New Yorkers in (Video Game) New York

One of the bullet point features of Luxoflux's True Crime: New York City is that it does in fact recreate its setting of New York to a fairly high degree, the developers working from some eleven thousand photographs taken from around the city. Though the game hasn't been extraordinarily well-received, it apparently did that city recreation bit well enough for The New Yorker writer Daniel Radosh to put it to a tougher test. He enlisted the help of two professional New York City tour guides, neither of whom had any experience with games, to check out the simulated world and compare it to the one they work in every day.

Within minutes of taking command of True Crime's protagonist, an undercover detective named Marcus, Kamil had wrapped his vehicle around a lamppost ("one of the fancy ones Giuliani put in to beautify the city," he noted), and then, after venturing forth on foot, he inadvertently got into a fatal gun battle with a uniformed officer. It was decided that the game's controls would be turned over to an observer, who would follow Kamil and Rush's directions.