Mafia Review

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Mafia

Review by Mike PhillipsSeptember 2002

In the immortal words of the Gheto Boys, “Damn, it Feels Good to Be a Gangsta!’ Perhaps immortal is a stretch, but that sentiment captures the atmosphere and game-play of Mafia far better than anything I can possibly conjure up.

Mafia defies explanation in the traditional sense. It’s not an adventure game, it’s not a driving game, and it isn’t a shooter.  So what type of game is it?

I have serious trepidation even referring to Mafia as a game, as it’s the closest thing I’ve ever experienced to being completely immersed in another time, another life, another place. Mafia is an alternative universe on three seemingly harmless pieces of polycarbonate, a world beckoning one to take a break from real life and slip back into that of Tommy Angelo’s.

Tom is an ordinary Joe, a young cab driver barely capable of paying his bills. In a fortuitous moment, he happened to be in the proverbial wrong place at the wrong time. Enter Paulie and Sam, associates of one Don Salieri. I’m not talking about a nickname for Donald here; Don Salieri is the boss of the Salieri syndicate in the 1930s.  What follows is an enthralling tale of betrayal, deception, intrigue, love, violence—you name it, Mafia has it all … in spades.

The story unfolds in a series of flashbacks. In the introduction Tom is expressing to a police detective serious remorse concerning his employment with the Salieri family. He is now older, wiser, has a wife and daughter, and is scared. His life as a Mafioso wasn’t as it appeared initially; the dark side eventually reared its ugly head and Tom wasn’t able to stomach it. He wants protection in exchange for information he can provide for the prosecution of Don Salieri. 

It may sound clichéd, yet when you have an opportunity to actually participate in this world the result is a thrill ride like you’ve never imagined.

The odd bit is, a US developer didn’t create Mafia. Illusion Softworks is the guilty party, a development house based in the Czech Republic. No surprise that their LS3D engine is nothing short of amazing (well, actually it is; more on that later), but it is astonishing that they so masterfully captured the ambiance of the 1930s in the US. The building architecture, the cars, the clothing, the speech, and the music are all done with perfection.

I Can’t Drive 55?

As much as the story is the star of this show, so are the automobiles.  Body styles, engine sounds, horns, and (unfortunate at times) speeds of these antiques are faithfully recreated. If you happen to be a car lover, the game is replete with a Carcyclopedia, an option that gives you the weight, horsepower, maximum speed, etc. of all automobiles used in the game, sixty in all according to the developers.  For some reason, all cars are given fictitious names—the Bolt series are all Fords, the Schuberts are Chevrolets—and I had a great time trying to identify all of the models.

Driving these autos about the city of Lost Heaven occupies much of your gaming time. One often witnesses other citizens pulling some incredibly stupid vehicle tricks, making turns from the wrong lane and trading paint with other cars. Enter Lost Heaven’s finest, the boys in blue. If you happen to run a red light, drive faster than 40 mph, accidentally run over someone, or pull a gun in public while in sight of a police officer … you’re screwed. For the minor infractions you can always pull over and pay a fine, but what fun is that? Drop the hammer and reach crazy speeds of 60 mph or better to outrun the law, or simply eliminate the officer in question that witnessed your unlawful act … whatever works.

Damage modeling has to be brought up while on the car theme. Cut a corner too closely and slam into a streetlight, you may lose a bumper or blow a tire. Half the fun of Mafia is experimenting with destruction.

Arguably one of the most exciting moments in gaming history occurs when you “borrow” a race car. The mission is during the night, it’s timed, the car has no headlights, and it can hit a max speed of 140 mph. Maneuvering the beast through city streets is an E ticket ride to be sure, game design at its finest.

On the other side of the coin, the next mission involves racing a similar car on a road course, with twelve other cars. In defense of the game, the reason one must race the car is logically explained in the plot. I’ll even go further and say the race level is better than many racing games. The problem is, by the time you reach this level you are so absorbed in the flow of the game that the race brings said flow to an abrupt halt.

