Mafia: City of Lost Heaven. There’s a game that can call up such praise and such indifference in the same forum topic. Released originally on PC in 2002 (and then ported poorly to the PS2 and original Xbox), the game was brushed aside as a Grand Theft Auto knockoff. But the similarities end with that  it’s a 3rd person open world City game, and I’d argue that Grand Theft Auto IV was heavily influenced by the cinematic storyweaving that the Illusion Softworks (now 2k Czech) team did here.

But this article isn’t about Mafia, it’s about its sequel. Mafia II, released this year, was, for the precursor’s fans, more of the same, but ‘Next Generation’.  It tells the story of a young man pulled into the mob in post-war America, a story that pulls threads from Goodfellas, Sleepers, American Gangster and the bible of mafias, The Godfather. And this is where the game shines: Mafia II tells a tale that builds 3 dimensional characters, that creates an intriguing story that has you sympathizing with Vito, with Joe. You cringe at some parts and smile at others. It is an interactive film about one man’s life in the mafia.

What about for those not familiar with the original City of Lost Heaven?….is this a game for them? Actually I’m not sure. And this is the problem that Mafia and it’s franchise will always have: where is its audience? Its gunplay, while fun, doesn’t live up to it’s competitors; it doesn’t really have a gameplay hook; it’s the only one of it’s kind that tells the type of early 20th century mafia tales us boys like to read about, but is that enough to pull in the ranks? Probably not.

On the surface Mafia II is nothing special. It doesn’t play with the big boys for combat; it lacks an interesting hook or twist on content; between the linear story and unbalanced boss fights it doesn’t, at times, seem to understand what it’s audience wants (I get now why reviewers didn’t feel that it was open ended: I think I started every mission being told to get somewhere really fast!). But the sad thing is that Mafia II  really is special. Like Red Dead, it brings to life a world that none of us lived in. A world that had just raged war; a world optimistic for it’s future; a world at peace. The game opens with you coming home from the war in the dead of winter. I was in awe when I was given control. This was like being in my home town, Toronto, on King Street at Christmastime. It is busy. People are bustling forward, eyes down, bursting with packages and bags. Someone’s car has broken down and nobody is helping her. A vender is selling hotdogs and the steam and smoke from his cart blocks the view behind him. There’s construction somewhere…the next street down maybe? Sounds like they’re ready to be done with their shift and want to go home to a warm meal. The snow gently sways and floats in front of me and somewhere Bing Crosby is crooning to a room full of hushed girls.

That’s pretty phenomenal that a game can get that kind of environmental emotion from just one scene.

So you don’t play Mafia II for anything new in gameplay or combat. You play, like its father, for a great cinematic story and great characters. You play for the best character in the cast, the city of Empire Bay.

But I hate careless game design. And while Dante’s Inferno doesn’t have a lot of that and I’ve been enjoying the fuck out of it for a while now, at one specific moment  they got careless and pulled you out of the game; made you realize that you’re just playing a God of War knock-off, with almost no story or character progression. And you ask yourself as you sit there in your sweats, stuck in your house in a cold northern winter that won’t end: Why are you playing this again?
Take last night. I’m playing the Greed layer of Hell. I’ve just managed to skip over a jumping puzzle and fend off waves of enemies. I have no save at this point.
The idea is to pull a lever to pull a lever to pull that first lever so that you can run, jump twice, go on the lowering platform and get back up to the top doors before the doors close on you and you have to do it again. If you touch any of the blades that are lowering while you’re doing this, you die. Simple as that. I tried this 15 times with different variations, but always missed one part of the timing mechanic. After the 15th time I punched the controller and turned everything off.

Here are the underlying problems with this shit.

