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True Crime: Streets of LA
(hx) 10:19 AM CEST - Jun,14 2004
One of last year's more entertaining games on the consoles was undoubtedly True Crime: The Streets of LA The game combined driving, shooting, and fighting into a crazy Hollywood style action package that provided crazy amounts of excitement. Guns, kung fu, dirty language, slow motion, copious amounts of blood, high-speed car chases… Yep, it's all here. Unfortunately, upon release to the three major consoles True Crime lacked polish and included a great number of bugs and glitches. Offering much better graphics, new features, and an on-line mode, True Crime is back for fans of the game as well as PC gamers. However, is the PC version worth buying? I will try to answer the question in this review.
As the name suggests, True Crime takes place in Los Angeles with over 240 square miles of the city area with a pretty high level of accuracy. You play the role of Nick Kang, a recently suspended LAPD detective who has been recruited by the EOD (Elite Operations Division) to deal with the escalating illegal activity by the Chinese and Russian mafias and to restore general order within the city limits.There are eight major episodes, which are broken into missions that typically involve one of three major types of gameplay: driving, shooting and kung-fu fighting. When you get a lead you drive to a destination to follow up upon it; while driving to a location various crimes are going on throughout the city, which you will get calls on your radio to resolve. It's just your choice, if you wish you can continue on your way to your destination, or you can go and resolve the situation. Depending on how you solve crimes and confront suspects, a meter in the HUD will range between "good cop" and "bad cop" ratings. If you choose to help out and arrest the suspects without lethal force you get the good cop points. But if you kill a civilian, you'll lose the good cop points. The rating determines whether or not you're a good cop, and influences which ending you get when you finish the game. It isn't too much of a problem since you can always replay missions.
The PC version also features online multiplayer up to four players through Gamespy or a Local Area Network (LAN). Modes included are Street Racing, Dojo Master (last-man-standing like mode where you fight opponents by Kung-Fu), Battle Master (last-man-standing like mode where you fight opponents with weapons), Police Chase (1 player is the criminal, the others are cops), and The Beat (you're a cop on patrol looking to rack up more arrests than your buddies before the timer runs out). You can choose your appearance from any of the characters that appear in the single-player game, as well as from a number of new skins. I played several LAN matches, but got bored pretty fast, especially because of excessive lag. Unfortunately, the lag issues were frequent during online matches and the game even crashed a couple of times.
Talking about things not included in the console versions, the PC version has also new weapons like a crossbow, Baseball Bat, and rocket launcher, as well as new character skins which are based on "Activision all-star" characters, such as Pitfall Harry, Officer Dick from the Tony Hawk's Pro Skater series, Jeanette from Vampire: the Masquerade - Bloodlines, Rikimaru from Tenchu, a soldier from Call of Duty, and a character known only as "Sandwich Man," who is dressed up in, of all things, a sandwich suit) and extras like training videos and cinematics.
What about controls? The console gamepad controls have been translated to the familiar WASD interface, and the mouse is used to look and shoot (left clicking the mouse will allow you to shoot while driving the car). Sadly, the shooting interface can be a pain in the ass at times, mostly when it comes to steering in the driving mode and moving around to combat enemies beside and behind you in the shooting mode.
Overall, True Crime is far from perfect itself, the controls are particularly awkward and multiplayer is half-baked. Also, there are plenty of glitches as well, usually involving clipping or rendering the game surface. That's why 72% is pretty fair rating, in my opinion.
Though it is not the greatest port from console to PC, it can be worth playing. I would recommend this to anyone who wants to keep occupied while you're waiting for the next Grand Theft Auto sequel.
Minimum System Requirements: Pentium III 800MHz processor or AMD 1.5 Ghz Athlon processor, 128 MB RAM, 3D Hardware Accelerator (32 MB VRAM) with full T&L, DirectX 9.0 or higher compatible sound card, 32-bit 4xCDROM (with 600kb/s xfer rate), 3.1GB free HDD space.
Multiplayer: Internet (TCP/IP) and LAN (TCP/IP) play supported, Internet play requires broadband connection and latest drivers
* True Crime has been tested on many, but not all, of the major video cards incorporating the chipsets listed below: ATI Radeon 8500, ATI Radeon 9500, ATI Radeon 9800, NVidia GeForce 256, NVidia GeForce 2 MX, NVidia GeForce 2 GTS, NVidia GeForce 2 Ultra, All NVidia GeForce 3/Ti series, All NVidia GeForce 4 series
snd: 5/5 - excellent voice-acting, fantastic ambient sounds, cool sound-track (PC soundtrack contains 32 new songs, mostly from alt-rockers like Alice in Chains, Queensryche, Megadeath..)