The race is quite fun, just very time-consuming. It takes several laps simply to get familiar with the course, several more to understand how fast your car can safely take corners, and several more still to get used to racing in a crowd. These cars are light, with narrow tires, and the AI of the other drivers is set on vicious mode. They will give you a “gentle rub” that will send you careening into a race-ending spin. Harry Hogge said it best in Days of Thunder: “… He didn’t slam into you, he didn’t bump into you, he didn’t nudge you, he rubbed you. And rubbin’ son, is racin.'”

Thanks for the advice, Harry, but the race level in Mafia is pretty much game design at its worst. Finishing the race isn’t enough, finishing third isn’t enough, you have to win. There is a skip-race option … which doesn’t work. I imagine the forthcoming multiplayer patch will include a fix for that, or at least I hope it will. The game does support gamepads, joysticks, and wheels, fortunately, and they threw in Force Feedback support also. There are also several tweaks in the options menu in order to get your car behaving in a suitable manner for your driving style.

But a Mafioso’s life didn’t consist only of mundane trips across town, jacking cars, racing, and life-threatening car chases …  there’s so much more.

You Want I Should Tune Him up, Boss?

Of course there are instances where you must collect payments, ensure the rival family, the Morellos, don’t intrude on your turf, and make a statement to the authorities concerning who is really running the city. In order to do that, many people have to be liquidated.  Enter the weapons used … you didn’t really expect to accomplish this with your good looks and a smile, did you?

As with the autos, the weapons are all authentic. If you have a desire to zip through a gunfight with a rocket launcher, look elsewhere.  In an early mission, your arsenal consists of a baseball bat and two Molotov cocktails. Stealth and planning are as necessary as aiming accuracy. Ammunition is also at a premium—if you decide to reload before your chamber is empty, you lose those bullets.

In a welcome twist, med-kits aren’t strewn all over the place.  Take a few bullets and you’ll be reloading a save. There are, however, a few med-kits in various places, and when you come across one it’s a good indicator that a major firefight is nearby.

Blood level can be adjusted in the options menu for those who like to see puddles of plasma after a kill. You types scare me, by the way … just a random thought.

Gunning nirvana is achieved once you acquire the Thompson 1928, more commonly known as the Tommy gun. Kickback is consistent with its firepower—fire off a few dozen rounds and you’ll be aiming ten feet above an enemy’s head unless you adjust.

Pistols, brass knuckles, and one shotgun (or Tommy gun) can be hidden in your overcoat. If you carry more than one of those lethal weapons, they must be carried in hand, in plain sight of citizens and police—not a good idea.

The missions are very well-balanced: edge-of-your-seat, sweaty-palms action followed by a relaxing, take-deep-breaths drive back to a safe place in most cases.

Mafiosos do have personal lives—as twisted and corrupt as they may be, there’s so much more.

Dis Ain’t Your Territory

It pains me to say this, but the story and character development in Mafia are far better than in any adventure game I’ve played this year. Yes, that’s even considering the fabulous Syberia.  Mafia consists of three CDs, and it’s a 3D game … you do the math. The cutscenes are numerous and huge, and they can change depending on some of your actions, but the overall path is rigidly linear.  Not necessarily a bad thing since the game is story-based, and what a story it is.

The incredible attention to detail in the game makes the experience hauntingly realistic. In many games the environment is anemic and sterile, nothing more than a backdrop. Not so in this case—the world is alive. You may have to stop on a drawbridge and wait for a barge to pass underneath, traffic lights control the flow of traffic, cars use turn signals, honk their horns, and flash headlights if you veer into the wrong lane. Don’t feel like driving? Catch a ride on a trolley or an elevated train, or simply walk. At one point in the game, I came across several cars stopped on a bridge. I got out of mine to investigate and found a man on the rail preparing to jump. Small things such as that turn a game world into a virtual one.

Voice acting is some of the best I’ve encountered in a game. That seems to be a rarity in many games lately. Everyone speaks in thirties slang with a hint of New Yawk-ish accent.