1. No Save:  I just killed waves upon waves of enemies and while I do get a ‘restart point’ if I turn it off in frustration,  like I did, I’ll have to start at my previous save point.
   NOTE TO FELLOW DEVELOPERS: Stop being lazy and using save points to  make your game more “challenging”.
2. Redundant Redundant Redundant: I have to pull a lever to pull a lever to pull that first lever. And if I fail, WHICH I WILL, I do it again.
3. One shot kill: after pulling these levers I have to try and make it under the blade that is slowly falling down. If I don’t, I die immediately.
4. Time Mechanic: A time mechanic is fine, but a time mechanic that makes me have to do all of the above again is not. I managed to pull the lever to pull the lever to pull the lever, to double jump under the blade before it killed me, got on the platform, but by the time I got to the door, the door was closed and I had to do it all again!
5. Cone of Error, how small it is: I need to be exact, and with a response system that isn’t I can’t be as exact as they want me to be.

Listen. I’m not saying make games uber easy, I’m saying design for your PLAYER, not for you. Too many times in games I’ve made and played I’ve seen designers make game levels for what they find fun. But listen bub, you’re playing the level 20 times a day. Your average player is going to play this once.

Remember Cel Damage? I worked on that game. We balanced that game for us, new game developers on a new platform with one QA guy. And to quote American McGee when I met him at GDC after we released that game “You made that game too fucking hard!”

And we did. Because we made the game for us: developers who played the game 20 times a day. And for that we got ridden hard in reviews. For that, we sucked.

When you make a level you have to say to yourself: besides what would be cool, and visually interesting, what would make this fun. And 9.99 times out of 10 that will not be to punish your player. And that’s what this mechanic is doing in Dante’s Inferno. It is punishing the player for not playing EXACTLY the way the developer did. The cone of error is so narrow that the player MUST play it exactly how the developer played it, and this only leads to the 10th ring of hell: frustration. And my controller thrown against the wall.

1. how dynamic the levels are (only an OH MY FUCKING GOD can describe this). The level of interactivity with living and breathing levels (moving train, falling building) is unprecedented and this game will be seen as the game that changed EVERYTHING when it came to environments.
2. There is absolutely nothing in the game that takes you out of the game experience. Texturing, Modeling, animation, lipsyncing: all is perfect and shows nothing that would tell you that this is a game.
3. The story and character development is perfect: you feel growth in the characters, you fear with Drake as he almost (doesn’t) make a jump. And the pacing of the action and story kept the adrenaline up, the heart racing, and you were waiting to see what would happen next.

But one thing Naughty Dog: if your Boss Fight is going to be as annoying and difficult as what ended up in the game, then don’t fucking punish me for wanting to see what happens in the end and putting it on Very Easy just to get the pain over with. What punishment? That would be the Trophy I received for completing it on VERY EASY. I spent 11 of the 12 hours on Normal. And that, my friends, is what we call a Weeny Move.

If I gave a shit about PS3′s Xbox Achievements, I’d be more pissed off.

• News
• last.fm
• Instant On Zune marketplace Zune Marketplace Video Marketplace Beta
  In place of America’s interactive, instant-viewing library of 1080ps movies features, Canadians will relish in their sole feature of  a reskinning and a library that continues the tradition of such new releases as ‘Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey’ and ‘Analyze This’. Finally! We can see what the hype is about!
  In addition to this is the new category of TV, allowing you to ‘download’ your favorite new hits like Beavis and Butthead.
• Twitter:
  I was expecting an automated way of tweeting what I’m playing, but instead what I got was a slower, more awkward version than what’s on my phone (I use twidget for Android).
• Facebook:
  Xbox’s version allows you to continue the tradition of finding smut photos of people you know but this time, on a larger TV while your wife watches.
• List of Shit Americans get that you won’t be getting
  This feature is loud and proud under the Preview menu.

Shut Up and Play This? You really don’t have a choice: the update will be mandatory soon. And while the list of new features on the American’s featurelist looks exciting, Canadians once again won’t be getting any of them, making this update near pointless. While the featuring of the lastest social networking sites is trendy and cool, its a feature that detracts the Xbox from what it’s intended to be: an entertainment device. You don’t sit down with your friends to twitter. You don’t show photos of your best friend dressed in drag in highschool to your new girlfriend. Xbox is used primarily as a movie watching and game device, and these features actually detract from that.

