Picked up EA's Skate (the first one) for ¥280 at an import shop, and have been really impressed with the game overall. Unfortunately, my aged, attenuated nerves apparently cannot differentiate between an Ollie and a Kickflip in the right-stick input scheme, and I have an unfortunate tendency to hold my aerials too long, leading to some magnificent imitations of a human crayon.
I'll keep with it, because I know it's me, not a faulty control scheme.
L.A. NOIRE arrived, so I played the first two hours of that, which appear to be the tutorial. It's got a lovely, evocative sense of place, the technology behind the facial animation is brilliant, but the investigative gameplay is not fun. Point and click adventures required that you move the character to each point on the screen and press "investigate." Noire requires you move your character around a scene and wait to hear a chime and feel a buzz, then press "investigate." Congratulations to McNamara's team for taking 7 years and untold tens of millions of dollars to replicate 30-year-old gameplay which was, at the time, achieved by a single developer over the course of months.