Subtitles are an available option, and spelling and punctuation are correct, which doesn’t seem like a big deal unless you’ve witnessed the atrocities committed in many recent titles.

Using a third-person perspective was the only way to go, and it’s implemented well. First-person works in shooters and Myst clones, but no way could they have pulled it off in Mafia.

Play it Again, Sam

When you complete the mission-based game, Free Ride Extreme mode becomes available. Comparisons between Mafia and Grand Theft Auto 3 abound; I don’t agree that the two games can be compared. Both are great, but they have little in common. Until you play Free Ride Extreme, that is … the designers dropped the gritty seriousness and let loose.

Your tasks, among many, include chasing an invisible man, running down (literally) a man named Speedy Gonzalez, and, a la the movie Speed, driving a truck to a destination with an onboard bomb.  If you drop under 34 mph, kaboom! Fun stuff to be sure, but I so much more enjoyed the main game.

We Got a Couple, Two, Tree Problems Here

Back to the LS3D engine—one would expect a relatively small development house to utilize a commercially proven engine. Then again, where does one find an engine that can do car races, shootouts, and handle cutscenes in which there are a staggering number of facial animations? Illusion Softworks balked and developed its own. Was it a good choice? I’ll have to give an unqualified yes. For a virgin rollout, it performs remarkably well.

Draw-in distance seems to be a bit short, even at the highest setting.  A few textures here and there looked a bit sloppy, but considering the scope of this ambitious project, these little things should be forgiven.

Many events are scripted, and that can be a problem at times. In one mission I happened to push a car head-on into traffic during a car chase. The result was thrilling—the driver slumped over the wheel with his head on the horn, the passenger dead also. It was a bit confusing when I got the “try again” screen, because he had gotten away. I was supposed to chase him, not catch him … oops!

Oddly enough, one of the features that make the game so immersive ends up being a weak point after a while. Initially, driving around town is a joy, but by the latter stages of the game you can do it without looking at the included poster-sized map of Lost Heaven, or without using the in-game mini-map, or without using the compass.  Worse yet is the 40 mph speed limit—I go faster in parking garages—it becomes tedious after a while.

But my major gripe has to be the omission of a save feature. There are generous save points in missions generally, but I can recall several times cussing like a madman, having to replay scenes because I screwed up something later on in that mission. There’s no excuse for this. The game is far from short—if I want to add excitement I simply won’t save, and if I want waypoint saves, I’ll play console games. Add a save-anywhere feature already!

GOTY (Not Gotti), Capiche?

Time for a final summation. Is this game for you? A driving, shooting, story-based game about a crime family in the 1930s US that has no save feature and can be insanely difficult at times? If ever there were a description for “don’t touch it with a ten-foot pole,” that would undoubtedly be it.

Yet Mafia oozes class, polish, and style like no other game so far this year. To not “experience” Mafia is a far greater crime than any in the Salieri family ever committed. 

No doubts here, I award Mafia a .  Thus far it gets my GOTY award also.

Gentlemen, take a bow—what you’ve created is nothing short of brilliance! 

Damn, it feels good to be a gamer!  The End

The Verdict

The Lowdown

Developer: Illusion Softworks Publisher: Gathering of Developers Release Date: August 2002

Available for: Windows

Four Fat Chicks Links

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Screenshots

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System Requirements

Windows 98/ME/2000/XP (Windows 95 not supported) DirectX 8.1 Pentium III 500 MHz (1 GHz recommended) 128 MB RAM 8X or higher CD-ROM drive 800 MB free hard disk space (minimal installation) DirectX-compatible 3D accelerator with 16 MB RAM (64 MB recommended) DirectX-compatible sound card Keyboard and mouse

Where to Find It

Links provided for informational purposes only.  FFC makes no warranty with regard to any transaction entered into by any party(ies).

      Copyright © Electric Eye Productions.  All rights reserved.  No reproduction in whole or in part without express written permission.