…and now a rant….
I’m proud to be a Canadian. While not from birth, I naturalized here and for many reasons that are outside of the scope of this gaming site, I couldn’t ask for a more diverse and greater country to live in. But we are constantly, as Canadians, on the short-end of the stick when it comes to technology and media. I’ve been doing research as to why and been saving that up for a larger, more journalistic article as to why this keeps happening. There are many things that stem this issue, from government intervention to corporate greed, but let me put up a challenge to any Canadian owned company. Instead of complaining that there isn’t enough support for Canadian content or Canadian businesses and asking the government for handouts, or simply being forced to shut your doors or be bought out by American Interests, why not find out where the opportunities are and start it yourself? Bind together with other businesses of like? There is a HUGE opportunity for not only featuring old and current Canadian content on Xbox Live Video Marketplace here but also for creating new content for a perfect demographic that is trapped to do nothing but WATCH your content. And Xbox Canada, isn’t it your duty to help Microsoft mold their features and services to the needs of a Canadian clientelle? Shouldn’t you already know and be figuring out ways to get help to set this in motion?
I’m tired of being treated like the 3rd world of technology up here and seeing, for no other reason than greed and the over protectiveness of our government, the lack of choice given to Canadians. Choice breeds ingenuity, initiative and a more competitive marketplace and it’s about goddamned time we were given some. And it’s about goddamned time someone in Xbox Canada, in one of the controlling corporations, or in many of the small-time production companies realized the potential to promote, provide and showcase some of the Canadian talent we have up here.

• Start. Oh yeah. Forgot Bethesda made this.
• Oh my god. The music is killer. That with the art gives it a crazy 70s vibe.
• Controls screen. Does anyone read these anymore? Or do they just mash buttons?
• We definitiont: A euphonism yadda yadda screen went away.
• Rendering is very reminiscent of Mercs 2…which has me fearful of the quality.
• Simmons voice does NOT fit the face.
• 70s grain is kinda annoying on this cutscene. Wonder how thatll play in the game.
• More awesome music.
• Tutorial time!
• Well that was short: first one is pretty damned short.
• ICK. they cut to the next tutorial and teleport you to another place. Kinda jumpy considering how short the tutorial was.
• And there we go: final battle to use my newly learned abilities.
• Bullet Time galore: pretty standard fare so far: shoot your gun, run on walls, slow down time.
• More tutorials
• Ah.. collectables
• Health potion.
• UGH. Quick Time event to open a door. Pretty sure that I’ve never a) had to use effort to open a door and b) had to use a sword.
• Sword Tutorial
• Oh now this just got interesting. Very Kill Bill.
• Okay….if they string together all of these ideas within small areas and get rid of the linear levels, this could be very interesting. I’m not looking for open concept, just some multipathing.
• Some cool acrobatic pole swings and sliding is a lot of fun. Sword and gun is fun. and I can use my gun whenever I want. Awesome.
• Hrm…got lost already.  and found an invisible wall. disapointing.
• There we go. Heading into an arena fight. Not really sure what they’re telling me I have to do.
• 5 minutes later
• Ah…this isn’t about me killing guys. This is about me closing the spawn doors. /facepalm.
• Done. Phew. That will be fun….next time when I know what I’m doing.
• Okay..just went into some weird sort of berserker mode: everything is red, black and white….game has sped up. Pretty fun. Slick visuals.
• Really great presentation there. That song sucked tho. Generic 90s punk.
• Now I’m on a car. For some reason. Firing my gun.
• Doing quick time events to stay on car.
• Firing at enemies and…didn’t hit A to not die, and died, and that completely BLEW.
• Okay…if you don’t die, this is kinda fun: you’re leaping from car to car and sending other cars to their explosive fiery death.
• and if you fire while doing that A to not jump death, you get automatic kills on the enemies in the car. Neat!
• Oh…and then it ended suddenly.

Parting Thoughts: the presentation is fucking sweet and the music killer. The sword and gun gameplay is (always) fun and the combination of acrobatics and firepower is stellar. I’ll definitely be watching the reviews for thoughts on the game as a whole.

