There's absolutely no way that the link that's at the end of this post is safe for work unless you work at a pornography factory (or Gawker) but if you'd like to see what a XXX parody of Grand Theft Auto looks like, you'll find it at our sister site [Fleshbot]

Is L.A. Noire—despite its running, gunning and vehicular cruising—essentially an elaboration on the point-and-click adventure game? Some critics and commenators have suggested that the title has more in common with Monkey Island than Grand Theft Auto IV, with the crucial difference being that L.A. Noire (unlike the adventure games of yesteryear) allows you to advance despite having made blunders.

On the most recent installment of Michael Abbott's Brainy Gamer Podcast, guest Tom Bissell—author of Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter —suggests L.A. Noire may not even be a game at all, in the conventional sense.

At around the 24:00 mark, Bissell begins:

I see the story as a train—you're on a train, and this train's on a track. And there's very little you can do. You can occasionally throw a switch that maybe shifts like, one track over; but you're going to the same place. You can make tiny micro-adjustments to the story, and that's really all they're giving you. We don't think that this is a video game. It's probably not a video game in the terms that we're thinking of it. In fact, 50 Cent: Blood on the Sand is by any common definition a better game than L.A. Noire. Is it anywhere as interesting as L.A. Noire? Is it anywhere near as thought-provoking or...did it stick in my head the way that L.A. Noire did? No.

I'm thinking that player agency is so far outside the parameters of what this game wants to do. This game is actually trying to tell a cinematic story within unbudgeable parameters, that you kind of have a weird amount of freedom to explore, but you have very little freedom to determine. Freedom and choice we think as gamers are the same thing. But they're not. They're very different.

...This game is actually sneaking in under the orthodoxies of game design something that's rather more old-fashioned...one of these interactive films they made in the 1990s. This is essentially Night Trap, this game. And because it's got a lot of production value, and terrific performances, and a lot of interesting things happening in it, I think this has revived the tradition that Night Trap very briefly exemplified. And it's actually gone back to something that we all abandoned. That all game designers looked at and shrunk from in horror because it was so horrible the first time out...It's gone back to that and said, you know what, there's actually interesting things to do here. My belief is that this game is a completely new thing, that we don't even have the name for yet.

I'd walked away from Rockstar's last major release with an uncomfortable sense of irresolution. If Red Dead Redemption's John Marston was such a chivalrous, decent sort of guy—calling rancher Bonnie McFarlane "ma'am" and positively dripping with graciousness—how could I then command him to shoot innocent civilians, or slaughter his own horse? The game seemed to struggle with reconciling my agency as a player with Marston's integrity as a character.

L.A. Noire came along as a sort of reply to my Red Dead misgivings—it privileged Cole Phelps's claims as a predefined character over mine as the player operating him. But Bissell's words make me wonder: when the character is more important than the player, is what we have still really a video game?

Brainy Gamer Podcast - Episode 34 [The Brainy Gamer]

Now you can cruise the seedy streets of Grand Theft Auto IV's take on Liberty City from the comfort and safety of your web browser, thanks to the efforts of GTA's most dedicated fans and some 80,000 screen shots.

The folks who run GTA4.net added an impressive new feature to their interactive GTA IV Google Map earlier this month, letting you revisit the boroughs of Liberty City from a Niko's eye view.

"All roads are covered, except for a few on/off-ramps that weren't very interesting," writes Adam from GTA4.net. "There's around 3,000 separate panoramas which were stitched together from almost 80,000 in-game screenshots (captured with a script) and the final set of tiles consist of over a million images."

Zip around town if you'd like, because we're told there are some hidden Easter Eggs scattered throughout the city.

Liberty City Map [GTAIV.net]

Today, Take-Two inked a deal with South Korea's XLGames to make one of the U.S. game company's titles into an MMORPG. Take-Two owns Rockstar Games (Grand Theft Auto) and 2K (BioShock). [via 4Gamer]

I enjoy L.A. Noire. I enjoy it for reasons that have nothing to do with why I enjoyed Grand Theft Auto IV. Despite superficial similarities, two games are barely alike, which I've carefully explained before.

But when I put L.A. Noire in the hands of someone who loves GTA, guess what he tried to do first? He discovered just how different these two games are. Watch.

The Colbert Report tackled the latest innovation in Madden NFL 12 last night, with pseudo-conservative host Stephen Colbert—no stranger to video games—blasting EA Sports' "horrifying new feature" that sidelines Madden players suffering from concussions.

EA calls the new feature "another opportunity to create awareness" about the impact of head injuries on players, but Colbert has (unofficially) put the Madden maker on notice.

"We cannot let real-world consequences invade our mindless video games," Colbert warned during his most recent Threatdown segment. He underscored that opinion by highlighting the removal of mindless from games like Grand Theft Auto IV and his own "teachable moment" from Angry Birds.

Watch a clip of that segment above or see the whole thing at Colbert Nation below.

ThreatDown - Superman, Madden NFL 12 & Glee [Colbert Nation]