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16 Responses to Screw the Internet

  • Matt "Steerpike" Sakey

    God damn, Scout, I’d never heard of this Lanier fellow, but that’s pretty profound.

    Information is not a manufacturable item… as you said, we are making less and less. This is either indicative of a larger-scale societal transformation, or a bad thing. I’m afraid I’m inclined to assumed the latter.

    Thanks!

  • Mike "Scout" Gust

    Steerpike, that was exactly the argument Lanier was having with callers on the BBC. Lanier was all fatalistic about society’s drop in real productivity while his opponents claimed that this was a huge transformation and that he was just too old to grasp the coolness of it all. If you notice, the web address of that first Lanier link is well.com. I mean, that is old! The Well?

    Lanier’s thoughts were pretty much echoed by David Simon, one of the creators of The Wire. Here he speaks with Bill Moyers about the fate of paid journalism in the face of the web.

  • Spike

    I’ve read many criticisms of Facebook et. al.  I’ve also read contradictions of those criticisms, namely, that social sites are making people more connected than ever.  I think that that connectedness is an illusion.

    For several months at the end of 2008 and the beginning of 2009 my daughter badgered me to join FB.  I could connect with her and some of her friends that I know as well as renew old acquaintances with some of her friend’s mothers.  I finally signed up so she’d quit the badgering. I used to check in every day to see what daughter and friends were saying because if I didn’t she’d ask if I saw her post, or a friend’s post. 

    What I’ve learned is this:

    1.  “Karen Likes John’s photo (or post)” IS NOT communication.

    2.  The reason I lost contact with some of these “friends” in the first place is that we no longer had anything in common.

    3.  I am bombarded with so many ads in so many places that I can do without more.  My policy is to never click on ads on FB or on many other sites. 

    4.  While FB’s original mission was connectedness/communication, I think it has become “Let’s make as much money from these fools as we can.”  “Wanna have gobs of fun playing a free game on FB?”  That game is gonna cost ya big, folks. 

    5.  Social sites are just more places where your personal info can be stolen.  There’s enough risk out there as it is.  Additional risk is not providing any valuable payoff for me.

    6.  Why do I want to “friend” a certain handbag manufacturer?  Why do I want to take a quiz that tells me what my personality is?  FB content providers tell you up front that if you click the link to take their quiz (goes for other types of content as well) you are giving them permission to access your profile info.  That’s ok.  I’ll also give you my SSN, bank account number and the key to my front door.  Not.

    7.  Don’t even get me started on the number of people who start an account in a pet’s name, and even have the pets making friends and posting.

    “…he was just too old to grasp the coolness of it all.”

    No, it’s just that most of us get to the age when we demand a bit of wheat with our chaff.

    At 38 my daughter is older than the average demographic of social sites although I know that that demographic is skewing up.  She seems to be cooling on FB.  Some of her 221 friends are as well.  Many of them do want some wheat.  When more cooling has taken place I will unjoin.

    I wonder, though, what new fad will come along when FB, Twitter and others run their course?  MySpace, anyone?

  • Mike "Scout" Gust

    My favorite line from the BBC interview was when Lanier was comparing MySpace and Facebook. He admitted that MySpace had some eye gougingly bad pages but said that he liked the “strangeness” of personalities that you get with it. With Facebook, he claimed that it was like looking at a tax form. A boring, watered down, bland presentation of people.

    I joined Facebook almost exactly a year ago. Apart from sparking up a new friendship with a very dear buddy, I’ve gotten about zero back from it. I sort of read with bemusement the activities of people I hardly know and could care less about. And when you consider how much information the devs harvest there…it’s scary. Lanier claims that the information is so far worthless to the investors and that the whole thing has become a sort useless ritual serving no purpose. He claimed that Google’s ads on the other hand will probably turn out to be the greatest advertising model ever created. He also thinks Google should stop before it’s too late but says they probably won’t. Just a glance at the side bar reveals about 4 ads for advertising agencies. Heh.