Worries: As always a demo has to do 3 things: sell you on the idea, teach you how to play, and give you an idea on the gameplay as a whole. So what’s difficult to judge is how the gunplay, swordplay and acrobatics will play together in a proper level: will we see linear levels like in the demo? Or will we see some multipathing to spice things up? Will they keep the momentum up as you traverse the world, or will it be levels designed around one of your abilities: I’m really hoping for the former.

Shut Up and Play This?: Definitely.

Why do developers hate me so? Or is it that because I do this for a living as well that I’m overly critical? Or could it be that I just spend too much time playing video games.

Annoying Game Mechanics of the Week

Save Points don’t increase the tension, they piss me off.  Dead Rising lost me for that sole reason; Prince of Persia 2 I traded in after 3 hours; Dead Space utilizes it as well. Now Dead Space, one of the games I’ve been playing this week, is a really fantastic game. It’s one of the best horror games I’ve played, has fantastic sound and some really neat dismemberment features that make the combat a lot of fun. Most of them are paced well, but the game can get repetitive and part and parcel of this are these goddamned single places where I can save. Combined with Item Management Without a Fucking Save mechanics and Shoot Your Fucking Head Off to Learn mechanics I instill the Throw Controller and Shit on the Disc mechanic.

One of my favourite things about some games are the bosses that introduce a new mechanic that you can Only Learn by Dying, and by favourite things I mean fuck you.

If an enemy is to the left, and nothing is to the right, then chances are I’m going to go left, especially if your enemies drop ammo. So please don’t have the dead-end be left, and have fucking enemies shoot me in the back once I get there. Thank-you Halflife 2 for reinforcing why I hate you.

I Learns my controls from the Internets

I pulled out a lot of old games this week and played a lot of tutorials. Most mediocre, one good, and one horrific. One of the sad things about our industry is the face that we even have to make a tutorial: it’s extremely difficult to combine narrative, opening impact and learning all at once. It’s also extremely hard to play the game if I don’t know what to fucking do. I played each of these games as an idiot savant: I hit no control that I wasn’t told to, but played it mastered once I was.

Half-Life 2: It’s no secret that I dislike this game: there are fundamental level design and game design mechanics that it brazingly abandons. Yet people love it. So I decided to put the game in and have a go again, 4 years later (this will be a full feature once I’ve completed it). The tutorial in Half-Life 2 is non-existant. I encourage you to play as I played, mentioned above. If I didn’t know that LS moved forward and RS moved the camera, I wouldn’t have gotten off the subway in the beginning. Nevermind that tutorials for controls are no more than hints displayed on the screen. D-

Thief: Deadly Shadows: It’s not secret how awesome this game is: Thief is the game that started the whole Sneaker Shooter sub-genre. The tutorial attempts to combine atmosphere, story and learning all at once…and while it fails a bit at story, it does manage to give you an idea what the game is like while teaching you how to actually play it: and it’s a difficult game to play because it has so many different mechanics and turns shooters on it’s head (ie. do NOT engage the enemy). B+

Gears of War 2: I’ve been waiting for a certain someone to be available to do co-op with this game, and finally after 6 months gave up and unwrapped the bitch myself. I like that you have the option to avoid the tutorial (the new game mechanics aren’t so new that you need a tutorial if you did the first game) and that there’s an achievement for doing it (forcing every gloryhound to do it anyway). I think the scenario of teaching your rookie soldier the moves is an interesting attempt at avoiding the ‘tell the experienced soldier to do basic stuff’ scenario, but I think in the end it’s weak. What I do like is that the tutorial continues throughout the game: I’m about 3 hours in and I just received a tutorial for using the sniper rifle. Grand Theft Auto IV did the same thing. And this is good. And all peace was upon the land. A

Tutorials can make or break a game: it is the first level that introduces you to the world that the developer is setting up and so it needs to be exciting. It needs to properly teach you the mechanics of the game, and the more complicated the game, the more mechanics it needs to not only teach you, but ensure you’ve learned. And finally it needs to grab the player and pull you in. It needs to do all three of these things, and within a time limit: a long tutorial just delays you getting to the meat of the game. I don’t think a game has done tutorials right yet, not one: there is no game on the face of the earth that I’ve played that hasn’t made me want to take a shotgun to my head, or made me feel a part of the world. But maybe there is a game that I haven’t played that does. Comment below if you know one.

