L.A. Noire

This week: Tales of Battlefield 3 hackers banning innocent players, WW2 shooters are a good thing and Uncharted 4's million polygon characters. Plus mucho more.

Now that all the end-of-year celebrations and accolades from 2011 are out of the way, it's time to start sifting through whatever's left over and putting together our annual, hate-filled Anti-Awards. Those don't run until this Friday, but in the meantime, we've asked our editors what their own biggest gaming disappointments were last year...

At first I didn't think to pay much attention to Cole Phelps' comments as he picked up irrelevant items when working a case. I assumed they were just meaningless remarks that had no bearing on anything important at all. But then, while nosing about for evidence in someone's apartment, Cole picks up a clock and says: "This tells me nothing". Bam. Just like that.

This is a small selection of some of the complex contemplations (and what they mean) that Cole Phelps dropped on me as I played through LA Noire. But be warned, this is pretty deep and intense, so feel free to bail now if this kind of radical thinking scares you.

The last of the LA Noire DLC cases is a little ho-hum, but at the very least it provides a fat stack of easy Achievements and Trophies. The Achievements and Trophies in Reefer Madness are all very easy to get, and can be scored in a single play through if you don't mind missing out on a large portion of the case. For the sake of completeness we've also worked out the rest of the case so you can get a five star rating if you're so inclined.

The downloadable cases released so far for L.A. Noire have all been short, but they’ve nonetheless taken us to some interesting places. Nicholson Electroplating gave us the destruction of a small chunk of Los Angeles, and culminated in a huge shootout in the Spruce Goose’s hangar. The Naked City and A Slip of the Tongue had us breaking up theft rings and grilling a few memorable idiots along the way. After all that, however, Reefer Madness feels like a weird note to end on (for now, anyway)...

For all its realism, LA Noire still has to bow to traditional videogame logic in order to be fun. So while Rockstar and Team Bondi trumpeted their achievements in city detail and gritty detective work, I couldn't help but laugh each time something decidedly "gamey" happened to these otherwise straight-laced officers. Did '40s detectives really scale pipes, leap across crumbling movie sets or flip cars into oncoming traffic? Hey, if this is what it was really like to be a cop back then, retroactively sign me up!

LA Noire's straight-faced dick-in-a-hat Cole Phelps might be good at cross-examining witnesses and interrogating suspects and he's certainly never short of a thing or two to say about naked dead women. But if it's not business, what does a man like Cole Phelps talk about? Is he as adept in the art of conversation as he is in solving crime? Let's take a look at how Cole Phelps handles a conversationally opportunistic moment at the office water cooler:

Have you already played the best videogame 2011 has to offer? The question may sound crazy with six months – and a massive, sequel-stuffed holiday calendar – left to go, but just look at the contenders. A Valve masterpiece. A Rockstar epic. A Nintendo classic. An Epic experiment. Three of the titles below scored a perfect 10/10 on our site and, depending on which GamesRadar editor you ask, the other four possibly deserved to as well...

The latest L.A. Noire DLC case has arrived, and brings with it a new group of Achievements and Trophies for you to collect. We've pointed out where each piece of evidence is and what you'll need to say in each of the interrogations, as well as where you'll be able to snag each Achievement/Trophy.