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MAFIA III - Yo Coonass prepare ta learn 'bout family in N'awlins

rezaf

Cipher
Joined
Jan 26, 2015
Messages
650
AJ has a point when he says Mafia 3 is trying to out-GTA the GTA series, which it does a pretty miserable job of.
There's so many little touches missing.

And who the fuck makes a GTA game in which you cannot store your cars?
 

sullynathan

Arcane
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Messages
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I never played Mafia 2, was it any good?
Not really. If you really want to play something like it, play LA Noire. Story is more engaging and so were the gun fights, or if you want to stomach something that is also shit but more enjoyable. Play GTA 4.
 
Last edited:
Joined
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Messages
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RPS' John Walker wrote a review, he kinda hates the game. Mildly surprising, I'd think that OMG RAYCISM angle would have been a hit among SJWs.
Review In Progress: Mafia III

By John Walker on October 8th, 2016 at 8:59 pm.

ma11.jpg


For reasons that are becoming apparent, 2K chose not to share review code with the press for Mafia III [official site], instead choosing for everyone to be able to buy it before critics could potentially warn them off. So it is that we couldn’t get our hands on it before you could, and I’m playing the game over the weekend to be able to bring you a full review next week. But in the meantime, below is a Review In Progress, my thoughts from the earlier hours of this open-city mafia-me-be, to give you a rough idea of whether this is a something in which you want to sink your pennies. Clearly the below is not a final review of the game, but it sure contains my feelings about the experience so far.



ma05.jpg


I turn up to a country club in a red sports car, the guy on the gate horrified that a black man thinks he can just go through the main entrance. I’m Lincoln Clay, freshly returned from the Vietnam War, and I’m helping out my father-figure by getting the Haitians off his back, and as part of that doing a favour for the local mob. I’ve been invited to see mafia boss Sal Marcone in his luxurious club, the sort of place that doesn’t welcome a negro gentleman, as this guard is letting me know.

But I’ve been invited, and he has to let me in. Into a courtyard where, in my shiny soft-top I proceed to mow down everyone in sight, to absolutely no reaction. Groups of members stood about chatting are panicked when their friends start dying, but make no effort to get away, while other gaggles a few metres away seem not to notice. More bizarrely, while the “help” I kill, a couple of gardeners, stay dead on their well-kept lawns, all the posh folks eventually get back up and carry on with their conversations. Welcome to Mafia III.

ma02.jpg


Mafia III takes the novel twist of not being a game about the Mafia, the Italian mob really being a side-product of its story of a young black Vietnam vet attempting to take control of the city from the made man who killed his family. Grabbing a huge bucketful of Saints Row, and picking handfuls of the last decade of Ubisoft games, the result is an open city in which you regain territory by claiming others’ rackets, killing off rivals, and recruiting underlings to your ever-growing empire. Mostly by driving toward and icon, then killing everyone there. But it doesn’t start off this way.

At first the game plays much more like the previous two (Mafia: The City Of Lost Heaven being a flawed classic, Mafia II being a nasty piece of garbage) with a faux open world as decoration, the game as linear series of story missions set within. As Lincoln is introduced, things play out in a more familiar fashion, mission after mission in order, with the freedom to drive off but no reason to do so. However, once you’ve ploughed through the opening chain of narrative-driven missions, and mistakenly believed this is true to the form of a Mafia game, it then slumps bonelessly into a saggy, bloated open city that no one was asking for.

ma06.jpg


It is far more Saints Row III than anything else, a broad map with an ever-growing number of missions and side-missions to complete, some for the central narrative, some for extra power in the city, as you occupy more territory and control more funds. But to get there, boy oh boy is it going to explain how. From the moment it opens up, it feels the need to interrupt what you’re doing on a simply astonishing number of occasions to force you to learn about the latest extra element being piled in, as if throwing enough micro-management at you will trick you into thinking you’re having an involved time. When it starts repeating these agonisingly frequent game-freezing tutorial messages that you’ve already fully taken on board, it’s hard not to start roaring at the screen. “I KNOW ABOUT RECRUITING BOSSES! ALL YOU’VE HAD ME DO SO FAR IS RECRUIT BOSSES! STOP TELLING ME HOW TO RECRUIT BOSSES! JUST LET ME PLAY FOR FIFTEEN SECONDS!”

ma12.jpg


The game, while pretty enough in places, looks very dated. And not 1960s dated. Character faces look a good five years out of date (except for the teeth – they’re exceptional teeth), while vehicles look like they’re made of plastic. It’s derivative in every sense, feeling like a slipshod knock-off of a GTA knock-off, something Ubisoft would have squeezed out in between bigger projects. So familiar is every aspect of the game, from its bland open city with mission chains strung within, to the press-Y-to-steal-a-car ordinariness of the process, to even featuring purple fleur-de-lis icons on the map without any apparent sense of awareness nor shame. Good grief, if you’re going to lift so many features of someone else’s game, don’t bloody use their distinctive logo too!

