Update 2: Yo, I Be Fly Today
: Now that we’re done dicking around in the office, we can head out of the building and into even more of Daryl Gates’s bullshit wonderland.
: Here’s another shit game design thing. This screen makes it seem like there’s two different exits.. only both go to the same place, rendering this entire screen pointless.
: If you go down the left-side exit from the last screen, you instead wind up on the other side closer to the buttons, so technically going left is speedrun tech.
: I’d like to point out that while this game does have a page on Speedrun.com, no one has ever submitted a run of it. I hope no one ever does.
: We have to call the elevator for some more confusing bullshit. We want to go down to the lobby - I didn’t even bother trying the other options and I’m not sure half of them actually go anywhere.
: We can optionally use Carey’s change on the vending machine to get a candy bar. This doesn’t do anything and isn’t worth points.
: Any kid who grew up in the 90s will recognize that logo instantly. DARE (short for Drug Abuse Resistance Education) was another Daryl Gates program.
: DARE was a school-based program dedicated to promoting abstinence-only education about drug use. It usually involved a cop coming to the school to tell kids about how so much as looking at pot would kill you.
: I had to do DARE when I was in school, and I remember even then that everything they were saying seemed really suspect - one of their key lines of bullshit involved pot being a “gateway drug” that inevitably turned anyone who so much as touched it into a heroin or coke addict.
: Spoiler alert: I have in fact touched pot (never smoked it, but had a college roommate who did and got the shit everywhere) and have not morphed into a coke addict.
: This is the message you get for touching the poster, and.. pfft. DARE was not only completely ineffective, it was also a GIGANTIC waste of money.
: See, what you have to keep in mind is that DARE revolved around cops - cops who were billing their time doing the DARE program as overtime. One paper from 2001 estimated the cost of police overtime alone at somewhere between $537 million and $635 million per year, and PBS estimated the total cost per year at nearly $600 million in 1998.
: What’s especially infuriating is that DARE still exists as far as I know, even though it has been documented by study after study to be totally ineffective. If we assume that the cost of the program remained constant from 1993 until today, that’s $18.6 billion (probably more than that) in police overtime alone.
: Daryl Gates died in 2010, so that means he’s managed to waste some $8 billion from beyond the grave.
: Oh no, it’s Daryl Gates’s worst enemy: THE NEWS MEDIA.
: This scene makes no sense if you know anything about Parker Center. Carey wouldn’t leave the building through the front door. Those cars you see in the background? That’s the visitor parking lot.
: The people who worked at Parker Center used an underground parking garage which was attached to the main building.
: “Heading up the Hickman investigation is veteran homicide detective John Carey. Carey is best known for solving the murder of Lane Blair, the stunning actress who featured in many of the action-adventure Straight Shots movies.”
: “Detective Carey has been unavailable for comment and all requests for a formal statement from the department have been denied. However, we have been told by an unofficial source that the department is looking at this as a gang killing.”
: No TV reporter is going to report on a murder by standing outside the police department. They might get some B-roll there, but they’re not going to report from outside the police department. They’re going to report from outside the crime scene, preferably from inside if the cops are gone.
: The reason is obvious: the cops aren’t going to answer shit if you have a camera with you. Hell, I had to call a police department recently to get a report on a car crash (for work) and they were stonewalling me on shit that is supposed to be a matter of public record.
: You also would not see a reporter saying “an unofficial source”. There are essentially two levels of anonymous sources in journalism. The first is called “background” and sounds like this:
: “An officer in the LAPD with knowledge of the investigation told KTLA that officers in the Rampart station frequently stole cocaine and other drugs from the evidence locker.”
: The second is essentially full anonymity and sounds like this:
: “A source with knowledge of the investigation told KTLA that Daryl Gates had at one point attempted to freebase the cocaine in the evidence locker, only to wind up with a very dry pancake.”
: There is a third level, which is going fully off the record, but that’s technically not a source because you can’t use or attribute that information.
: Finally, you wouldn’t see the LAPD “refuse to issue a formal statement”. Their PR person is going to tell you that they don’t comment on ongoing investigations. This will happen 100% of the time, and that’s what you report. The only reason people call is to see if the PR person fucks up and leaks something.
: “Detective Carey, would you care to make a statement concerning the murder of Officer Hickman?”