There won’t be a Shut Up and Play next week due to the holiday and me working my ass off at work and on my house. So don’t bitch to me if you don’t see it.

Unlike your regular desk job, working in the games industry can mean long hours. Long hours means less games…or to be more specific, more of the game I’m making and less of the games I want to play. In weeks like these I become retrospective of some of the great games I’ve played: Full Throttle, Grim Fandango, Fable 2, Mass Effect, Baldur’s Gate II. And then there’s the list of games I’ve played that not many people have…and you’re insane if you haven’t played these.

Take Blade Runner for instance. Made in 1997 by Westwood, it was one of the last adventure Point and Click games: but it was more than the slow paced, hemmorage inducing puzzle-solvers of the early 90s. Blade Runner brought Adventure games to the modern times (of the late 1990s) and did a lot of things that should have changed the industry. Playing as Ray McCoy you, like Deckard, have to track down a bunch of Replicants (those pesky Androids from the film). You travel to scenes that are faithful reproductions from the movie, including your own apartment and converse with new and old characters familiar to any fan.  The game’s cutscenes, environments, music and sound effects pulled you into that futuristic dystopia…and I was in fucking awe.

I'll take two. TWO.

The game did some unprecedented things back then.  Besides the technology, besides being a rare great move-franchise game made 15 years after the movie came out, and besides pulling Adventure games out of their treacle- momentum decline, Blade Runner had a very strong narrative. This was a big fucking deal back then…BioWare had only just emerged on the scene and hadn’t yet release Baldur’s Gate, the game that changed RPGs. In Blade Runner you WERE Ray McCoy; you WERE playing with your life and you were solving the mystery of who were the replicants. And for each player the story was their own experience. Westwood set out to make a game that would have a different narrative depending on who was playing the game. The characters who were Replicants were randomly determined at the start of a new game.  This meant that a Strategy Guide would be of no fucking use. This meant that for every character you met, whether it was your first playthrough or your seventh, you had to pull out your Voight-Kampff machine and ask questions to determine whether they were a Replicant. Or not. You could just shoot them and hope that they were (Remember the scene of the stripper in the movie?). This only helped to bring you into this world, to make you a part of this world with your interactions and actions making a difference.

Tell me about your mother...

And best was that your choices made a difference. A real fucking difference.

Conversations were similar to what we see in Mass Effect. Mass Effect uses paraphrases to make the resulting choice a surprise, and new, instead of required reading. In Blade Runner you could choose the questions directly or you could set your responses by emotion: you didn’t know what you’re character would say, you only knew it would be angry, sympathetic or smarmy. What you chose in these conversations could make a big difference to the outcome of the game: it would determine whether a character liked you enough to help you in your quest, or they could just outright fucking hate you and piss off for the rest of the game.

And then there are the endings. 13 of them. And while the ‘choose at the last second to get a different ending’ do exist in the game, the choices you made could affect the entire outcome and make some doozies of an ending: everything branched from what you did as Ray McCoy.

Let’s take four of my friends who all played the game to the end — and because ALL of you reading this that haven’t played are going to turn around and play it, I’ll do this without major spoilers — I played 20 or so hours until the end and made a choice and got my ending. Another friend played 20 hours made a choice and received a different outcome. Another person played 26 hours, made a choice just before the ending and received something else entirely.

And then there was the friend who played 7 hours and met a teenage girl named Lucy. You have a choice in the game to help Lucy, and you can have conversations that influence her trust in you. And after only playing 7 hours of the game my friend chose to run away with Lucy. Credits roll. And he came back to us at our weekly meet-up (read: DnD) and told us how awesome the game was, even though it was short.

