Mafia Comments by Gestalt

"you're the editor for a games review site that scores games out of ten"

Yeah, and I keep trying to convince my bosses to let us drop the scores. ;) I think scores distract people from the text of the review, they lead to pointless arguments ("How can you give ZooCube a higher score than Halo?!? You guys suk!" etc) and at the end of the day they don't really tell you anything useful.


"How does genre affect the scores"

You can't really directly compare a dancing game to an action game, because they're two completely different genres with different fans and different standards. At the end of the day the score is simply a rough estimate of how much we enjoyed the game - there's no magic formula saying game X is better than game Y and should receive score Z.


"I've seen the initial reactions and they seem pretty good"

And I've just looked at the game's official forums, and they're full of people whining about how hard the race and garage missions are. ;) Making the missions that difficult might be fine for some hardcore gamers, but for the majority of people it's going to be a huge turn-off. Illusion should have included an option to skip missions that you had failed several times so those of us who were getting sick of them could get on with the game, and/or a choice of difficulty or save game settings (eg, have a hardcore mode that doesn't have any manual saves but unlocks extra goodies in the Free Ride mode or something). This would keep people like you happy, but also let the rest of just get on and play the game without having to repeat big chunks of it over and over again when we didn't want to.


"he doesn't make it if you block his car"

That's because you're breaking the scripting by blocking the route of the car. Once the car gets to the top level he runs to his waypoint every time.


"Not sure it applies to morrowind"

There's only one outcome for each quest and the central plot is fairly linear, but there's dozens of quests for you to just wander off and do in any order you want. That makes it a very free game for me, even though if you want to reach the end there are certain missions that you have to complete in a set order. The point is that you can do those missions any time you want.

"and at the end of the day they don't really tell you anything useful. "

It's a rating still, tells a crap game from a good game.

"You can't really directly compare a dancing game to an action game, because they're two completely different genres with different fans and different standards."

But the scores are about if they're good or not? So if brittney scored higher on here, it's simply a better game, isn't it?

"And I've just looked at the game's official forums, and they're full of people whining about how hard the race and garage missions are. ;)"

Two hard missions out of what, 20? Enough to say a game is worthless?

"That's because you're breaking the scripting by blocking the route of the car. Once the car gets to the top level he runs to his waypoint every time. "

It's still and alternative, the outcome isn't completely pre-defined.

"There's only one outcome for each quest and the central plot is fairly linear, but there's dozens of quests for you to just wander off and do in any order you want. That makes it a very free game for me, even though if you want to reach the end there are certain missions that you have to complete in a set order. The point is that you can do those missions any time you want."

Just like Mafia then, with its central plot, or free-ride options? Plus there's the side missions for the good cars that you clearly didn't do.

I get the feeling that this debate could go on for ever with each side just quoting the other and attempting to answer the points.

I have stayed with EG becuase they say the truth - they don't get overcome with the hype.
They are not afraid of the big gaming companies.

I see all their reviews as being fair. When a game has faults, these are pointed out clearly and then a score according to the whole impression is given.

I haven't played Mafia and I won't in the future.
I will not spend my poor money on this product and I could care less if it was called Mafia, StarCraft 2 or whatever.

A 4/10 isn't a game I want and a bad review might make the devoloper work harder the next time.

Besides, if you like Mafia you probably have it already. Why care if EG gives it a 4 or a 10?

If you never play the games Eurogamer mark down, how do you know the reviews are fair?

I have been playing it for a while now and I am enjoying it quite a lot.

If one is to compare it to GTA3 I find the plot a lot more involving but the fun factor lacking slightly. One of the refreshing things in GTA3 is how the cops are not that aware of how fast one is travelling where as any bobby on the beat in Mafia can guage exactly how fast one is going and then it is a choice of stopping to pay the fine or burning off and hope no one else sees you.

I think Mafia is a PC game and GTA3 is a console game, simple as that, GTA3 one can pick up at any point and just go burning around and i love it for that master stroke of design. Mafia however is an involving and evolving story that is interesting and really does tie the game together well. One of my major problems with GTA3 is how easy it is and so far Mafia is the antithesis to GTA's (at least in my opinion) easy missions.