: “No comment.”
: The reporter will block us if we try to move past her, which is again not something a journalist would actually do, because again - they all know the cops aren’t going to say shit.
: To progress, we have to push the reporter out of the way - which is the way Daryl Gates would handle this situation (he’d probably also punch her) and is also the wrong way to handle it.
: After leaving Parker Center, we get the world map. Our list of possible destinations includes Hickman’s house (in Area 11), the Morgue (in Area 3) and the alley from the start of the game (Area 12), but we want to go to the police academy. It’s time for the gun range.
: Let me explain what a “bonus shoot” is. Bonus shooting is a thing the LAPD actually does where you’re given 30 rounds to shoot targets and get a pay bump depending on your score.
: I wish my desk job offered something like that only with golf, because I am Happy Gilmore level dangerous with a driver in my hand.
: The first thing we need to do is pick up Form 13.5.1, which as far as I can tell is not a real LAPD form.
: Carey fills it out automatically, which.. what was the purpose of making me do this? There’s no challenge here, other than clicking around until you find the form - I think the guy behind the desk will tell you to fill one out if you haven’t.
: In return, he gives us a box of 9mm ammo. Let’s just take that..
: This may or may not be entirely bullshit, I can’t really tell. I could not find a single source anywhere about cops having to pay for ammo except for two circumstances: if they’re using their own gun, or if they’re using a gun that isn’t the standard department carry (some departments, for instance, offer the option to carry a .45 instead of a 9mm but you have to pay for the .45 ammo).
: It may be, however, that we have to pay because we’re not here for the qualification (which we have to come back for later, regrettably).
: He also gives us some ear protection, which we can’t put on immediately for some reason.
: Welcome to the uh.. “exciting” “arcade” sequences.
: You go through four “phases” of targets at different distances. The goal is to hit them as many times as possible, which seems.. kinda counterproductive.
: The goal is to aim for the white dot in the middle, but I’m gamer-pilled and forced to go for headshots.
: I get a little over 310 points, which would be enough to be a “marksman” and get $4 a day in extra pay. The City of Los Angeles can feel free to get in touch with me to pay me my $4 stipend.
: For extra “realism”, you occasionally have to reload your gun in the inventory by clicking the box of bullets on it, because that’s how a gun works. You just kinda dump a box of bullets on your gun and it reloads. That’s just science.
: Our next destination is the morgue, which has a lot of optional dialog in it. In fact, we only need to go in here for two things and there is a screen that is entirely skippable.
: By the way, I checked, and the address on that isn’t current - the Coroner is actually at 1102 North Mission Road.
: Quick shout-out to this kid, who I imagine is in some kind of necromancy club. That kid knows how to summon a skeleton. I can just tell by looking at him.
: What IS at 1104 North Mission Road is the County Medical Examiner, which is in a different building. Here it is, for reference:
: If I was writing this, the receptionist would be desperately trying to pretend she didn’t notice Carey, the way the people at Sierra did when Daryl Gates was around.
: “Hello, Sherry. I’d like to see Deputy Nobles. Is he available?”
: Boy, I sure do love pointless busy work in games.
: "How can you tell when someone’s been choked to death instead of by accidental ligature strangulation?’
: “I don’t know.”
: “By occluded blood vessels and thyroid fracture!”
: This feels like a Harvester cutscene. I feel like Steve from Harvester was more of a protagonist than Carey is.
: What we’re here for is.. you see those little brown bumps on top of the counter behind the coroner?
: These are the envelopes containing the belongings of the two people who died in the alley at the start of the game, and are in fact the only reason we need to be here.
: The one for Hickman is identical but has a “BH” on the envelope.
: What I’ll do now is summarize the optional dialogue. There’s a bunch of questions we can ask and the coroner will just go “I dunno”.
: “Sam, have you completed Hickman’s autopsy? What are your preliminary findings?”
: “The autopsy is complete. Beyond the surface evidence, I found a ruptured gastrointestinal tract. Fluids were sampled and I’m having toxicology tests run, including all known poisons.”
: I’m not a coroner, but I’m pretty sure this isn’t how autopsies work.
: “Sam, will you go over the physical marks on the body?”
: “Yes. There are the two injection marks in the upper left arm, the burn marks to the face and upper torso, the epoxied eyes, the missing index finger, and then there are restraint marks.”