How fucking insane is that? The developer put in thousands of hours to create a deep and long game, only to have it possible for the player to finish it in 1/3 of the time. And they put so much work into the environment, the atmosphere and the experience up until that point that the player would feel satisfied with their outcome.

THIS is what the game industry is about. This is what makes us different from the movie and television industries: we can provide completely different experiences depending on how you play. And what’s the importance of that? Think about how much socialization will happen due to this. You only have to look at the BioWare Community to see how much interaction happens because players are excited that our games provide outcomes based on their choices.

Blade Runner was an early game that was a mediocre hit that started to show how exciting our industry can be. It’s a game that any and ALL gamers should enjoy. And it’s a game that will easily play on your netbook, even the 701s.

In fact, I’m running downstairs and dusting off my box to install it right now.

Sources:

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blade_Runner_(1997_video_game)
• http://www.bioware.com
• http://www.gamefaqs.com/computer/doswin/file/196769/2227
• My own fucking memory.
• http://www.brmovie.com/Game/index1.htm
• http://www.adventuregamers.com/article/id,14
• http://www.trustedreviews.com/video-games/review/2006/09/12/TrustedReviews-Top-5-Games-Of-All-Time/p5

Absolute Shit Game of the Week That you Just have to See:

Sega’s Altered Beast, now available for more money than you should pay on XBLA. Like everything from the 1980s, when you were a pimply teenager with more parts than your brain could actually control, you look fondly back. Remember how great looking that girl was in 10th grade? Remember how awesome it was to hang out in the mall? Remember the incredible music? No. You don’t. And you should never, EVER revisit those things, with a time machine, with a year book, on Much Music or by paying Sega money to reinforce that being nostalgic dickheads is good game design.

Great Way to Kill Ghandi

Civilization: Revolution. I’ve said it once, I’ll say it again, it is a great fucking game. Yes the framerate dips. Yes the AI is a little predictable. Yes Ghandi is a war-monging greedy beast. But this is the best PC-to-console translation, the best console Strategy game on the 360 and a great and highly addictive game, perfect for those times when you come home from work at 10pm and need to unwind, which Dead Space does NOT do thankyoufuckingmuch.

Everything Should be an RPG

Dead Space is great. I love it. I love the design, I love the gameplay, I love the care that these guys put into the game, and I love that they got horror. The Thing creatures meets Alien atmosphere? Yes please. It’s all great…
One hour at a time.
I feel, sometimes, that I’m on a Super Fun Haunted House ride at the CNE. Something might make me jump and hit the cat, but ultimately I’m always aware that I’m at the hands of someone else. I can’t recall a time in Mass Effect or Fallout when I felt like that.
I want conversation. I want moments that contrast with the intense alien bashing. I’ve centered that this is my issue with the game. I want to feel like I’m making a difference…
Also, I want to punch in the neck the guy that decided that to have the main character not speak…speaking of stupid fucking decisions that pull me out of the game. Oh I’m sorry…you wanted me to project myself on the character? So I can feel the pain he must be going through? How about you remove the fucking mask and make him talk about his feelings asshole! Thanks.

My Kids are Better than Me

Peggle: stupid fucking name, retardedly happy art direction and music that makes me want to kill baby giraffes. Yet I can’t stop playing this goddamned game. And now neither can my kids. My eldest, at 5, has already beaten my highscore on one level. And this week my 2 (TWO!) year old grabbed the controller when it was my turn and had a go…clearing 3 levels. THREE LEVELS. She can’t pronounce gymnastics, but she can school me in a game I spend hours in trying to clear all the pegs because the freaking Unicorn told me to.

I Wanna

… play Infamous. Playstation 3 is finally starting to show a promising line of exclusives that are pulling me towards finally owning it. Yes, as a game developer I should own all the consoles…but fuck you..it’s expensive and Sony’s being a giant dick of late. Infamous looks like all the fun of Crackdown, with all the killiness of Force Unleashed. With the Ico Team’s latest chapter and Heavy Rain coming to the platform, and nowhere else, I might just have to shell out cash to go buy one…and quickly stomp on Tretton’s foot on the way out.

That’s it for me this week.