I agree with Gestalt that a great deal of the driving seems completely pointless byt i intuit this is due to Illusion trying to familiarise the driver with their surroundings.

I found the race to be quite amusing although not really necessary to the plot. I think it is quite an innovative idea and i had fun doing it, i just don't understand why it can be "only Tommy".

I think 4/10 is a harsh score, but then the review is quite accurate to many of my complaints. I think the comments system has been particularly useful in highlighting the many differing opinions that are going to be formed about Mafia.

"If you never play the games Eurogamer mark down, how do you know the reviews are fair?"

Slim, where in my post did I say that?

I have played alot of hyped games and then regreted spending a dime on them.
I wish I had found EG by the time B&W was released, if I had, I wouldn't have bought B&W and saved both money and frustration.

Therefor, I am thankful to sites like EG that actually review a game instead of blindly stomping it with the mark of approval.

"any bobby on the beat in Mafia can guage exactly how fast one is going"

Actually that's a good point - I didn't know cops had speed guns in the 1930s. ;)

Guess I'm mostly preaching to the already converted, but I'm still disappointed that so many review sites shy away from emphasizing obvious flaws in games, or, even worse, do mention quite a few of them and still give an overall rating of 8.5 + x (which in my book == "very good"). The game review business seems somewhat stuck at the level of glossy movie magazines, who run big and nicely illustrated features on upcoming releases and, due to all the hype they generated, thereby incapactitate themselves from both giving their subjective opinion and mentioning obvious faults. Halfway serious film critics on the other hand, rarely give a f**k about the marketing hype (unless they stood in line for five hours to get that 15 minute star interview maybe), they watch the movie, go home and write down what's on their minds.
If one just compares www.rottentomatoes.com to gamerankings.com, you can't help it but notice that the former displays a healthy variety of critical opinion, while the latter looks like the dream-come-true of a cultural Bolshevist. Basically the same applies to literary criticism, there are even some critics that didn't praise "Underworld" or "The Corrections" to the skies.
I wish the business of game reviewing would finally grow up, and Eurogamer is one of those few sites that are not afraid of speaking their minds, which gives me a little hope.

keep it up

critically yours

catsailor

A little personal note about difficulty in games:

If I fail a mission/die on a level/don't solve a puzzle in time I want to do so feeling that it was my fault I failed. I want to be shouting Anglo-Saxon expletives at 2am worrying the neighbours because I screwed up, not because the game/level designer decreed that a certain part of the game should be excruciatingly hard because:

1. The previous missions had been easy up until then
2. Someone said the mission was too easy
3. They can
4. The game/level designer/tester who has been playing it for half a year already can do it so why can't everybody else goddammit!

'Faked' difficulty is a good indicator of poor level design or AI which, when implemented, doesn't actually work well in the game. Or both.
Yes, games should have hard bits that really test you, make sure you have been paying attention up to that point. But they should be fair, and it is on the designer to play through the entire game during development to make sure there are no sudden 'ramp up's in difficulty that are out of place.

Anyone know what the longest EG thread ever was ?

Anyone know what the longest EG thread ever was ?

I don't know but I'd put in a guess at one of either Max Payne, Beige Box Blues, GTA3 or Halo. I seem to remember a couple of other 300+ ones too.

btw to the reviewer: im sure if this was an xbox game it would get 9/10

I'm sure it would, but not on EG. :)

A few points that struck me when reading through this mass of comments:

What Gestalt is saying about predictable scripted AI is right, although maybe the important point was lost in the noise.
It is important that any NPC behaves in a way that you might expect. So you might expect someone to jump out of a car and run for cover - but you would NOT expect him to keep running at you as you shoot holes in him, because his script tells him to keep running until he reaches point X, and then decide what to do.
This is simply poorly thought-out game design, but to be fair to the designers there are equally stupid things going on in every game I've ever played.
Just think of all the cases where you find a "clever" way to beat a game, such as the dozens of cases in GTA3 where someone has found that you can beat a really hard level by taking advantage of a flaw in the collision or that you can get to the other islands by some bizarre method and then get back to the first with a more powerful car. These are also flaws in the game design - and they are just as bad as the minor flaw of an NPC who isn't coded to handle enemy fire before he reaches a waypoint.

