There's A New Action Button Video
At the risk of sounding entitled, I'm pretty disappointed that a video I've been anticipating for two years is about L.A. Noire. My favorite ABRs are the deep dives into Japanese games I'm totally unfamiliar with, and Action Button takes on the classics. They're not my favorite, but it can also be interesting to see his perspective on the state of modern games.
L.A. Noire came out in 2011, which was the peak of games I don't give a shit about. I feel like 2003-2013 was the lost decade for games, the era in which, if you weren't into sports games and gray-and-brown military ultraviolence,1 you were left out in the cold.2 I had an Xbox 360, because I was still young enough that buying a new console was just what was done, and the Wii was a Gamecube with a motion controller, and the Playstation 3 cost $ix Hundred US Freedom Eagles, so I convinced myself an Xbox 360 would be a good investment. It wasn't. I have almost no fond memories of it. It was my last console.
2011 was the year of Skyrim, which I did not like, and Dark Souls, which wouldn't be on my radar until years and years later. Xbox had been doing their Summer of Arcade promotion for a few years, where they highlight a handful of smaller indie games, but the fact that they needed to highlight these games in such a manner indicates how rare they were. Nothing like today, when there's a new Cozy Roguelite Deckbuilding Farming Sim As Metaphor For Fatherhood coming out on Steam approximately every 2.3 seconds. Looking back at the SoA games, the promotion ran for 6 years and there was about 1 game a year I was interested in (and two of them, Bastion and Shadow Complex, ended up being games I intensely dislike with the benefit of hindsight.)
2012 is when the dam started to break. Spelunky HD came out, although I didn't really get into it until it came out on PC the next year and I could play with a proper controller. That was the salt in the wound: there were barely any games I wanted to play, and the ones I did want to play felt bad because the D-pad belonged in a garbage can.
Luckily it was around this point that Steam started proving a viable platform for indie games. 2013 saw the release of Don't Starve, Desktop Dungeons, Guacamelee, Steamworld Dig, Rogue Legacy and Spelunky, all of which I enjoyed to some extent. Also that year and highly regarded are Gone Home, Papers Please, Antichamber, Proteus and The Stanley Parable. It's kind of bonkers when I list them all out like that. Video games were back, baby!
But, 2011. L.A. Noire. What's the deal with it? It's not a gray and brown military shooter, but it's a gray and brown cop game, which is basically the same thing. Its whole gimmick is that the developers used facial capture technology for the characters, and as you interrogate suspects, you have to rely on facial cues to determine whether they're lying to you.
We were supposed to be blown away by the amazing graphical fidelity which made a new paradigm of storytelling possible in the medium of videos gaming. We were supposed to think that video games were finally art. And some people did, but to me, the character models still fell firmly into uncanny valley territory, and even if they didn't, looking cool doesn't make a game enjoyable to play.
I'm also of the opinion that this kind of game could be made just fine with static character art. Judging NPC reaction by their facial features was a big part of Tokimeki Memorial (a game I like a lot but haven't yet added to my collection. It's good! I learned about it from the Action Button review!) and those characters don't look like they fell out of Tom Hanks' The Polar Express.3 Or, like, if it's just watching people talk and pressing a button to select a response, it could be FMV. It doesn't get any realer than real.
Also, I was ignorant of this aspect at the time, but in 2025 I definitely don't want to play a game about cops interrogating suspects because, like, that's not how crimes are supposed to be solved. Cops are supposed to present evidence to a jury that proves the suspect's guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. "He looked really guilty so I yelled at him until he confessed" isn't evidence, no matter how much the cops want it to be. If I were being interrogated, I'm sure I'd look guilty as fuck because the signs of guilt (nervousness, stuttering, incoherence, not making eye contact) are also signs of being scared because a guy with a gun is yelling at you. I don't want to play as a cop. I don't want to coerce confessions out of people. In the real world, innocent (and often the most vulnerable ) people are wrongly convicted because cops lie, manipulate and intimidate suspects into making false confessions all the time. I don't want to embody that role. I would be the one telling people never to say anything in an interrogation room except "I want to talk to a lawyer". Hey: never say anything in an interrogation room except "I want to talk to a lawyer"!