  • lokimotive

    Has anybody read Anti-Oedipus? I’m slogging my way through it (the third attempt I believe), and Deleuze and Gauttari’s ideas seem relevant to this in a way that I’m not sure I can articulate. This probably has something to do with a conversation I was eavesdropping on that, coincidentally, mentioned a lot of Deleuze and Gauttari’s theories. Someone was talking about another theorist (whose name I didn’t catch) who was defending “Generation Y” essentially. The argument went that Generation Y is an example of a “de-Oedipalized” cultural group (that’s Anti-Oedipus jargon, just stay with me). Apparently this meant that they made connections in a different manner than other generations, the idea of bricollage was brought up and things were generally mired in a lot of reasons why I don’t have my Masters in English. What I got from it was this Generation Y shoots out connections everywhere and attempts to make up a whole idea with them as opposed to relying on predefined pathways. In Deleuze and Guattari’s language: the schizo as opposed to Oedipus. In language that probably makes sense: Peer to Peer as opposed to client-server.

    So, of course, no one’s really right. I’m skeptical of the idea that Generation Y (full disclosure: I’m 29 so I’m part of that group) has enacted some sort of paradigm shift in how to operate in social systems, but facebook has changed how I connect with people. Then again, it’s not like I don’t value face to face communication.

    The future is somewhere in between. I’m really not cynical enough to believe that we are at the end times of civilized society because of Web 2.0. Instead society will change and stay the same because that’s what it does. Facebook is not the future; it’s probably a rung up the ladder though.

  • kaythomas

    To me, Facebook and Twitter are 0’s. They are not worth my time.  I do not care what someone I know or don’t know did a half hour ago or will do next.  I have met up with people on facebook I had lost contact with.  But, in truth, the reason I had lost contact was I was not that interested in staying in contact.

    I think for many people the Facebook/Twitter world is great.  For me it has nothing to offer. 
    kay

  • Matt "Steerpike" Sakey

    Tap has an automated device that twits… tweets… whatever whenever someone posts a new article. Just in case it draws some visitors.

    To be honest, though, I’m on Kay’s side of the fence, I don’t understand Twitter and I don’t understand why it’s so popular. I barely care what I’m doing from moment to moment, why should anyone else?

    I don’t get Facebook either, though I’m a member to keep track of all the girls who wouldn’t give me the time of day in high school.

  • Lewis B

    Tweets are great for giving me snippets of news.  If I like what I’ve read in the short paragraph tweets give, then I will visit the main page for that tweet. (Very good for following world news, favourite columnists, etc.)

    However, reading tweets from people such as “Just woke up, Madonna is giving me a massage while I shave my nuts” is not my idea of a good read.

  • Toger

    I use tweets the same way Lewis does. Of the people/things I follow, if the tweet is interesting I’ll follow the link to read the entire article. I follow fairly intelligent people, so I’m not subjected to the idiocy of “Just brushed my teeth while sitting on toilet”.

  • Gregg B

    @loki: I’m afraid I’ve not heard of them. I’m a couple of years below you so that puts me in the same Generation Y as well. I read through a few of those links Scout posted as well as a few more on Lanier’s new book “You Are Not a Gadget” and it took me a fair while to get to the crux of what he is saying and he has a lot to say, most of which I find very confusing.

    As a graphic designer the whole “everything is becoming advertising” thing has been bothering me for years. The incessant barrage of advertising is like fingernails on the chalkboard of my soul, which sort of makes me a hypocrite. After all the years of tuning my art and design skillz my creative abilities have amounted to nothing more than crafting pretty ads that sell things. Non of it speaks any truth or has any sort of ‘beauty’; it’s just stone cold mechanical capitalism. Granted there are ads out there that are beautiful, clever and visionary but the front line stuff is as dull as it gets. I’m sure this isn’t strictly what he’s getting at but it’s definitely something that irks me in relation to Scout’s last remark.

