Mafia is another one of those video game summaries that I decided to throw into the movie section. Mainly due to the fact that I couldn't be bothered to play the mafia game. I just can't stand the controls for this darn thing. The driving mechanic is horrible. I despise hate time limits and the city layout is a mess. The whole darn thing looks exactly the same block from block and trying to navigate through the city is just such a nightmare. Maybe I could forgive the game if it didn't immediately throw me into a Time scenario or I'm running away from a group of gangsters trying to kill me within the first 2 minutes.
It's just infuriating and then it's followed up by these taxi missions that go on and on and on and they become incredibly repetitive. Essentially it just turns into a giant time waste and if I'm going to waste my time playing a video game I want to play something that I actually enjoy like Spyro the Dragon or Mafia 2.
Now I know this game has an absolute loyalist fan following and if any of them heard me bad-mouthing this game as much as I am, they'd probably want to do to me what got done to Paulie at the end of the game. Let me make this very clear. I want the like this game. I really really do.
The game takes place during one of my favourite times and all of American history and the best time for Mafia history. It has wonderful Django Reinhardt music along with a pretty good introductory score and some pretty solid graphics for the age.
I love that the story doesn't go completely over-the-top and that front the entire game you are just a mobster. You don't climb to the ranks of super Don or start running around destroying and dismantling the entire organization. You're just one guy who was always a part of the dream.
Now I'll try to be fair. I'm not going to judge in this game by the standard of the typical movie because it wouldn't be able to stand up to even the worst films. Well it might do better than vampire over London but still that's bottom of the barrel material.
But even looking at it as a video game movie it's not that great. The voice acting can be very stiff sometimes which wouldn't be that big of a problem but it seems the overlap with the other characters are about to say right before they start to interact.
So you end up with a bunch of different people interrupting each other all the time and it's kind of annoying. It seems like a really easy technical problem that could have been fixed with just a little tweaking.
The actual story itself it's your typical Mafia affair. A man with no connection to the life gets involved via unfortunate circumstance and it turns out that he's the right guy for the job that he progresses and becomes part of a criminal Empire.
He does pretty well with the whole Mafia life at first, but a series of unfortunate events, along with his own conscious and a couple of schemes ends up biting him in the butt, as he inevitably ends up turning to the police for protection.
Inevitably destroying the very criminal Empire he helped to build. And then dying in the end because Mafia stories are never allowed to have a happy ending. Unless you play Mafia 3 in which case you get a kind of bland un-interesting ending that doesn't give you a much closer to anything.
The story itself is relatively uninteresting. It's just groups of monsters sitting around discussing what they're going to do next as they apply to every individual Heist there about to achieve and then go out and do it.
Ironically despite this being least interesting Mafia story, it's probably the closest to most accurate to what people actually did.
Nobody acts incredibly over the top and there aren't even any interesting zingers. Everybody is just kind of sitting around and talking about how they're going to make more money when they take over another weird racket.
Also not to go back to Mafia 3 but they rip this game off when they decided to have their own Steamboat assassination mission. It really surprises me how little original content there is in that game and how much was just taken directly from this one.
this game does try to Peddle that most heinous of Lies that's been made up about the mafia over the years in that they never distributed drugs or tried never to have involvement with drugs. Once again I have to reiterate that the mafia is one of the fundamental reasons why drugs became so active in the United States to begin with.
Various opiates and cocaine was easily shipped in or created by the mafia while they were in charge in this country.
It's only starting in the 1950s that they tried to shun away from it because the United States government started to really clamp down on drug related activity.
To such an extent that you ended up getting in more trouble for making drugs than you did from actual murder. Have screwed up is that.
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