Now, I haven't played L.A. Noire, so to be fair, there's a chance it's not Copaganda at all. Maybe it subverts everyone's expectations and tells a story about the corrupt institution of policing. But based on its release date and gimmick, I kind of doubt it. 2011 was before the murder of Trayvon Martin, before the cop-murders of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, well before the cop-murder of George Floyd in 2020. The universality of police brutality and corruption was not yet on the national radar, and I doubt a big-budget AAA game would be allowed such a controversial stance. Also, wouldn't it kind of undermine the game's gimmick? It'd be somewhat inconsistent to sell a game based on its realistic facial expressions and end with the message that facial expressions are actually worthless for the purpose they implied. I don't think it would be bad for a game to do this, this kind of subversion would earn my respect, I just (X) Doubt it's a risk a big publisher would be willing to take.
So, with the interminable preamble out of the way, I'm still looking forward to the Action Button video. Even if the game is 100% what I expect it is, I trust Tim Rogers to tell an interesting story about it. He's been firmly anti-cop in his previous work, so I don't know what to expect, but I'm not worried that it'll involve an IGNesque glazing of the facial capture tech. I think he's going to have something to say.
I hate to make a post so heavily dependent on assumptions and speculation, but I don't know when I'll be able to watch the video. It might be a good one to watch at work, but I can't watch it with newpipe because it's age-restricted. I downloaded it at home with yt-dlp, but even the 480p version is nearly 9GB4 and I haven't had time to transfer it to my phone.
Well, I would've had time, but I was compelled to add another feature to whirltube. You see, yt-dlp has a flag --use-browser-cookies [browser] that will import cookies from the specified browser and use the youtube cookie that says you agree to bypass the age gate. It has to be spoofed this way because with restricted videos, you normally need to be logged in to watch them at all.
This wasn't a feature I thought necessary because I can't remember the last time I encountered an age-restricted video. For as much as video essayists engage in self-censorship to avoid demonetization, I don't think I've ever had to verify my age because the presenter says "fuck" and "shit". I say these words a lot in my own videos and I've never had any of them age-restricted. It's ironic that Tim Rogers, the man who's never said a profane English word aloud in his life to fulfill a childhood promise to his mother, is the one who finally made me hit that barrier. I figure it's because L.A.N(e). has enough realistic-looking graphic violence to trip whatever the threshold is for this sort of thing.
Anyway, I could've just downloaded it with a normal yt-dlp command, transferred it and gone to bed. Instead, I stayed up late adding the feature to whirltube out of a weird sense of spite. Talk about bad timing. It's funny how quickly the project went from "these are the three things I need it to do" to "well, I guess it would be nice if it could also do this" to "fuck, I guess it also needs to do this now."
If it were just me, I could add the flag to the command and never think about it again, but since I'm releasing it to the public I want it to be privacy-respecting by default. I don't think it would cause any real harm, but it's just what you do. This means I needed to add a menu option, move the other menu options around for consistency, and create variables for both the option and what browser the person is using (just in case someone encounters it who doesn't use firefox.) It's done, but I didn't test it thoroughly enough to release it. It should be going up tonight, and then that's the final version, save updates to fix anything broken by changes to yt-dlp. I hope this is the last feature I need, because I'm running out of numerals for options and commands. No program should do more than 9 things IMHO.
So, that's what I was doing instead of transferring the new Action Button video to my phone. I may decide I don't want to watch it at work anyway, it might benefit from watching it on a big screen and paying closer attention, in which case it might be weeks before I have an opinion. Hopefully I won't find out all my assumptions were off-base and have to issue a proclamation of eaten crow, but that could be an interesting outcome too. Stay tuned 🦝
Nothing like the red-and-green ultraviolence of the 90s. That was the good violence.↩
There was still good stuff coming out on handhelds, but playing on a handheld is a compromise I don't want to make when I'm home and have a TV.↩
Thinking about gray and brown military games almost made me type out "Tom Clancy's The Polar Express", which would be a very different movie.↩
This isn't true, I thought the version I downloaded was 480p but it's actually 720p. I tried re-downloading as 480p but it grabbed the 720p version again instead. This seems to be yt-dlp not working as expected, AFAICT there's nothing wrong with whirltube 🤷♀️↩