gfx: 3/5 -
solid (though dated), Los Angeles is very well captured, car damage model, poor texture quality, characters look bland, clumsy camera, collision detection problems, many clipping issues
playability: 4/5 -
pretty good - fighting, shooting and driving but doesn't beat or kill GTA!, "good cop"/"bad cop" mechanic, a lot of replay value, limited combat, awkward controls, no options for using gamepad controller, no quicksave option, laggy multiplayer, great number of bugs and glitches
genre: crime action (shooting/driving/fighting)
platform: PC 4CDs (also available on PS2/Xbox/GC)
release: May 2004
developer: Luxoflux
the game is similar to: GTA, Mafia
publisher: Activision
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Overall: 72% |
                                                 
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last 10 comments:
| madda | (01:40 PM CEST - Jun,14 2004 ) | | i am "aquiring" it now, should be good to play through! |
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| Viper357 | (03:14 PM CEST - Jun,14 2004 ) | | Well the story is good but everything else kinda sucks. The game lags (even on very powerful machines), i mean, they have clearly missed with the "Minimum Requirements". The graphics are dull, all the cars feel the same (same sound, turn the same = booring). Music is absolutely great but everything else sucks... so instead of buying this, i would suggest you to wait for GTA:SA and buy it, when it's released. :) |
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| El_Coyote | (07:25 PM CEST - Jun,14 2004 ) | | and that wont happen for a good while. |
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| madda | (07:33 PM CEST - Jun,14 2004 ) | | so i will tide myself over with an acquired copy of this game! :) |
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| Ulas | (02:42 AM CEST - Jun,15 2004 ) | | I played this on XBox when it came out a while back.. It's a lot of fun but not very long. Can easily be finished in 2-3 days if you don't take time to do the optional crusing around arresting people thing. |
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| Viper357 | (09:56 AM CEST - Jun,15 2004 ) | Ulas> I played this on XBox when it came out a while back.. It's a lot of fun but not very long. Can easily be finished in 2-3 days if you don't take time to do the optional crusing around arresting people thing.
It definetly is better on the XBox than on PC. (thanks to those guys who ported that game!) |
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| xxxx | (04:16 PM CEST - Jun,15 2004 ) | | change ur name madda to spammer. |
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| Anonymous | (03:01 AM CEST - Jun,16 2004 ) | Why spammer??
Why pay 40 bucks for a game when u can get it for a buck a cd??
Anyway most of the games are pure crap and you don't know till u buy them and it's better to throw away a burnt cd than cry over your 40 or more bucks
that like a quarter of a month's pay where i come from |
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| madda | (11:44 AM CEST - Jun,16 2004 ) | Alkatraz> Why spammer??
Why pay 40 bucks for a game when u can get it for a buck a cd??
Anyway most of the games are pure crap and you don't know till u buy them and it's better to throw away a burnt cd than cry over your 40 or more bucks
that like a quarter of a month's pay where i come from
exactly!!
When i realise it is a good game, i dont mind paying for it! I give money to the companies that actually deserve it! I wont pay for this game, because its a pile of dump, and the developers should have spent more time coding it before releasing it! |
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| Ulas | (03:19 AM CEST - Jun,18 2004 ) | madda>
exactly!!
When i realise it is a good game, i dont mind paying for it! I give money to the companies that actually deserve it! I wont pay for this game, because its a pile of dump, and the developers should have spent more time coding it before releasing it!
Great.. I'm glad you find the power of deciding which game deserves money or not in yourself. According to your definition you will download the game first (or buy it on a pirated CD), play it and if it's good go buy an original copy? Spare me the rightousness. I don't think anybody here believes your self serving statement. There is no way you would pay for something you already have and how is the company going to make better and better games if they don't make money in return for games they develop - even good ones.
This is why there are review sites like GameGuru. You can read up on the reviews and decide if you want to buy it. Most software companies also provide you with demos. By buying pirated CDs you are encouraging piracy - that's much much worse than just downloading it off p2p networks. I agree that usually there is a big markup on the game prices but when you actually take the time to do proper research and find games with good reviews/demos that you would like to play, you should buy that game. |
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| madda | (01:51 PM CEST - Jun,18 2004 ) | i have actually acquired a few games, then bought them because I wanted to play them over multiplayer, and I like to have the box, and manual! Its fine if you dont believe me, but its true!
If they brought down the price, they would sell alot more games. Its the same for CDs. Also they should make the release dates the same between countries, because games that are released in the US 2 months before the UK, allow US customers to have a domination over the mulitplayer game, because they have had that much longer to play and learn techniques of how to win more easily!
Basically if they reduced prices, and released the game in all major countries at the same time, then I think there would be alot more people buying the games, at least I would anyway! :) |
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| xxxx | (10:23 PM CEST - Jun,18 2004 ) | | don't talk about piracy when you have handy links on this page to get to pirate sites. people who come to this site know full well that this site harbours links to pirate sites and search engines. to come here and talk down about piracy is ridiculous. hell, look around you. what kills me is that people actually give interviews for HX considering he has direct links to places to get serial numbers, cracks and software. yet a site like astalavista keeps going on and on. so don't complain about people here talking piracy. piracy is what this host harbors. piracy will obviously never die and you waste your breath trying to argue it with people. |
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| (11:34 PM CEST - Jun,18 2004 ) | What kills me is that people like you think I'm happy with "direct links to places to get serial numbers, cracks and software" :( Of course, I'm not.
Actually, we have no choice. Nowadays, it's pretty hard to run an independent website, trust me. If you have business proposal which could help us, feel free to mail it to site owner.
quote:
what kills me is that people actually give interviews for HX considering he has direct links to places to get serial numbers, cracks and software. yet a site like astalavista keeps going on and on. so don't complain about people here talking piracy
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