Mafia - PS2

Mafia. Ahhhh, memories.

I played Mafia on the PC when it was released back in 2002. At that time I absolutely loved it, I had a great time playing it... up until the race mission. As much as I tried I simply couldn't beat that damn mission. I must have tried thirty times to no avail. About the only advice people had was to beat it using a controller... which I didn't have. So I got stuck and finally gave up on the entire game.

When I first got my PS2 and was looking for games I noticed Mafia for $5. I immediately picked it up. I remembered how much fun I had with it on my PC and now with a controller I could finally beat that damn racetrack mission.

I was excited when I finally got around to playing it, but that excitement quickly turned to frustration several hours in.

The first thing I noticed is that this game is dark. Not since Doom3 have a played a game so hampered by it's lighting. Driving at night quickly get annoying when you slam into cars that you can barely see ten feet in front of you. Occasionally there would be a shootout and the only way I could see where the person was is by the muzzle flash. Nothing I did worked, with no in game brightness setting I had to rely on my TVs, and even then it was still too dark.

I remember the driving in Mafia being very different, you couldn't really go speeding through town, you were driving '30s era cars. So high speed anything was really out of the question. What I don't remember is the cars handling poorly. It had nothing to do with them being older cars, or them not being able to go fast. They just handled incredibly poorly. It wouldn't have been such a problem if so many of the missions hadn't involved driving.

Timed missions. I know I've talked about how much I hate timed missions before, but Mafia brought it too a whole new level. A lot of the missions are timed, drive here before this amount of time passes. Get this person to this place in this amount of time. These missions would suck on their own, but pair it with the fact that the cars handle so poorly and you have a recipe for disaster.

The AI. I'm not sure if I have the right to complain about the AI in a game that's seven years old. A lot has changed since then. The AI was utter crap though. There were a few times when I hit a person who was just standing in the middle of the road. Not walking across it, just standing in it. Usually at night when I couldn't see them until it was way too late. Cars will turn left from the far right lane, people will get out of cars and step right into oncoming traffic. I'm all for hitting people, but in this game there are ramifications for it... the only problem being is that these people seem to WANT to be hit.

Gunfights in the game were incredibly difficult as well. I turned the sensitivity all of the way down and still had problems targeting people. Up and down was okay, but side to side I would completely overshoot the target. Killing people in a game about the mafia should not be problematic.

The load times. Dear God the load times. The load times were excruciating. I actually timed some of them, and they ranged between 30 and 40 seconds. 30 seconds doesn't seem like a long time, but it is when you're chasing someone and cross a bridge and all the sudden you have to wait 30 seconds to get back to the action. I did one mission where to load the mission would take 30 seconds, you would drive down the road and hit another loading screen... another 30 seconds. Problem being I had to retry this mission six or seven times. So it was 30 seconds of loading, drive for 10 seconds, load for 30 seconds and then the mission timer would run out 3 minutes later and I would have to do it all over again. So even though the mission took three minutes I had a minute plus of loading time. Not fun.

Either I remember this game a lot differently, or the PS2 version is just horrible. I remember a very fun game, a game that I wanted to play. Instead I got a game that about halfway through was just frustrating. Too many missions I had to retry, too many time I was frustrated... too many times I just wasn't having fun. About halfway through the game I just wanted to put on God mode so I could make it through the other half.

I wanted Mafia to be the game that I remembered, unfortunately it just wasn't.

Squid.