Mafia

Great game, Looks like an old fashioned GTA.

Merciless beatings, betrayals, and plenty of guns—such is the course of a typical day in Lost Heaven, a city wrapped in the intrigue of a 1930s Mafia power struggle. An unsuspecting cab driver named Tommy Angelo stumbles into the conflict, becomes an employee of the powerful Salieri family, and is forced to run errands for the family to help shift the balance of power. If this premise makes Mafia (due next January on PS2 and Xbox from publisher The Gathering) sound like a '30s prequel to Grand Theft Auto, that's fitting—because it plays like one, too.

But creating Lost Heaven's world wasn't as easy as sitting down and combining The Godfather with Rockstar's popular crime-game series. Nearly every artistic aspect of Mafia had to be painstakingly modeled to reflect the era, including the zoot-suit clothing style, art-deco interiors, and lumbering vehicles, which you'll drive on missions (à la GTA). "We spent a lot of time on the cars and were very much inspired by the cars of the era," says Gathering Development Director Luke Vernon. "We tried to make them [be] realistic as well as have the right kind of capabilities." Of course, the PC version (released last year) was criticized because the game's driving mechanics were too realistic, but traffic laws are a little more relaxed in the PS2 and Xbox editions. Freewheeling around like you're blind-drunk on cheap hooch will eventually draw out the cops, but thankfully you won't have to worry about tedious details like coming to a complete stop at most red lights.

As in Grand Theft Auto, driving is only half the fun in Mafia. There are dozens of action sequences involving tense shootouts in locations from a seemingly deserted gas station to the rooftops of Lost Heaven, with gunplay using historically accurate weapons. (So a Thompson won't be incredibly precise, but its rapid-fire feature can be invaluable at times.) Those guns will see a lot of play over the course of the game's missions, though you'll often need more brainpower than firepower. For instance, in one stage, Tommy drops in on a funeral at a massive church being attended by dozens of members of another crime family. The objective of whacking all of the enemies is a simple one, but being fired at from nearly every direction makes it a little more difficult, especially if you only have access to a relatively weak weapon. But you can aim your pistol in on an opponent, put a slug right between his beady eyes, and then collect machine gun ammo off his body for use against his crowd of friends. Other missions don't involve such blatant violence. In fact, some parts of Mafia test Tommy's skills as a thief by requiring him to steal cars and break into safes. He'll even act as a getaway driver in some stages.

All of these elements should place Mafia on Grand Theft Auto fans' hit lists, but will the game's early 20th-century setting give players an offer they can't refuse? "Sure, it's not contemporary," Vernon says. "But it's from an incredibly evocative period of American history." If you end up spouting '30s gangster slang to friends early next year, don't say you weren't warned.




source: www.egmmag.com

i will rent that as soon as it comes out and tell yall how it is...sounds pretty cool though.

It's been out on PC for like 6 months or more... come to think of it, I think it was October of last year.

Edit: It was actually in August of last year: 08/28/02

Yeah, I though it looked sota ok, so I posted it up.