: “The restraint marks appear where you would most expect to find them, on the ankles and the wrists. At these points I found fiberous [sic] material. All very consistent with what you would expect to find at a torture scene.”
: “Sam, do you have a preliminary back on the toxicology tests?”
: “Not yet, John, but I believe we’ll find that Hickman died of poison, as opposed to say, a heart attack. If Hickman was killed by poison, it could have been a slow and painful, and quite obviously, tortuous [sic] death.”
: You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means. Now we can go and ask about “the youth”.
: “Sam, what can you tell me about the youth?”
: They think you’re an asshole and are glad you’re dead.
: “Exactly what would you like to know, John?”
: “The boy’s identification? Confirmed, and by whom?”
: Who the fuck talks like this?
: “The Lucky Mini Mart owner confirmed the body as Bobby Washington, a local neighborhood boy.”
: Real creative naming we’ve got going on here, these two dead Bobs.
: “Has the boy’s family been notified?”
: “Yes, and as I am sure you can imagine, the mother is near hysterics. Her name is Bernadette Washington and she lives just around the corner from the alley. The poor woman is so upset she can’t yet bring herself to come down and claim the body or the few small trinkets we found on the boy.”
: “Sam, do you have a preliminary on the boy’s cause of death?”
: “I counted seventeen points of entry, John. The boy was mowed down, execution style. Cause of death, gang violence, if you want a personal opinion. Professional opinion, the youth was killed by gunshot wounds to the head and body.”
: That.. isn’t what “execution style” means. Granted, the term is almost meaningless because reporters overuse the fuck out of it (this was something they told me even back in college) but it’s usually used to describe a single shot to the head from point blank range.
: Our next destination is back at the start of the game, in another move that really doesn’t make any sense. The game is never really good at indicating where the exits are, but there’s an exit at the top of the screen (where Carey came from at the start of the game) that we couldn’t take before.
: Apparently the police simply forgot to check this wall that has been riddled with bullet holes. I mean, it doesn’t surprise me given how generally incompetent the LAPD is.
: And now we get to do more busy work. We have to use the putty knife from the homicide kit to dig out all sixteen of the bullets from this wall.
: But wait! That’s not all! We also get to do the tedious bullshit task of clicking each hole again to put the bullet in a bag.
: See, a good game would have had it so simply using the putty knife on the wall automatically removes all the bullets and bags them, but this is not a good game.
: We can exit through what is.. apparently a wooden prop wall set up in the middle of LA. Gotta love that DARE billboard in the background - LA’s taxpayer dollars at work (or rather, not at work).
: We have to show the badge and use the notebook on these two guys, who don’t really have much to say. I’ll show you some of it. The other person talking is the guy in front wearing what looks like the Takoroka Windcrusher from Splatoon 2.
: “I’d like to ask you fellas a couple of questions.”
: “You be da Man, ask away.”
: “Last night there was a double murder… a police officer and a neighborhood boy, Bobby Washington. Do you know anything that might help us solve what happened to them?”
: That last sentence sounds like it was badly translated from a different language, only it wasn’t.
: “I be knowin’ nothin’. Dat copper, wha’ he be doin’ down here anyway?”
: “Did you know Bobby Washington?”
: I had no idea who the fuck they were talking about, so I searched the name and came up with about 20 different Wikipedia pages. They’re talking about this guy, who was a pitcher for the Dodgers.
: “You a big baseball fan? I see you’ve got a baseball.”
: “Yo baby.. I like all dem sports… dis here ball, I find it.. find it in da field. What’s lost is now mine.”
: “If you can think of anything that might help us, why don’t you give me a call down at Parker Center. Just ask for Robbery Homicide, Detective Carey. You never know when I might be able to repay the favor.”
… What. What the fuck is this writing?
: Has.. has anyone ever said the phrase “I be fly today”? Is that a phrase human lips have ever uttered? Who the fuck at Sierra looked at this and went “This is okay. We can release this.”?
: That’s a disingenuous question, because it was Ken Williams. I do want to mention that at one point, years ago when I was doing research for this LP, I found a source that I have not been able to find again that talked about this game’s development.
: There was a story involving Daryl Gates being in an elevator with Tammy Dargan and some other people, and she’s running some stuff past him and he looks at it and goes “That’s.. kind of racist, isn’t it?”
