose of being a detective.

The gameplay is pretty smooth and the controls are programmable, but this is actually one of the few games where the default control setting seems the easiest to command. There are many interesting and intricate little features to this game that you will discover as you play it. (i.e. the ability to change point of view when driving) The graphics are very sophisticated for the X-Box, although, there are only about thirty or forty different looks for non-essential characters, but what can you expect?

The one thing I did notice about this game is that randomization is key. With many games, if you go down a street at any given time you will see the same people, the same cars, and the same things going on, but in this game, everything is constantly moving and changing.

The only other flaw this game has is that it is prone to freezing up, or sometimes it will overload itself and your map of the city (bottom left corner) will temporarily disappear, it is usually self-correcting and takes only a minute but can be a pain if you are chasing someone or heading to a specific location.

For all of this, I give True Crime: New York City an 8.5 out of 10. The top features being excellent graphics, good randomization, good controls, and the random mission concept can keep you entertained for a few hours. The only flaws to this game are intermittent freezing and a weak main mission and storyline.

Think you’re a gang-banging hard-core thug?

My tactical shotgun says otherwise.

That is what I was wondering myself,
being an Undercover investigator and detective apparently means players need to kill multiple gang members.
Some sort of basic problem solving should have been integrated into the murdering.

I agree completely. The original True Crime (Streets of L.A.) was a little bit better at integrating problem solving into your mission, but still not much. In fact, I’ve yet to find a game of this nature that does integrate such, there are some action games that do, but there are not really any investigator games where you actually investigate anything.

From a social science and psychological perspective, this is fascinating. Not in a good way, I’m sorry to say. Video games don’t lead to violence and abuse, they uncover what is inside us and bring it to the surface.

Remember the famous prison experiment done in the 70s? The psychologist’s name starts with a Z I think, I can look it up later. The problem is that we do need cops to keep social order, presidents and armies.

Maybe video games that make people think and solve social issues, which can be done in an entertaining way as well, should be on the agenda. Or is there so much aggression in teens that it just can’t be marketed?

Has there ever been a realistic game with actual consequences? Imagine if you get a game over, the game self-destructs, and you have to buy a new one. You think that’s pushing it? It would sure make the gaming experience really intense.

For some people, I’m sure that is true, but for others, I think it is a bit of a stretch. I was really into the original Bloodrayne game on PlayStation for awhile, for instance, and I don’t want to be a female vampire nor do I believe in the existence of vampires. There are other examples, as well. I think that a lot of it for me is about the challenge, and then when the challenge is over it can be kind of fun (if the game has replay value) to sort of play an open-ended game like that in a way it is not really supposed to be played in order to win.

Agreed.

I think that would be kind of Marketable. The concept would probably work for a game with the same overall design and gameplay as the Sims games. You could work Legislation in certain ways and be scored based on employment rates, average wage, general happiness.

The difficult aspect of that idea is probably keeping it neutral from a political standpoint. What I mean by that is, you couldn’t have all Leftist ideals make the populace happy and have all Conservative ideals upset them.

I don’t think that is pushing it. Even if it were, you could set up the game itself to have some kind of internal clock and if you get a game over the game does not permit you to play again for a month or something like that.

It was almost like that for many of the original NES games, because there was no way to save many of the games, Atari too, I think. There was one in particular for the Sega Genesis I liked called Kid Chameleon it was nearly impossible to beat on one play-through, but that’s what you had to try to do.

I did it once with the SNES’ The Legends of Zelda: A Link to the Past I made it so that I couldn’t save so if I died I had to start the whole thing again. I ended up running the table on the first go around (Always keep a fairy in one of your jars) but it took over twelve hours.

Great points.

Keeping it neutral? Why the fuck would we want that? No way, the further left the better. Game over is when the player goes conservative.

I suppose if you want to go with the Market trend of Gamers. Most of them probably do lean left, so that makes sense.

Nope, I’m not interested in making money. I’m interested in presenting an idea that might possibly get people thinking about social issues, and aware of the consequences of ideology, action, as well as non-action. They can see for themselves, if the game is constructed properly, all the pitfalls of a social-darwinian, conservative ideology.

It’s a question between a dog eats dog world, as my sociology professor, Dr. Levine, PhD from Berkley, pointed out, and providing social structures for public issues that individuals do not have the capabilities to solve for themselves. Now, he didn’t take a stand on what kind of world we should live in, in fact, interestingly, he opposed advertising left-wing ideology and a kind of brainwashing for a good end, as I was in favor and about to argue before I went to his lecture, to counter all the brainwashing we get from the right-wing. Thinking about it, he has the truly liberal approach: do not dictate ideology, but allow people to make ethical decisions for themselves, provided they have good information to make reasoned decisions. What the liberals must do, I think, is fight against misinformation and allow people to make their decisions based on actual facts – you know, like global warming is an actual problem despite the misinformation the oil companies deliberately, as well as the politicians they bought, spread throughout society – and not political, cultural, and philosophical propaganda that is fed to us by giant corporations and the right-wing.

I have much more to say, but I’m tired and sleepy, so we’ll continue this a bit later.

-tum