As a part of this, it of course wants to be able to offer all the mod-cons of your stand Ubisoft icon-em-up, but keeps hitting a narrative wall with its chosen pre-computer, pre-mobile, pre-internet setting. In increasingly embarrassing and desperate bends of reality, it tries to justify surveillance systems by use of wiretapping junction boxes, which then apparently give you pinpointed locations of all enemies in an area via… I really have no idea. My best theory is that there’s a whole second layer to the story where Lincoln Clay is in fact an unaware robot from the future, explaining how he’s capable of seeing the outlines of enemies through walls, and red highlights around combative foes in crowds.

ma10.jpg


As alluded to in my opening, Mafia III is also a game very much about race. And race in the late 1960s southern United States is clearly not a comforting or comfortable subject. The game offers a rather strange and seemingly paranoid opening card that concludes, “We find the racist beliefs, language, and behaviors of some of the characters in the game abhorrent, but believe it is vital to include these depictions in order to tell Lincoln Clay’s story.” Which is, well, a pretty odd way of putting it.

ma14.jpg


“It’s vital to include these depictions in order to tell the story of this era of this nation’s history,” would have been equally unnecessary and paranoid, but at least made a lick of sense. Lincoln Clay isn’t real, the city is fictional, and his is not a story that was going untold until some people in a room invented it. Anyway, this is all to say that the game is jam-packed with racial epithets and abuse, oozing out of every pore, as the character you’re playing is insulted, jeered, rejected or dismissed. And that’s a novel experience for a white dude in the UK – I cannot speak for anyone else’s perspective or experience, and clearly am not a victim of racial abuse in my daily life. Your mileage will clearly vary. For me, being incessantly called “boy” or “nigger” feels alien, distant, far outside my own life, and I perceive it as ugly, but not particularly affecting.

I think it might be partly that I’ve just sat and watched thirteen episodes of Luke Cage, and heard the n-word an awful lot in doing so, and perhaps been too recently fatigued by its use. I think it might be more significantly because of the bubble gum frippery of the writing, a muddle of “I’ve watched the Godfather a few times” gangster speak, and “Cor, isn’t it terrible how people were awfully racist” condemning scripting. The latter is, I think, the bigger issue, the game too frantically making sure you know the sorts who use such language are all dreadful, rather than more intelligently capturing the larger horror that such language – and the societal status it implied – was indelibly a part of the vocabulary of the era. That it simply wasn’t a perceived big deal that people would say this, ostensibly “decent” people would use such words without a surface-level burning ill will. It, in being so busily worried about ensuring everyone knows that they’re not a racist some of their best friends etc, they’ve ended up diminishing the impact and severity of the language used.

ma09.jpg


Perhaps later in the game such issues will be more smartly explored, the writing will be braver, and have something more sophisticated to say. I don’t know yet. What I do know is that most of the rest of the game has little chance of earning the term “sophisticated”.

It is, peculiarly, a big backward step from Mafia II’s superb gunplay. That game made the ridiculous mistake of barely using its best feature; this one has infinite shoot-outs, but without any of the thrill or tension. Enemy AI is so appalling that they can do nothing beyond bob up and down from cover, other than run straight toward you in a suicidal charge. Although that’s a best case scenario – it’s not unlikely that they’ll instead opt to face a wall and endlessly run toward it, or get themselves run over, or just walk off.

Features that had made the previous game more interesting, the ability for fire to spread, for cover to be meticulously damaged, are all gone. Molotov cocktails are hilariously useless, and you could throw them at a pile of birds nests lined with matches and they’d fizzle out in three or four seconds. You can shoot out some wooden boxes to remove cover, but that’s about it.