Likewise the problems with being unable to complete a mission within a few goes are important. Not because Gestalt is lazy, or incompetent (I wouldn't know, this is the first review I've ever read by him) but simply because he wasn't thinking the same way as the designers. So maybe the game is lacking in mission information, or maybe it needs an extra "hint" system adding to try to give clues for people who really don't get it.
I'm sure I'm not the only person who wasted days trying to get through one single section of DOOM II because I was trying the wrong things - time and again I would get killed, and I never understood why, until somebody else told me what I was doing wrong, and suddenly I couldn't see how I could have been so stupid. Once again, this is a flaw in this game and many others, that failure to complete a section prevents you progressing, but failure may be caused by some minor failure on the players side that they will simply never get past on their own. The suggestions of an option to skip missions and better mission scripts are reasonable, and perhaps ones which all game designers should consider, if they are writing a mission based game.

It is curious that so many of the features that other people mentioned, and which I would have thought were quite innovative, got no mention in Gestalts review.
I don't recall any mention of shooting as you drive, or having an accomplice shoot as you drive - both surely worth a mention. Perhaps they were not obvious to Gestalt - I know I'm guilty of playing a game without reading the manual - I've even finished a few games before I discovered there was another weapon or a sniper view or something. Or equally possibly he was so pissed off with the game by then that he simply didn't think to mention them.
Also there was no mention of the fantastic effects other people mentioned - shooting tyres flat, the sound of the car you were hiding behind being peppered with bullets and all the windows smashing, and so on. For this I can only assume the latter explanation - Gestalt was too fed up with the game to remember that they had even happened. Or maybe he played the game on a P133 with an original 3DFX VooDoo card, and the sound turned off :-)

It is also noticeable that Gestalt has failed to maintain anything resembling objectivity when it comes to complaining about the failings of this game.
It would have been enough to say "I would have been happier with faster cars than these slow 1930s models" without breaking into a 200-odd word essay about slow cars, speeding traps and driving back and forth.
To follow this shortly after with another 200-odd words about a single mission which presumably he didn't understand, and then another 200-odd words moaning about the traffic system is nothing short of nit-picking. These faults should have been mentioned, even if they were only in reality perceived problems that a better understanding of the game would have relieved. But they didn't quite need to be the major part of the review. Where was the balance ? Where was the detail ?

Overall, it is quite clear that this game has a lot to offer, but that it is tarnished by a number of poor design flaws, which combined to prevent Gestalt from getting full enjoyment from it, and I think he would be wrong not to say so - I just think he went off on one for the body of the review and failed to really review the game.

As for the rest of the moaning and whinging on here ... get a life :-)
I write games for a living, it pisses me off no end when reviewers appear to have played a different game to the one I wrote, but at least Gestalt appears to have actually played the game, which is more than some reviewers seem to do.
It is a pity that he missed out so much detail which would be useful to people who are genuinely thinking about buying the game, but then this is the internet. There are people who only buy one games magazine, but I bet you can't find many who only read one review on the internet, after all why would they when there are dozens to choose from ? They'll read all the interesting stuff from others, and perhaps in some cases even form a balanced judgment about whether this is the game for them or not.

YAY ! Otto returns !!

*yawn* Is no one going to let this rest? It's getting a bit repetitive you know.

It is also noticeable that Gestalt has failed to maintain anything resembling objectivity when it comes to complaining about the failings of this game.

I don't want to start laying into Gestalt but I must say the review does seem to do nothing but slag the game off. Surely there were some features which were interesting/well worked? After all it was given a 4 and not a 0. So Gestalt, what did you actually like about it?

"Perhaps they were not obvious to Gestalt - I know I'm guilty of playing a game without reading the manual"

Actually I read the manual cover to cover - not something I normally do, but there was plenty of time while the game was installing! ;)


"That woudn't be realistic but this reviewer wants fast action and the story doesn't matter anyways"

Er .. no, I just want a game that's fun. :) The story is great, the gameplay and graphics are badly flawed. If you can look past those flaws and still enjoy the game, all power to you, but it just frustrated me and spoilt any enjoyment I might have got out of the game.