    Anyway, I remember Twitter just exploding in what seemed like the space of a week and I still can’t fathom the allure of it aside from providing a direct stream of consciousness from famous folk to their ravenous fans. I wish I’d thought of it to be honest. I can see the creators sitting around a table staring at Facebook and then saying “I know! We make a website that’s just about status updates! You can even update them with your mobile phone!”.

    With regards to Twitter news snippets, unless it’s for a phone, I don’t see the point because RSS feeds do a great job. At present too great; I simply can’t keep up with my subscriptions. There’s too much information on this super highway.

  • Jen

    Twitter is officially the dumbest thing ever.

    That said, it looks like I will have to be the official “tweeter” for my day job before too long. I can’t wait! (roll eyes)

  • xtal

    I’m with everyone else here. I’m glad to say I’ve never signed up for Facebook; I fear that if I ever had I would have long ago died from loss of brain cells due to reading moronic status updates. It’s as Kay said: ninety-five per cent of people with whom you lose contact are probably no longer in your life because you have nothing left in common. And echoing Steerpike’s comment, me eating toast and jam on a Sunday morning watching Fawlty Towers is not interesting, not to me. Why the hell would anyone else give a shit?

    Twitter I signed up for about a year ago, not really understanding what it was. I now understand it…but don’t care to use it often. I have made 58 tweets over that year. I suspect for some that is a daily or weekly average. It’s just Facebook status updates without all the drunken photographs. I admit it can be mildly useful for following, say, a news site. Usually when I hop on my twitter (once every two weeks??) it reminds me that I should read The Onion more often. That’s about it.

    Let’s see… looking at the actual humans I follow, um… Wil Wheaton is happy that the LA Kings have won 9 games in a row, my sister-in-law thought our dinner tonight was “delicious,” and Kevin Smith’s batteries are recharged … or something.

    Wow, my life is already getting better!

    p.s.  <—– Gen Y'er (can we call ourselves that?) and proud that when I Google my own name a real estate company pops up.

  • Fraser

    Twitter is exactly as useless as the person who’s writing it. If someone is telling you boring shit over Twitter, it’s the person wasting your time, not the delivery channel.

    MySpace is the same, but it seems more intrinsically garbage because for some reason almost everyone who used it was an intellectual embryo with a fetish for unreadable hyperneon text on top of garish uninteresting photos. Facebook’s great trick is that it prevents you from realising that most of your friends would make a brutally hideous homepage for themselves if they could.

    That’s the argument against the whole of this post: the internet isn’t evil, but the people who use it might be. It’s people who make business models successful; people who make money flow to advertisers instead of artists, by buying into the advertising.

    This has been a pretty didactic post, so let me compensate by saying VIDEOGAMES WOOOOOOO!!!

  • Gregg B

    Good point about not blaming the delivery channel Fraser. I seem to recall Lanier saying that he preferred the personality that MySpace has over Facebook despite its Craptastic Pages of Illegibility. I’m trying to think of something intelligent to follow that up with but my brain is failing me at the moment, so…

    VIDEOGAMES WOOOOOO!!!

  • Jason Venter

    Fraser, I really loved your following comment:

    “Facebook’s great trick is that it prevents you from realising that most of your friends would make a brutally hideous homepage for themselves if they could.”

    I think that may just be one of the most hilariously true comments I’ve read in a comments area on any video game web site ever.  That sounds overly dramatic, I know, but I actually mean it.  Kudos to you!

  • Mike "Scout" Gust

    Yeah but don’t you miss all the ugliness of MySpace? All those hideous pages at least had personality or what Lanier called the “strangeness of the person” to them.

    I actually don’t agree with a lot of what Lanier says esp “the hive mind must die” stuff. But I do think he is right about the spirit shriveling blandness of Facebook.

    I also suspect that Twitter is going to be around for a while. It will be more and more influential. People are simply not as willing to ingest huge amounts of information in the form of pages of text anymore. The delivery systems that succeed will be those that can communicate a lot of information in a short amount of time. Most days we want “glimpses” or “snapshots” not total immersion. Lewis, Toger and Fraser are correct in that you get out of it what you decide to follow.

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