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The answer is of course no. The studio no longer exists. We (I) desperately need more games like LA Noire.
Warning: This blog post has a big spoiler about L.A. Noire
Here are some old musings from my first playthrough of L.A. Noire:
I managed to get through the game on a Saturday night. Is that a good way to spend Easter? I would have liked to watch Breaking Bad on Easter, but the DVD box didn't arrive on Thursday, but of course on the next post day, i.e. Tuesday after Easter.
On Saturday night, one street crime was still undone, and it bothered me when I didn't know which Desk it was. In the end, there were two options left, Vice and Arson. I found it on Vice the next day.
I only had 3-4 crime cases left when I accidentally read a big spoiler about the ending of LA Noire. I had already been wondering just how low Cole Phelps can sink? Demotions after demotions. I don't know how upset I would have been if I hadn't known about his death beforehand, because even now it felt bad. And that way of dying was very stupid. The whole damn game for nothing? And if you play through those cases or the game again, then its going towards Cole Phelps' death all the time? Make it make sense.
Well, thinking rationally, wouldn't it just be fair that at the end of all games the playable character would die, when they die quite a lot during the game anyway. Only if you survived the whole game without dying once, then the character could survive at the end, that would be fair.
However, the stupidest thing about LA Noire is that suddenly, in the last cases, you have to play as a completely different character than before. There was no sense in that game character change. Really annoying and pointless. Took me out of the game, so to speak.
In LA Noire, it's hard to kill people, that is, pedestrians. They almost always manage to avoid the car. The best way to kill them is when the person has already fallen to the ground, for example because they were startled by a madman driving on the sidewalk. ;) On the other hand, in LA Noire, the police won't come after you no matter what you do, so you can cause a mayhem in peace. If only you could. I also had to try to kill my police partner. When I finally managed to do it, it was instant game over of course.
Perhaps the funniest coincidence was once when I died while walking towards the door of my own car. Just a small touch from a passing car, and I died. A bit of the same thing, i.e. a mere touch was enough to cause the death of another character later. A bit of a contrast to that was when in one of the cases, while chasing a criminal on foot, some machine completely crushed Phelps into a pancake. I don't really understand those deaths by a light touch, I've been properly hit by a car many times without dying. I just accidentally rammed my partner twice with a fire truck, and he didn't die.
I also managed to drop into the void and die that way. So I found a bug in the game. I went through the house and the next thing the car dropped in a white void until he died and "officer down". Unpleasant, because right then I was going through the city along its edges and I didn't remember where on the map I was going. I was looking for cars at the same time, I always had to go through all the parking lots and cars, for the Auto Fanatic trophy.
That feeling and that moment when you find the last car and you achieve 100% game completion. In the words of Homer Simpson: I am not easily impressed. Wow, a blue car. Sky blue. I was also missing one newspaper for a long time, and it happened to be the very first one. D'oh.
But what to do next? 5 stars from every case? I'm still missing some trophies. I already started getting 47,000 dollars in damage for the Public Menace trophy, they say it's best done by driving the fire truck to the gas station fuel pumps a few times. I already destroyed two of them. I already got more than 32,000 dollars in damage with that other guy once, but I ended the case too quickly. All those destroyed cars for nothing. The second time I started doing the same thing, but the guy got hit by the car and died just then.
LA Noire is one of my all time favorite games, and I have played it through countless of times. The above text was from my very first playthrough.