"The reviewer seems to complain that this game is to difficult"

That's because it is too difficult in places, and I for one don't enjoy having to replay the same mission five or ten times or more to get it right, especially when (in those two missions) it's often the AI that's causing you to fail. The developers should have included a choice of difficulty levels and/or some way to skip a mission if you failed it three or four times in a row. In fact, apparently the first patch for the game might include an option to let you skip that race level - at the moment, if you hit the "skip race" option it just acts as though you lost and you have to start over again. Dunno if that's a bug or just poor translation.

Just look at the game's official forums though - a sizeable proportion of the posts there are about the race and car park levels. And the people posting there are, by definition, hardcore gamers - just imagine what Joe Bloggs who picked the game up from Dixons or Electronics Boutique makes of it. I'm not the only person that found those levels bloody hard and got pissed off having to endlessly repeat them until I didn't get rammed off the road / Sam and Paulie didn't run off and get themselves shot by standing out in the open.

Yes, that's just part of the game, but a) it's about 10% of the game (much more if you go by the amount of time I spent on them) and b) they're showstoppers. A lot of people would have given up at that point, as would I if I hadn't had to review it. The fact that both of those missions are in the first half of the game just makes it worse.


"what did you actually like about it?"

The story's great and the atmosphere is spot on, when it's not spoilt by poor AI, cop cars that accelerate way too fast and buildings that materialise out of thin air. Some of the on-foot action can be fun as well when you don't have to worry about AI sidekicks and you're not hopelessly outnumbered and given a pea shooter with half a dozen bullets to fight back with. Which isn't very often unfortunately.

I actually quite enjoyed the first hour or two of the game, apart from that ridiculously long and anal taxi mission, but after that it just got more and more frustrating and the constant driving back and forth across town got incredibly repetitive. If I wanted to cruise around town I'd play the free ride mode. As it is I found the cars a pain to drive and I just wanted to get on with the game instead of wasting ages driving around to get from Salieri's bar to wherever the mission was taking place in almost every level.

Everyone's getting very excited about the score, I don't see a score. Did Gestalt finally persuade the Don to let him drop scores?

Yes, the score was removed soon after the review was posted. Not sure yet if this will become a permanent thing, but I certainly hope so.

Excellent, good move. Are you thinking of putting anything in its place? A 'thumbs up/thumbs down' icon or some such quick guide? Don't want to get into another scoring debate but I've never worked out how numerical values can be extracted from a game review, the worst are those sites which start giving percentages in randomly generated categories and then average the whole thing out to give the final score out of a hundred. Daft. Daftest of all is to finish off by giving a 'reviewer's tilt' so undermining the whole carefully constructed charade. But a quick 'hit or miss' guide can be helpful to go alongside an in-depth written review.

I replayed the missions quite a few times, and found that the enemies would approach me differently. Sometimes they'd charge, sometimes crouch behind stuff, sometimes try to sneak around cars.

Unluckily so did I replay them, too many times. It got easier, though, when you already knew where the enemies would be scripted to pop out like in a shooting range. It seems to me we played a different game.

There's only one objective sure, but there's different way's to go about it.

Like what? I don't count something being different if it's cheating the AI like blocking it with cars or something like that.

Well sure, its a linear game, that's the way it is. You expect them to produce an alternative route through the game? That would require a huge number of missions.

Actually the motel car escape could easily have been handled by one cutscene and perhaps having the bald guy pop up again somewhere... or maybe one extra mission where you visit his house somewhere. Too many things like this in the game: a small tweak here or there, and Mafia would've been a good game, as opposed to average.

GTA3 yes, but there fairly simple missions, and there's a plotline that has only one outcome afaik. Morrowind has only one solution to the plot, you complete the quests within their rigid guidelines, if you fail in a plot you get a message to say the world is now buggered, you can carry on if you like but you'll never complete the game, hows that innovative or free? It's just another way of saying game over. Deus ex had a linear structure, not sure why you're saying its a free game. Sure, I like open ended gaming, but I think you need a linear thread though the game to provide a coherant plot, objective and complete bit of entertainment.