: I wonder if this was what he was talking about.
: Oh look, it’s the two guys from last night. We have to talk to Raymond Jones III again - for reference, he’s the guy in the blue shirt.
: “I’d like to ask you a few questions.”
: “Yeah, OK… sure. Ya got som’ spare change a fellow could have?”
: We have to use the change on him three times. This doesn’t get us anything, but if we try to use the change a fourth time..
: Fuck you, Daryl! Fuck you too, Tammy Dargan! Holy FUCK this pisses me off.
: I work right near a major road that connects three towns. There are little “islands” in the middle of the road that divide it, and those islands are a hotspot for panhandlers.
: I personally saw the cops arrest one of them and throw all his stuff in a garbage can a few weeks before I started this LP.
: The cops also had a car parked nearby that had a sign reading something like “DO NOT GIVE PANHANDLERS MONEY, THEY SPEND IT ON DRUGS”.
: Shortly thereafter, as a personal fuck you to Daryl Gates, I took the lane that put me closest to the panhandlers and gave this guy who reminded me of Frank $50. I then went to the grocery store, picked up some stuff, and came back past the same spot.
: Was the panhandler doing drugs? Fuck no he wasn’t! He was eating dinner outside a Popeyes right across the way. I wanted to give him the rest of the cash in my wallet but couldn’t get to where he was from that road.
: And if he had been buying wine? Let him! He deserves it! Fuck, I’d have gone and gotten him a bottle of the good stuff if he asked.
: We now have to go into the convenience store for some more racist bullshit.
: “Everybody know who you are. You big cop, bring big trouble.”
: The TV plays a highly compressed shot of Carey pushing the reporter.
: “Not too smart, big policeman. You push girl on TV.”
: “I.. it wasn’t like that, she…”
: “Yeah, yeah, you save for others. I see TV. I see you in neighborhood. You not come but for dead cop.”
: Now, in a good game, Carey would be forced to come to terms with the fact that he really is only here for a dead cop and it might be a moment for character growth. This is not a good game.
: “Can you tell me your name, and what your position is here?”
: Let’s just set the casual racism aside for a moment (fuck you, Tammy Dargan!) and focus on something worse - that being the person this character is a reference to.
: The clerk is a reference to Soon Ja Du, who owned a number of convenience stores with her husand in LA in the early 1990s. One of those stores was Empire Liquors, which was located in the middle of a hotspot for gang activity.
: According to Lou Cannon, Empire Liquors had been robbed at least 30 times prior to 1991, including an armed robbery by the Crips in December of 1990 while her son had been behind the counter.
: On March 16, 1991, Soon Ja Du shot and killed an unarmed Black girl by the name of Latasha Harlins with a single shot to the back of her head. The entire thing was caught on video.
: Soon Ja had accused her of stealing a carton of orange juice, which was completely false - eyewitnesses to the murder saw Latasha Harlins with money in her hand going to the counter to pay for it.
: There was a physical altercation. Soon Ja picked a fight and lost, and then proceeded to pull out a gun from behind the counter and shot Latasha Harlins as she was trying to run away.
: Soon Ja Du was arrested, tried.. and sentenced to 5 years probation and a $500 fine for a shooting that was caught on video and where the prosecution had multiple eyewitnesses. It also became pretty clear that this was a hate crime - again, from Lou Cannon:
“Soon Ja Du acknowledged her fear and dislike of African Americans. She confided to a white probation officer that blacks were lazy and used welfare money to buy liquor instead of feeding their children.” - Lou Cannon, Official Negligence, page 112
: Let’s look around the store, because the descriptions of some of the shit sound like a cross between a robot that has never seen LA before and Sheldon from The Big Bang Theory.
: We need to take an apple from the bowl.
: Of course they’d be Red “Delicious”, the worst apple in existence. I imagine Daryl Gates refused to eat any other kind.
: I’m willing to bet there was no way Daryl Gates didn’t drink.
: We also need to get a tube of superglue from the rack to Carey’s right.
: And of course, we need to pay for it. Wouldn’t want the owner to shoot Carey in the back of the head.. actually wait, yes I do.
: Next time, we’ll meet Bobby Washington’s mother. We’ll also do another pointless gun range segment (not shown) and meet some more racist caricatures.