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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
Back by popular demand, our video game junkies review "Mafia" and breathe heavily over the "Bra & Panties" match in the new "Smackdown."
Mar 11, 2004 | "Mafia" (Illusion Softworks)
Jeff: Based on the box and instruction booklet, "Mafia" seems heavily reliant on "The Getaway" for its overall look and feel.
Tom: "The Getaway" itself having leaned conceptually hard on "Grand Theft Auto: Vice City." Both are terrific, sui generis games, though. I don't blame people for copying them.
Jeff: Everyone wants to be a gangsta. "Vice City" had the pastel-clad crime world of 1980s Miami, and "The Getaway" gave us the underworld of contemporary London. "Mafia" takes us back to the mythic roots of the genre -- into the world of American organized crime circa 1930. I'm thinking Capone, Cagney . . .
Tom: If this is a 1930 "Grand Theft Auto," then I assume we can look forward to dancing the Lindy, sleeping with flappers, running moonshine, stuffing ballot boxes for Mayor Daley and tommy-gunning snitches.
Jeff: We open with some truly beautiful cinematic flybys of the awkwardly named little neverland of Lost Heaven, where "Mafia" takes place.
Tom: This game looks really, really good -- amazingly good, in fact -- in these opening sequences. Some great water effects, the sound is phenomenal, every Lost Heavenite has a different gait, the buildings look nicely grimy, and the clouds and sun are rendered with crystalline care. I'm told the PC incarnation of this game is even better, but it looks pretty great on the Playstation. Everywhere you look is graphical singularity and differentiation. Already I'm impressed.
Jeff: Are you noticing all the Czech names in "Mafia's" credits? Look at this: Pavel Cizek, Tomas Hrebicek, Vaclav Kral.
Tom: We inflicted on Eastern Bloc gamers the indignity of "Rush'N Attack." I don't believe we have much right to complain if these Czech programmers feel like making sport of U.S. mobster iconography.
Jeff: And this game has an epigraph! It uses Romans 15:1 as an epigraph! Not even "Hitman 2," the most operatically bombastic game we've ever played, had the audacity to use an epigraph.
Tom: And now we've got a 10-minute-long intro sequence.
Jeff: I hate this. I just hate it. Video games are not movies. Not yet. The faces are nicely rendered but their mouths and bodies move like animatronic robots. I'd rather hear a well-written voice-over narration with some nice stills than see these clumsily animated "dramatic" sequences.
Tom: Looks like our character, Tommy, is a snitch. He's talking to a cop about dropping a dime on his boss Salieri.
Jeff: Salieri.
Tom: Whose voice, sadly, is not provided by F. Murray Abraham.
Jeff: It looks like at least a sizeable part of this game takes place as Tommy narrates to this cop his accidental life in the mob, which means you're playing levels that are flashbacks.
Tom: That's ... kind of odd, isn't it? If it's a flashback, and you're telling someone what happened, how, then, do you die? I confess the narrative implications of this are kind of blowing my mind.
Jeff: And yet you seem to have come to terms with the millions of resurrections you've experienced in your life as a gamer. All right. Finally. Here we go. Tommy's story begins. It turns out he's a humble cab driver who first crosses paths with the mob when they jump into his cab as they're running from a rival gang. Go, man! Get them out of there!
Tom: I'm trying. My car is kind of ... slow.
Jeff: Are you in a Brubaker or something? A Brubaker's a car, right?
Tom: I'm not sure. I'm going 30 miles an hour, though.
Jeff: This just now occurred to me: Is it a good idea to create a car-chase game set in a time when going to South Hampton was a three-day journey?
Tom: Lost Heaven certainly looks pretty, though. It's sort of a greatest-hits cityscape: San Francisco's bridges, Boston's row houses, Chicago's street-hovering Ls.
Jeff: Please speed up. I can't take this. If I wanted a documentary experience of 1930 I'd rent a Ken Burns movie.
Tom: Be patient -- though I have to admit I'm not crazy about "Mafia's" clarinet-reliant jazz soundtrack. It sounds like a Woody Allen movie's opening-credit sequence.
Jeff: It says in the instructions here that you have the option of a "speed limiter" to prevent you from speeding. It also says that if you're ticketed by the cops you have to get out of the car and pay the fine they give you. Is this a driver's-ed game? Did the highway patrol put this out?
Tom: These games never really reveal their true quality until you're gunning people down. You know that.
Jeff: This game needs a new slogan. "Go back to a time when cars were slow and crime sucked! Strap yourself into a Model T and turn on your speed limiter: 'Mafia' will take you on the ride of your life!"
Tom: Look, we gave them the slip. So now I guess I'm in the mob. Next board is yours.
Jeff: You're sorely mistaken. We're not in the mob yet. Before we can join the mob we have to drive around Lost Heaven as a law-abiding taxi driver for an hour. "Mafia" is developing video-game muscles I didn't even know I had: how to drive 24 miles an hour; how to get from point A to point B without breaking any laws; how to respect life and property.
Tom: I think in the next mission you get to do mob-type stuff.
Jeff: Yeah, maybe we'll get to load crates of moonshine onto a truck or something. Or toilet-paper a rival gangster's house. Or go around sticking bananas in people's tailpipes.
Tom: I'm still willing to give "Mafia" a chance.
Jeff: Sorry, but in my admittedly idealized video-game universe it should not take more than 70 minutes of play to get to the Good Parts.
Tom: Maybe "Mafia" means "boring" in Czech.