Morrowind's main quest does have a plot line, but the outcome depends on the character e.g. players prior actions. Also the only way to get the whole world "buggered" is by killing an NPC you wouldn't probably have a good reason to kill, and even after getting that message you still have thousands of side quests to complete. Try getting your own stronghold etc.

Try considering the fact that games are not things to be completed, but toys.

Why I cited GTA3 and Deus Ex as good examples of "non-scripted games" -- they both give you numerous approaches to a problem. You can complete Deus Ex without KILLING anybody, in GTA3 you have loads of small quests littered around the area -- while it's a comedy game, it still feels like you are not bound to follow a single story, mission by mission.

I think you're living in fantasy land to be honest. It's a nice idea, but it rarely works out.

Game criticism and game theory research is what gives us a dream of a better world -- a world where games could become much more than simple-minded entertainment where you simulate killing people. Morrowind, Deus Ex etc. point us a way forward, and it's fair to criticise games that bring nothing new to gameplay, only tired old scripted concepts and poor AI and player interaction with the world.

We're coming back to realise that a good old fashioned story is what a lot of people really want.

LOL! We're thinking that people have realized that freedom is what they crave -- and that's why Morrowind and GTA3 have been on the bestseller lists for so long!

"a quick 'hit or miss' guide can be helpful to go alongside an in-depth written review"

Yeah, something like that might work. It's certainly better than trying to score everything out of ten or as a percentage.

better than trying to score everything out of ten or as a percentage.

Quite. I'm guessing that you come under some pressure from publishers to give scores, right? Presumably so they can refer to it in their marketing blurb (assuming the score's a good one). But a thumbs up/down system plus 'awards' ("EG seal of approval" or something less cheesy) for really outstanding games might placate them. Does away with the need for scores entirely imho - seeing as the readership doesn't seem to want them.

Try considering the fact that games are not things to be completed, but toys.

Not a "fact" as such, but a pretty sound point of view. I often ignore the "mission" structure entirely in some games and just stick to sandbox. Comes down to individual taste I suppose.

Gestalt said: "We're coming back to realise that a good old fashioned story is what a lot of people really want."

Viktor said: "We're thinking that people have realized that freedom is what they crave"

There's room for both types of game surely? I wouldn't want to do without either. As long as a game's honest about what it sets out to do.

Er .. I didn't say that! Personally I'd like both - a good story *and* plenty of random stuff to muck around doing on the side. :)

Like what? I don't count something being different if it's cheating the AI like blocking it with cars or something like that.

I didn't see the blocking as cheating the AI, just as another route. Other ways of doing things were available all through the game, for example the stealth mission I didn't stealth at all, but rambo'd my way through it (and nicked the guys car, it's one of the best in the game!). If the cops stopped me for speeding, I gunned them down rather than waiting for a ticket etc.

Actually the motel car escape could easily have been handled by one cutscene and perhaps having the bald guy pop up again somewhere... or maybe one extra mission where you visit his house somewhere.

So that's two alternatives for one mission, you're asking for the game to be at least 3x bigger than it is. That's a pretty significant change.

Too many things like this in the game: a small tweak here or there, and Mafia would've been a good game, as opposed to average.

I agree, it's not a perfect game, but certainly well above average. Hard to think of any game that doesn't have any flaws at all.

Morrowind's main quest does have a plot line, but the outcome depends on the character e.g. players prior actions.

Most of the plot was take object x to y. There wasn't any room for anything else but the rigid guidelines. I found morrowinds quest system very rigid in fact, in the end very boring because of the repetition.

Also the only way to get the whole world "buggered" is by killing an NPC you wouldn't probably have a good reason to kill, and even after getting that message you still have thousands of side quests to complete. Try getting your own stronghold etc.

Yep, but you can never finish the game.

Try considering the fact that games are not things to be completed, but toys.

