L.A. Noire
LA Noire's game world is big. Way too big. End to end, the city very easily takes longer to traverse than Liberty City, or the entire region of New Austin and Mexico. Driving from scene to scene usually takes an excruciatingly long time, with nothing going on in-between except dialog with your partner. Driving itself isn't really fun, and since there isn't anything more to do on the way - no spontaneous crimes, no optional content, no good side-missions to speak of - it's really just a cutscene with steering.
Now, to say there are no side missions would be incorrect: while you're driving around the city, there is a random chance of a radio message coming in to trigger an optional Street Mission. The mission will pop up somewhere on the map, and once you get there, you could get involved in anything from a high-speed chase, to an on-foot pursuit, to a shootout, to a hostage situation. These little cases take just a few minutes, and offer a reasonably bite-sized portion of LA Noire gameplay, that tends to lack the investigation and interrogation portions I'm so disappointed in.
If these missions were done in the style of GTA, dotting the landscape instead of appearing randomly and infrequently, I'd be a lot happier about having to drive all the way across town for the next mission objective. Or, if they were in the style of Red Faction: Guerrilla's random proximity missions, where the missions pop up when I'm driving nearby -- that would be cool. Instead, since the game map is too goddamn big, the street missions will invariably appear somewhere completely out of the way; in the opposite direction of, or exceedingly beyond, the mission location I'm on my way to. The scope of the street missions is perfect for a minor distraction, but as it is I end up ignoring most of them simply because I don't feel like doing more tedious driving just to get there.
Apparently, once I complete a crime desk (a series of missions in a particular position at the PD), I have the option to go into a free-roam mode to do the street missions available at that desk. So I may explore that option later on. When the street missions are commingled with the tightly linear story missions, though, they simply aren't enticing enough for me to bother.
Progress: Solved the case of the Golden Butterfly