True Crime: Streets of LA

True Crime: Streets of LA
Developers: Luxoflux, Exakt Entertainment (GameCube), LTI Gray Matter (Windows) Publishers: Activision, Capcom (JP) Platforms: PlayStation 2, GameCube, Xbox, Windows, Mac OS X Released in JP: October 28, 2004 (PlayStation 2, Xbox) Released in US: November 3, 2003 (PlayStation 2, GameCube, Xbox), May 11, 2004 (Windows), March 2005 (Mac OS X) Released in EU: November 7, 2003 (PlayStation 2, Xbox), November 21, 2003 (GameCube), May 28, 2004 (Windows) This game has unused areas. This game has debugging material. This game has regional differences. This game has a prerelease article

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Streets of LA is the first game in the short lived True Crime series, taking place on a 1:1 scale map of Los Angeles (really!), but is infamously crammed with glitches. Not even playable Snoop Dogg could save this one.

Insert Christopher Walken impression here.

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Prerelease Info

Unused Areas

An intersection in Inglewood, accessed using a glitch.

A few of the street props and houses left over from the removal of Topanga Canyon Boulevard west of Pacific Palisades.

Due to looming deadlines, the outermost edges areas of the map had to be cut from the game. Counter-clockwise, cut areas include the Los Angeles neighborhoods of Playa Del Rey, Playa Vista, Westchester, Baldwin Vista, View Heights, Baldwin Village, Leimert Park, Park Mesa Heights, Vermont Square, Vermont Harbor, South Park, Central Alameda, Boyle Heights, Aliso Village (despite that housing project being demolished in 1999, four years before the game's release), Lincoln Heights, Cypress Park, Mount Washington, Elysian Valley, Glassell Park, Eagle Rock, Atwater Village, Hollywoodland, Studio City, The Bird Streets, Silver Triangle, Beverly Ridge Estates, Sherman Oaks, Beverly Park, Encino, Mandeville Canyon, and The Summit, the Culver City neighborhoods of Sunkist Park, Fox Hills, and Blair Hills, the Beverly Hills neighborhood of Trousdale Estates, the cities of El Segundo, Inglewood, South Gate, Huntington Park, and Glendale, the unincorporated communities of Ladera Heights, View Park-Windsor Hills, Florence-Graham, Walnut Park, and Topanga, and landmarks including Los Angeles International Airport, Exposition Park, Griffith Park, Forest Lawn Memorial Park (which is not depicted as a cemetery in-game), the Hollywood Reservoir, and the University of California-Los Angeles campus, among others.

Attempting to enter those areas will result in the flashing of a white (or black on the PC port) screen as the player is teleported back to where they originated. If the player manages to remove the white-screen barrier through modifications or glitching and get out of bounds, however, plenty of leftovers remain:

• Most of the street names remain, and like in the rest of the map, match real-world names.
• Buildings remain within most of the southern, eastern and northeastern areas, and in small pockets of the northern area (which otherwise is mostly populated with trees).
• Streets are detailed with vegetation and props in the same manner as the rest of the map. With a few minor exceptions (mainly Imperial Highway south of Los Angeles International Airport), freeway models aren't present, and in most locations where real-world freeways run, normal streets are modeled in place.
• A few car repair garages and clinics can be found within out of bounds areas populated by buildings. These work as normal.
• Seven short street segments (three pedestrian paths on the UCLA campus, Mount Olympus Drive in the out-of-bounds area of the Hollywood Hills, Ascension Road in Forest Lawn Memorial Park, Speedway Track in Playa Del Rey, and a small segment of the Los Angeles River in Vernon) in out of bounds areas are still marked on the minimap, and it is possible to be teleported to those streets without removing the white-screen barrier.
• Street crimes can rarely spawn within out of bounds areas, almost always at intersections, though they can also spawn on the isolated minimap streets mentioned above.
• At least one area (the neighborhoods of Baldwin Hills and parts of Crenshaw) adjacent to the in-bounds map is separated from the rest of the out of bounds area using the same type of undestroyable fencing used to separate the other out of bounds areas, suggesting it may have been the last area to be cut from the game.
• West of Pacific Palisades, Route 1 turns north and becomes Coastline Drive (named as simply "Coastline" and continuing the freeway model used by Route 1 for a short distance, dead-ending at a cliff). Past that point, street props used for boulevards, as well as a few houses, continue west despite the lack of a street model. These houses loop around and eventually end back up at Coastline, while the street props continue north before stopping. Heading further north from that spot reveals more boulevard street props that are partially buried in the terrain and eventually continue into invisible land and ultimately stop at a completely empty area (a small portion of The Summit) where traffic does not spawn and street props are completely absent. These boulevard street props likely indicate that (based on location in relation to the map) the southernmost end of Topanga Canyon Boulevard was to have been included, but was cut very early in development, and the fact that every street in this section of The Summit is suffixed "Street" rather than their real-world suffixes and lacks traffic paths and props also suggests that this section was cut very early in development.
• The Hollywood Reservoir is still present when traveled to, though only as a ground texture.
• It is possible to crash the game while in out of bounds areas, usually by lingering within these areas for an extended period of time, but also by driving off the map model and then driving back on it. These crashes often result in the currently-playing song looping the last few lyrics played, though these can also lead to a crash to desktop on the PC version or rarely a loud, screeching beep (which in fact is associated with GameCube crashes in general) on the GameCube version.

Coordinate Display

To enable the coordinate display in the console versions, go to the map screen and press X, Circle, Square, Triangle on PlayStation 2, Y, X, Y, Y on GameCube, or A, B, X, Y on Xbox.

Regional Differences

To do: What missions were renamed? Also got a video of the edit.

The Japanese version features fully translated text as well as dubbed cutscenes, which is unusual in the latter's case as similar games just kept the original English voices. Strangely, the actual in-game speech, such as Nick's quips or the radio dispatch, are the original English voices. This can be somewhat jarring when going from cutscenes to actual gameplay. The names of the episodes and missions are also in English, but some were renamed, such as the mission "Strip Club Detour" getting renamed to "Show Pub Detour" to avoid any overly sexually arousing naming.

This version also features a small edit in the intro cutscene for the episode 5 mission "On the Chopping Block", where Nick chops off the finger of one of the butchers. In all other versions, the chopped finger is seen falling on the counter. However, the Japanese version doesn't show that since that falls under CERO's ban of extreme bodily mutilation.

Platform Differences

To do: What songs were removed?

The GameCube version removes a large chunk of the game's soundtrack, and what remains can become repetitive during gameplay. Additionally, on the GameCube version, one of the remaining songs, "Is It Gonna Be Alright" by Brown Liquer, fades out two minutes in, while the full song is heard in other versions. The Los Angeles City Hall was also inexplicably removed from the GameCube version, replaced with a park.

Conversely, the PC version expands the soundtrack with rock songs not featured in the console versions, as well as adding an exclusive multiplayer mode and 8 exclusive unlockable characters.