Talking of sophistication, my, what a welcome return for the Playboy licensed pictures of bare ladies to collect as you go. Yes indeed, you too could be the proud owner of a gallery of scans of ladies with their boobies out (as well as, hilariously, some articles from Playboy too – yes indeed, I imagine they only included the magazine in the game for the articles). No, the images themselves aren’t offensive. Some of them are very lovely vintage photographs. But the bizarre desire to have included them at all, this bold statement that this is a game for boys, is more the issue to me.

ma13.jpg


So far what I’ve experienced has been decidedly mediocre at best, farcical broken AI at worst. It feels like an open-city game from at least five years ago, possibly ten, in presentation, depth and delivery. That it runs at 30FPS is the least of its present problems, because at 60 and 90 its early hours will still be a bland, dated derivative of GTA. It’s going to have to significantly step up, introduce some novel and intriguing new elements, or at the very least embolden its story to the point where it has something meaningful to say, for it to recover itself in my eyes.

Mafia III is out now on Steam for £35/$60/€50.
 

adddeed

Arcane
Possibly Retarded
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Messages
1,473
I never played Mafia 2, was it any good?
YES.

Please don't listen to the haters above.

I replayed both games back to back a year agoh. Mafia 2 is not inferior. Cars physics were improved (without a doubt the most fun car handling out of all similar games, the game can easily pass for a racing sim, its that good), map was improved, i did not mind the cover mechanic and the game was challenging on highest difficulty, i liked the garage and how you can upgrade your car, story was good, stealth was improved, i liked the boxing and lock picking minigames, robbing shops was fun as was changing outfits, not to mention the attention to detail was just superb.

A good sequel. May not be better than the original overall, but it isn't worse either.
 
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Moo?
From gameplay vids it looked way more like Ubishit sandbox than anything resembling GTA to me.


That right there. I've seen people make far more Watch Dog comparisons, it seems to even share some of the same glitches.

That mix isn't chocolate and peanut butter. It's chocolate and alfalfa sprouts.
 

Alienman

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Codex 2016 - The Age of Grimoire Make the Codex Great Again! Grab the Codex by the pussy Codex Year of the Donut Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
When we now are talking about the older Mafia games, how come the older Take 2 games can't be bought on Steam? Like Vietcong, Mafia and Hidden & Dangerous. Anyone know?
 
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When we now are talking about the older Mafia games, how come the older Take 2 games can't be bought on Steam? Like Vietcong, Mafia and Hidden & Dangerous. Anyone know?

I've read before that Mafia isn't up on Steam because license on some songs has expired. I would gladly add it to my Steam collection.
 

AwesomeButton

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Does the game's story actually tackle racism at all?
Not in the way in which Mad Men tackels it for example. More in the way that the history books in 1984 tackled history:
In the old days (it ran), before the glorious Revolution, London was not the beautiful city that we know today. It was a dark, dirty, miserable place where hardly anybody had enough to eat and where hundreds and thousands of poor people had no boots on their feet and not even a roof to sleep under. Children no older than you had to work twelve hours a day for cruel masters who flogged them with whips if they worked too slowly and fed them on nothing but stale breadcrusts and water.

But in among all this terrible poverty there were just a few great big beautiful houses that were lived in by rich men who had as many as thirty servants to look after them. These rich men were called capitalists. They were fat, ugly men with wicked faces, like the one in the picture on the opposite page. You can see that he is dressed in a long black coat which was called a frock coat, and a queer, shiny hat shaped like a stovepipe, which was called a top hat. This was the uniform of the capitalists, and no one else was allowed to wear it. The capitalists owned everything in the world, and everyone else was their slave. They owned all the land, all the houses, all the factories, and all the money. If anyone disobeyed them they could throw them into prison, or they could take his job away and starve him to death. When any ordinary person spoke to a capitalist he had to cringe and bow to him, and take off his cap and address him as 'Sir'. The chief of all the capitalists was called the King. and

But he knew the rest of the catalogue. There would be mention of the bishops in their lawn sleeves, the judges in their ermine robes, the pillory, the stocks, the treadmill, the cat-o'-nine tails, the Lord Mayor's Banquet, and the practice of kissing the Pope's toe. There was also something called the jus primae noctis, which would probably not be mentioned in a textbook for children. It was the law by which every capitalist had the right to sleep with any woman working in one of his factories.
 

Santander02

Arcane
Joined
Sep 29, 2009
Messages
3,363
Speaking of SJWs, we all know Daniel Vavra hates them almost as much as the Codex does, I wonder how he feels about the game series he created being turned into a PC propaganda piece with buggy, dumbed down gameplay...
 

