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toblix

Mafia II

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Just spent a few hours getting through the first 5 missions of the free copy of Mafia 1 I got with my preorder in anticipation of this game. I'm not entirely sure what to say about it, to be honest. I can see that there's a great game underneath all the clunkiness, but goddamn is it clunky.

First, the bad. The controls are completely non-standard, leading to my car not moving when I tell it to in the first mission of the damn game. I had to remap every single interaction in order to make the game feel familiar. The horrible camera when you're on foot is laughable, planting the main character's shoulderblades directly in the middle of the bottom of your screen at all times, making his head look like the pistol from the early bits of Doom. The graphics are mixed at best. I really like how animated all the characters are, especially in the face (holy crap! Mouths move in a GTA-style game from 2002!), but either textures get reused way too much or there's actually a Boy's Grill restaurant and a Rose's Bar on every corner of the city. I don't think franchising had taken off quite that much in 1932 (the year I have reached in the game now), so I've got to assume overused assets.

Now, the good. The story is really drawing me in (despite some voice acting that belongs in the above paragraph) and feels like it's done in a pretty interesting way. I also really dig the way that despite running around and killing people in secret, you actually do have to keep up appearances. The speed limiter is brilliant, and actually keeps me thinking about blending in with the world rather than just blowing it up. Most of the mechanics feel dated, but in an 8 year old game, of course they are. Contrasted with GTA3, which I remember everyone comparing it to at the time, they feel great. I don't get the GTA comparison at all though, as despite a similar look to screenshots, they are completely different games. This world is not open at all. You go from mission to mission, always with an arrow telling you exactly where to go and a clock ticking down making sure you're going there. I don't mind this a bit, but I can definitely see why people were disappointed when it came out.

I'm going to make every attempt to beat this game before Mafia 2 comes out, but again, damn is it clunky. I really like it despite that, and can see that it would be worth suffering through the bits that are either really dated or just bad to begin with, but fair warning to anyone else who may be thinking of doing the same thing. This game has simply not aged as well as many others.

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Don't forget the music. There's some very rare Django in there. Once you get to the old school racecars you really get a better grip of the driving in Mafia1 and it seems to click. The shooting bits, especially later in the game, work way better than they did in GTA3.

Mafia2 PC all the way.

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I have fond memories of playing Mafia. Replayed it at least two times. But I am not as thrilled by Mafia II as I used to be by the first one. I wasn't before I played the demo and now after several hours spent on the demo (thanks to the guy who created the time freezer - why the developers even implemented it is beyond me) I'm still not convinced.

[rant]

I think after eight years and after playing GTA IV for hours and hours I expected more or smth. different. The gameplay of Mafia II has been left unchanged almost completely compared to its predecessor. The only differences are some added elements common among todays games, like recharging health and a cover system.

The demo mission is something I have played literally hundreds of times in GTA and other games already: watching cutscene -> running through corridors / taking cover behind objects / shooting peoples' faces off -> watching another cutscene -> shaking off the police while somebody is bleeding onto the back seat.

The urban environment feels like a Truman set, just like in the original Mafia and even more than in GTA IV. Cars materialize 100 m in front of you and vanish as soon as you are around the block. You can create huge pile-up of cars on a crossing which never disappears as long as you stay. But running 50 meters from the scene looking in another direction and voilà: the chaos is gone and it's as if it never happened.

And how weird the "people" act around you: kill somebody and others around run away (reasonable). Somebody will eventually come and utter some words of consternation (somewhat reasonable). The police shows up, stands around for a few seconds and then drives off leaving the body (NOT reasonable). And then people start minding their own business as if nothing ever happened, walking past the corpse like it's perfectly normal (disturbing).

I'm well aware that GTA IV has the same problems (though the world feels more real overall due to a greater variety of character designs and more detailed surroundings) and I played the sh*t out of it. But I'm becoming increasingly bored and disappointed by the obvious stagnation in terms of "creating a convincing world". While graphics improve and improve, NPC behavior is as horrid as ever. No improvement at all. :tdown:

[/rant]

What I liked:

  • Driving the cars in simulation mode is challenging and fun
  • Graphics are mostly nice looking
  • Particle effects look great (APEX clothing is useless though due to the huge performance hit)
  • Voice acting is good and cut-scenes well staged (the stiff faces not taken into account)
  • After robbing a place police shows up to investigate; depend on hints to identify you / no psychics

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Don't forget the music. There's some very rare Django in there. Once you get to the old school racecars you really get a better grip of the driving in Mafia1 and it seems to click. The shooting bits, especially later in the game, work way better than they did in GTA3.

Mafia2 PC all the way.

I had no issue with the driving, actually. Everyone complains about the driving, so I can understand why you'd assume I have a problem with it, but I saved for the night right before the racecar thing and haven't had an issue with that yet. The cars are old and shitty. Getting up a hill faster than 20mph seems impossible unless you have a bloody huge running start. That's just what they are though. There's nothing bad about them, apart from the fact that, just like they're supposed to be, they're really freaking old cars.

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Good god I hated the racecar thing. I adore most things about that game, but the race nearly stopped me from playing. Fortunately I managed to get through it eventually.

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Yeah, the race almost made me give up on the game entirely. Now my buddy Superfly keeps getting deaded real quick while I'm trying to go through an abandoned service station to mop up some punks. He runs straight into a crowd of 5 guys with nothing but a baseball bat, gets raped in half, and I have to reload the game. I think I'm starting to hate this game. I'm on mission 7 of 20, and still want to go through it, but god damn.