I have, and I've played a few of them. I used to want entirely open experiences until i'd tried a few. Now I'm happy to be guided around. A bit of freedom is fun, a lot is tedium. Morrowind got very boring after a while because it wasn't that scripted. A bit of freedom and non linearity is nice, Baldurs Gate 2 did a particularly good job of this through chapter 2, where you could follow the main plot or do a ton of subquests in any order you like, but the main plot was always there for moving along and giving you a sense of accomplishment.

Why I cited GTA3 and Deus Ex as good examples of "non-scripted games" -- they both give you numerous approaches to a problem. You can complete Deus Ex without KILLING anybody

Are you sure? I thought you had to kill the boss chars for a start?

in GTA3 you have loads of small quests littered around the area -- while it's a comedy game, it still feels like you are not bound to follow a single story, mission by mission.

Sure thats nice, but in the end you do follow the story missions and finish the game.

LOL! We're thinking that people have realized that freedom is what they crave -- and that's why Morrowind and GTA3 have been on the bestseller lists for so long!

Morrowind sold pretty poorly I'm afraid. GTA3 did well, but I'm sure that had as much to do with the violent content as much as any freedom ideal.

GTA3 did well, but I'm sure that had as much to do with the violent content as much as any freedom ideal.

Or the fact it was the most entertaining game of last year, if not the last 5?

Yeah, it being a bit good certainly will have helped sales :-)

Slim: You apparently won't ackownledge that there's a fundamental difference in the freeform gameplay offered by the likes of Morrowind and Deus Ex (which both games do in different ways) and the heavily scripted gameplay offered in the Mafia storyline mode. That's just funny.

On topic of the rating system, I really liked DailyRadar's rating system (if nothing else about them), IIRC they had three scores, something like bad, good and awesome. I like reserving an awesome to point out games that are kind of a must-have.

Well, I've played and finished all three games. DeusEx had different physical paths through the missions, well Mafia has that on many missions. Deus ex you could do them peacably or forcefully, well you can in mafia too, for example the stealth mission you could sneak through and complete it, or shoot everyone and complete it.

Morrowind was very open in that you could wander wherever you like and do quests, well Mafia has that in free play mode. Morrowind also has a very linear main plot where you have to do each quest in sequence with no freedom at all, and they can be mostly only done one way, I.e. goto dungeon X, kill this man and bring back Y.

Fail to see the huge difference here. Care to point it out for me rather than just say I'm being funny?

"for example the stealth mission you could sneak through and complete it, or shoot everyone and complete it"

Which mission, the one where you're breaking into the safe? I tried rampaging my way through that a few times, but there's tons of guards and they're all armed with pump action shotguns and tommy guns, so you tend to die really quickly if you shoot anyone. There's only one way I've found of getting through the first part of that level, and that's to sneak down the left side of the garden, bop one guy on the head with the baseball bat and then sneak on to the side door. Anything else got me killed, rapidly. On the way out I bopped the maid over the head with the bat, and the guy standing guard on the patio with his back to the door. Then I got spotted, but got lucky and took out the guy coming up the stairs to the patio before he could shoot me or the safe cracker. Then I legged it for the side gate. Again, taking on the guards is suicidal, especially as you need to keep an unarmed sidekick alive as well as yourself.

DailyRadar's rating system

Think it went

Dud
Miss
Hit
Direct Hit

So basically marks out of 4. Generally, I looked on it as Hit = buy it if it's your thing, and Direct Hit = sit up and take notice, even if it's not your thing. But at the end of the day, a Hit is basically a score of 6-low 8, and direct hit high 8-10.

Er .. I didn't say that! Personally I'd like both

Whoops sorry, well someone said it, personally I'd also like plenty of both, I always thought freedom was the advantage computer games had over books, a decent plot/story being the sine qua non of both media (sorry about that but there's been a shocking lack of Latin here recently :p). Arcade type games excepted natch.

"Which mission, the one where you're breaking into the safe? I tried rampaging my way through that a few times, but there's tons of guards and they're all armed with pump action shotguns and tommy guns, so you tend to die really quickly if you shoot anyone."

