Hello and welcome to Waypoint 101, where Waypoint is contributors chatting in detail about

classic games or just games that we're strangely hung up on because as listeners know, not every game we go to bad for would fit people's definition of a classic.

But anyway, for today, I'm your host Rob Zachney and today I'm joined by Cameron Conzelman.

Hello!

So today we're going to be talking about LA Noir team bond eyes and rock stars, 2011 hit detective game that has since achieved almost skyrim levels of being ported to new platforms.

If you haven't already checked it out, you should check out Cam's retrospective on the game from last month, where he discussed the game's noir influences and it's ultimately...

Ambivalent, uncommitted worldview, where binaries of good and evil are complicated and rejected, but also the moral questions are evaded in that same process.

It's an ambivalent game I would say.

Oh, absolutely. I mean, and you know, it's a noir.

And so, you know, I mean, it's leaning into that, right? And so the question is, you know, does it earn ambivalence?

You know, I think when you approach an in-war or any kind of, you know, whatever, not pseudo noir, whatever they're called, the kind of follow on in the genre, the question to me is always,

did the thing that you've spent time watching or reading or Neo-Ware is the word I was looking for?

But does it earn the kind of, you know, nihilism that noir, as a genre ghost war, and I think in some ways, you know, I guess part of the ambivalence in the article is getting through the whole game,

and I played the whole thing in a pretty short amount of time in like a week or something like that.

That's maybe faster than anyone should play LNWAR.

But you know, in big parts of it, I was like, oh yeah, this is like really firing on all cylinders.

You know, this is a question for you that we didn't talk about just a minute ago, but is this a full spoilers going out?

I'm talking about every part of this game. Do I need to hold anything back? What do you think?

Yeah, so that kind of touches on maybe the broader relationship of Waypoint One.

So the short answer is we're going full spoilers here.

But yeah, first I should say thanks to people listening right now, I've already made the launch of Waypoint Plus a success.

But I think to lay out some of our thinking around Waypoint 101, because I'm not sure this representative, but we're always going to be doing.

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