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If it's the same mission I think it is, then it's best if you can get as far ahead as possible and do as much damage before he gets stuck in. I think from the moment the mission starts you can run ahead and open the door before he normally does it. I had trouble there as well, but the race-car mission was really only difficult for me the first time around simply because I had a low framerate. After I upgraded my computer it wasn't an issue, but I must have attempted it about 600 million times prior to that.

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Didn't they even release a patch that lowered the difficulty on the race? I didn't think it was that hard, although I definitely had to replay it a couple of times.

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That's because you don't live on a continent that a whole of publisher hate.

It was pretty much canceled in Europe.

Oh, that's a shame. Then I'll wait for it to go on sale.

What's your beef with steam exactly? I saw a similar post on gamasutra regarding another game, I don't remember which. I promise I'm not stalking, nor trying to be an asshole.... just recognized your avatar.

(it's a small world afterall)

As for me, I plan on playing it but i'm not sure my PC is 100% up to the task so I will probably just wait a few months until I build my next PC. I was pretty fanatical about the first. I don't expect this one to live up to the narrative quality judging from the previews i've seen thus far.

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What's your beef with steam exactly? I saw a similar post on gamasutra regarding another game, I don't remember which. I promise I'm not stalking, nor trying to be an asshole.... just recognized your avatar.

- Single point of failure; whole game collection linked to a single volatile account;

- No consumer protection; because Valve is not bound to EU laws

- Requires you to be online; unless offline mode has been fixed since november 2009, it's seriously annoying to wait a very long time (3-5 minutes) just to play a game

Those are the reason I try to avoid Steam as much as possible, and otherwise wait till the game dropped to a more disposable price; which usually takes 3 to 6 months.

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- Requires you to be online; unless offline mode has been fixed since november 2009, it's seriously annoying to wait a very long time (3-5 minutes) just to play a game

If it helps, I do most of my gaming via offline mode. It works fine as far as I'm concerned.

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If it helps, I do most of my gaming via offline mode. It works fine as far as I'm concerned.

Yes, but you're have a working internet connection when you go into offline mode. Right?

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No, often I'll forget to throw the laptop into offline mode until I'm already at work. Steam doesn't care. It just goes "oh, well you were online when you signed in, so ok."

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I didn't have a modem for about 2 weeks once and it worked fine for me at the time. Granted I only played Borderlands and Portal. Might work for some games, but not for others. This was months ago, by the way.

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Ok, then it's something in my setup that makes steam just wait for the normal TCP timeout before prompting to go into offline mode. Steam was the only application that had problems with it, everything else returned right away that the outside world was unreachable.

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Just tried the demo on PS3. The controls are decent enough and the game looked better and run more smoothly than on my laptop, so I'll probably be buying this on PS3 then. In my opinion, the car handling actually felt very good on a gamepad. Just driving around the city with the radio turned on pleases me greatly.

Soundtrack was perfect, too. I hope it's more than just a few songs, because it really felt right. After all my time in Fallout 3, I'm acutely aware of games that do a great job licensing music but then only license like 6 songs. I hope Mafia 2 is not one of those.

I was worried about this as well, so I checked it. It seems that they have over 120 licensed songs in the game.

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I was worried about this as well, so I checked it. It seems that they have over 120 licensed songs in the game.

Yay!

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I tried out the demo yesterday. It worked perfectly!

I haven't played GTA4 at all, but I really liked the driving in this game and I was using keyboard&mouse combination.

Propably the coolest thing for me was driving to the mission on the island when I first drove the car to the bridge, the view was amazing! My jaw dropped right there. Now I'm scared to ever try the first one again, I was originally planning to dig it up from my closet and play it through before the sequel comes out. Great job from the developers, the game is shaping up to be quite nice!

The control layout was a bit strange, I think they've got quite a lot of buttons mapped out. Different button for breaking the window, different button for exiting and entering cars etc.

The car physics were a bit weird, I crashed with a really small car to a big truck and the truck went flying while my car just stayed there and moved a little bit backwards. The cars don't get apparently totally destroyed in crashes, just the window breaks, some metal gets crushed and the bumper starts to get loose, but doesn't drop completely?

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It looks like the Netherlands will be getting collector's editions for the PC, but apparently only the FreeRecordShop is allowed to sell them.

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No, that was the first Mafia. This game has a city up in the sky.

But the first one was subtitled The City of Lost Heaven. :erm:

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Played a couple hours last night and I like it so far. Even though the reviews of the game have not been that great, I am still enjoying it. Most reviews out there don't see this game as a "controlled" open world and expect to let you do things a GTA game would.

I came into this game knowing what I wanted. I don't really care about not having much to do in the city besides drive around and complete missions. I don't really care there aren't many side missions either. Playing the game last night brought back quite a few nostalgic memories of playing the original game and that is all I basically wanted from the sequel.

Anyway, played a couple chapters so far. The environments are really done well and look quite nice. The only thing I disapprove of are the playboy magazine collectibles that are apparently strewn around the world. I accidentally found one last night and I don't really understand what the point of it is. What were they thinking putting this stuff as collectibles in a game? More updates as and when I get the time to play again.

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The only thing I disapprove of are the playboy magazine collectibles that are apparently strewn around the world. I accidentally found one last night and I don't really understand what the point of it is. What were they thinking putting this stuff as collectibles in a game?

"Accidentally"? You sound like an embarrassed adolescent. You're playing a macho mafioso. Macho mafiosi don't complain about playboy bunnies. "Are you a fag? Do you want to bring shame on your family?" - these are words your mafia daddy would likely say to you in the light of your playboy phobia.

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