Remember True Crime: Streets of LA? It was a decent Grand Theft Auto clone developed by Luxoflux (RIP) and published by Activision in 2003. While it didn’t reinvent the wheel, it was a decent shooter, driving game and beat-em up. While I was doing my Game Fuel hunt a few weeks back, I had stumbled upon this mysterious gem in the DVD section at a Goodwill.
This is True Crime: Streets of LA Uncovered. A promo DVD for the game, presumably given to GameStop employees or people who pre-ordered the game. For $3, I couldn’t pass this up.
This promo DVD is chock full of interesting videos that highlight the game’s mechanics, a few behind the scenes features, even a video advertising the (now-defunct) truecrimela.com. There’s even a trailer for the original Xbox version of the game, which looked somewhat better than the other versions of True Crime.
I ripped the “Making of” video for your enjoyment, which is about 12 minutes of gameplay and developers saying develop-y things. Also, there’s a lot of prototype footage: characters look different, slightly different HUD, even cutscenes that don’t appear in the final game! It’s a nice retrospective on a solid little game.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qJ5WH0ybswQ&w=640&h=480]
As for the rest of the behind the scenes stuff, it’s the simple video game stuff you’ve probably seen online elsewhere. Developers praising their game, the large amounts of famous voice talent used for True Crime (Christopher Walken! Gary Oldman! Michelle Rodriguez!), videos featuring all the fighting and shooting moves… All this excess praise so you would march down to the GameStop and slam down $5 on a pre-order. Maybe it worked, who knows?
True Crime: Streets of LA was a pretty decent little game for its time, and this DVD made me get nostalgic for it, playing the game on the original Xbox in 2006. It wasn’t a GTA killer, but it wasn’t awful either. Certainly better than True Crime: New York City, that’s for sure. (I think. I never bothered to play it.)
Funny enough, today is the tenth anniversary of True Crime: Streets of LA. I couldn’t have timed this article any better. Maybe one day we’ll see a revival of True Crime… or we could just play Sleeping Dogs instead, which is probably the closest to a True Crime sequel we’ll ever get.
