Kentzz reviews | Nostalgic [Original] Mafia

When Mafia was released on the PC in the late summer of 2002, it delivered a deep plot, beautiful graphics, and incredibly authentic driving, and became the summer's sleeper hit. The PS2 version also preserves a lot of the feel of the PC title. However, it is prey to much of the same technological flaws that haunt most PC-to-PS2 ports, such as crappy textures, unintuitive buttons, lengthy loading times, and galore bugs. Mafia is taking place in the Lost Paradise, a seamy town in the 1930s. It follows the story of Tom Angelo, a cab driver who is pushed into a gang and then builds his way up from a two-bit hood into a well-respected Made Man. You've encountered a number of different people in the story, some are loyal friends there to support you, and some are enemies out there to kill you, and some fall right in between.

Mafia action gaming is a cross between third-party on-foot combat areas and driving a motorcycle. I know what you're saying, but this game is astronomically different from the Grand Theft Auto series. The gameplay is very story-driven, making the game highly linear, although the key draw of the GTA series is its "go-anywhere-do-anything" gameplay. The driving missions, though, are somewhat similar to the GTA, meaning that you're performing hit missions, robbing vehicles, becoming a getaway driver, and a variety of other illegal acts to advance through the game.

When it hit the PC, Mafia had all the pitfalls to be yet another GTA copy, but what stopped the game from being GTA, in 1930, was the incredible complexity of the atmosphere. The vehicles were genuine in construction, physics, and handling, which ensures that you couldn't get hot on the way to town (most of the cars out at 60 MPH) or turn on a dime. The big city was incredibly detailed and brought to life by well-rendered characters walking on the streets, fantastic looking vehicles, and impressive lighting effects. The realism of the environment of the game, combined with a fantastic and entertaining plot, made the game a convincing quest.

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The PS2 version, due to issues with the dock, Mafia loses a large chunk of the environment portrayed in the PC version. The static and unresponsive controls and the odd collision detection make the gameplay a shadow of what it was on the PC version. Manually tracking is incredibly difficult, and while you can counter this with the auto-aim controls, they only help to make shooting scenes too easy. Plus, the detection of collisions is very strong buggy, when you can shoot an enemy point-blank, and they're not even going to respond, or you can shoot an enemy from a long way down, without ever shooting, and they're going to keel over. AI in the game is terribly dumb, makes stupid mistakes too much to give you the upper hand. If all of this wasn't bad enough, the 45-second load times between locations and missions are so disjointing that it interrupts whatever enjoyment you may have had with the game. All and all, separate porting problems prevent the Mafia from getting fun on the PS2 for a very long time.

The graphics in the PS2 were perhaps the greatest failure of the porting process. When it was published (and for the most part, still now), Mafia was one of the most beautiful games on the PC. The character models were incredibly realistic, with facial expressions and feelings, the lighting effects were fantastic and the city itself looked natural and felt alive. However, the PS2 version forfeits much of the PC version's lust and comes off as an unpolished mess. The character models (while still pretty damn decent in the in-game animated cutscenes) look incredibly flat, the distorted graphics look like they were rendered on the original PlayStation, and the frame rates are very jumpy. Graphics are often prey to many glitches, with jaggy textures, clipping issues, and almost total lack of lighting effects.

At least the sound effects were also very well expressed, which is good since the sound and music in the PC version were phenomenal. The voice acting is excellent, taking the characters to life with their own personal characteristics and idiosyncrasies. The soundtrack is fantastic, with a combination of original scores and music from the period, with songs by Louis Prima, Django Reinhardt, and the Mills Brothers. There is, though, some intrinsic buggy in the recording, such as a bizarre pause between the stage where you smash into something and the noise that it creates, and a few cases of sound fading out or being distorted.

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Original Mafia was a brilliant PC game, representing some of the finest work ever to come out of Take-The Two's Gathering Production House. This makes the PS2 version even more tragic, as it has all the potential to be one of the next major items on the console. The glitches are too numerous to dismiss, and relative to the PC version, the game is a crappy mess.