Carrion

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I never played Mafia 2, was it any good?
Not really, although it does have its moments and a nice atmosphere. It improves a bit on the open world element from Mafia 1, adding a bunch of new things to do, but it's still all just unnecessary fluff in the end, because free-roaming just doesn't sit well with the overall structure of the game. The story and the writing don't really even approach the level of the first game, having some good parts here and there but never managing to gain any real momentum, and most of the characters are rather forgettable. The combat system is turned from great to shit with the introduction of the cover system, and the shooting sections have no real impact whatsoever. You'll be slaughtering people by the dozens from the get-go but no one seems to mind, and all tension is gone from the firefights because you can just sit behind cover all day without anyone being able to even scratch you. Overall the combat is probably the single biggest piece of decline from Mafia 1, just awful and generic as fuck. The driving mechanics are pretty good, but unfortunately it goes to waste because for the most part you'll just be driving from A to B and attempting to make it there safely. In that regard it's kind of like Mafia 1, except there are barely any car chases or anything, like cover shooting was the only thing they could come up with when designing the missions.

It's not entirely terrible, and it's entertaining (and short) enough for one playthrough, but only if you're starved for this kind of stuff.

He already made Mafia 2 so he can't say anything.
From what I remember Mafia 2 made SJWs cry about how sexist and racist it was*. I actually checked all the Mafia 2 main characters from the wiki. There are 22 of them, and two of them are women: your mom, and a prostitute known only as "Joe's girl". That's it. But of course, those are just the main characters, so it's missing other notable people like that random prostitute also known as a "fucking cum dumpster", all the other nameless prostitutes that briefly appear in the game, and the cleaning lady that pretty much does nothing aside from complaining and eavesdropping. There's also a very stereotypical Jewish loan shark (I mean, the type that actually goes and poisons your well when you're not looking) and a fair amount of slurs regarding people of Asian descent, to a point where it reportedly made some people a bit uncomfortable. You can blame the game for many things, but being SJW-friendly is probably not one of them.

* Then again, based on that John Walker piece above so did Mafia 3, so I guess there's just no way to win with these people.
 
Joined
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From what I remember Mafia 2 made SJWs cry about how sexist and racist it was*

Yeah I recall some people bitching that sluts who partied with thugs were too much like sluts. Because, of course, there's no reason why a normal respectable woman wouldn't wanna hang around gangsters too.
 

typical user

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Nov 30, 2015
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Damn, I played GTA V too much. Mafia 3 is good looking but it misses little details which original could boast with. There is no animation for honking in car, no ability to close doors, I haven't yet found a way to change clothes on my own. No characters or elements of enviroment to interact with. This game plays like Saints Row but lacks the customization options and weird abilities/powers. I like the combat though, your enemies aren't marked unless you see them and use the all-seeing sonar (and bothered to wire-tap district), on hard mode one goon can kill you with pistol, all gangs' hideouts are open and allow for stealth approach. Shame that this game received flak for some bad trailers showing off explosions and drifting.

The story is meh so far. Characters at the tutorial are likeable thanks to their facial expressions but the momentum is lost with all these skips to the action part. Maybe I am just looking for somehing to whine about but so far the main character has rather poor motive to take over a city and after taking over a brothel it is turned into some sort of jazz club - because you know, you can't play a crook but SJW who helps them niggaz without cash when cash is needed to operate a crime family.
 

Alienman

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Codex 2016 - The Age of Grimoire Make the Codex Great Again! Grab the Codex by the pussy Codex Year of the Donut Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
Major ending spoilers below!

The JFK thing, what in the fuck. Our pal the CIA agent randomly assassinate the senator thinking he might had something to do with the murder of JFK. That thing came out of nowhere. And what a nice guy he was. Cutting up old women in the jungle, makes me wonder if Lincoln did the same things.
 

AwesomeButton

Proud owner of BG 3: Day of Swen's Tentacle
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From what I remember Mafia 2 made SJWs cry about how sexist and racist it was*. I actually checked all the Mafia 2 main characters from the wiki. There are 22 of them, and two of them are women: your mom, and a prostitute known only as "Joe's girl". That's it. But of course, those are just the main characters,
Wat? What about Vito's sister, who with their mother and their debts, is the main reason Vito turns to crime?

BTW I liked Mafia 2's writing and story better, but the gameplay was still too much shooting for my taste, which was just added as filler to pad the playthrough's length. And the open world, there was no use for it because there were no secondary quests.
 

Mark Richard

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Just cracked open my copy of Mafia 1 to find a manual in the style of a printed newspaper, and a double sided city map & poster. Remember when the stuff they threw in boxes (for free an’ all) creatively supplemented the experience, rather than being a bunch of random crap to feed the hoarder lifestyle? Pepperidge Farm remembers. I feel immersed and haven't even started the game yet.
 

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