Yes, that one. I hid and bonked the first one on the right as he walked past, then nicked his shotgun and fired it. They all came running, but I stayed hid, and blow them away as they came into shot. See, different ways to do things.

"Again, taking on the guards is suicidal, especially as you need to keep an unarmed sidekick alive as well as yourself."

I didn't find it to be, provided you weren't daft enough to take them full on. The unarmed sidekick wasn't a problem as he responed to 'wait here' commands, I could put him somewhere safe until I'd cleared things out.

Otto: I said that, but I prefer both too, like baldurs 2 for example.

They all came running, but I stayed hid, and blow them away as they came into shot. See, different ways to do things.

Actually, you just exploited a flawed AI again (nothing wrong with that, I catch myself doing that often). That might be a different way, but it doesn't really speak for the game, nor the designers if they actually intended it to be that way. Even very slow thugs should notice a heap of their buddies lieing bleeding on the floor and approach more carefully.
Oh well.

I hid and bonked the first one on the right as he walked past

Now that I'd like to have seen. ;)

Well I'm loving the game, the performance of it is a bit iffy though and I'm at the dreaded car park level now.

I must say I did feel slightly guilty beating the housekeeper to death with my baseball bat in the burglary mission. Stealing the prosecutor's car right in front of him after offing half a dozen of his bodyguards did cheer me up a bit afterwards though! ;-)

I just wish the game had the stats like GTA3 has, I'm rather curious how many people I've run down. Even the airport mission is a lot easier when you nick a mechanic's truck and plow into tommygun wielding corrupt cops! :-)

I hid and bonked the first one on the right

Blimey, I knew freestyle allowing the player to tackle problems as they please was all the rage, but this is ridiculous.

Quick point, I've never played this game but these very interesting comments have pieced together the entire plot and exactley how to defeat each mission.

I wasn't going to get it anyway, just saying, that's all.

We need harsh gaming criticism to advance the entertainment. The most biased criticism would be to say that everything is good, when most games are bad or average. It would be an insult to the few really good games.

But then again, if you consider films, critics slam bad movies, but they end up being blockbusters. But slowly but surely the criticism influences the industry and helps create a better language of telling the stories.

Mafia has so many faults that it can not be considered a seriously "good game", while GTA3's faults are few (horrible control on PS2 being the worst) -- I don't mind f. ex. the disappearing cars, and it's lack of repetition and sense of herding is enough to make it a great videogame, four stars out of five.

These guys pay for the server bandwidth, so they can publish whatever the hell they want. Don't like it? Don't come back.

If they write a review which paints a game as superb and it turns out to be shite, they're labelled unprofessional fanboys/back handers. If they rightly slate a game, their reviewing skills are called into question.

They pay for the bandwidth to enable you to have your say.

They have an opinion and are slated for it. You have an opinion yet your's is somehow right.

I take my hat off to people like John and Tom running websites like this. Frankly, you miserable sods aren't worth the effort.

sod = turf? Haven't seen that one before.

Wasn't levelled at you mate, it was AmpH who inspired my soap box speech (well, and the rest of the miserable gimps on this thread. Oh, and the Halo thread, if memory serves).

Stu, did you not have to sing the one in school assembly about Jesus sitting on a grassy sod or something? Caused many a titter at Holtspur Middle School I can assure you.

I seem to have erased all Religious Education from my head as quick as I could French etc.

Anyway, back to reviews... people are already claiming Sega GT2002 (Xbox) as The GT3 Killer. Can you imagine the uproar from the gimps if it doesn't score 11 out of 10, with a side serving of comments to the tune of "take a PS2 and GT3 into the shower? I'd rather just have Sega GT2k2". etc.

It may well turn out to be a better game, but it won't perturb the manner in which it's thrust upon us by the bafoons.

/me ponders why he bothers.

"sod = turf? Haven't seen that one before. "

Oh that's an old one, right up there with Gay in the misappropriated words section ;)

On the subject of Mafia, I am enjoying it i just wish that there was a mode where i could drive my car around without being hasseled by the cops all the time, i have a car which does over 70 mph but i can't test that anywhere!

I would also like the GTA3 thing where i could tweak my cars...the hours of fun i had with that, i even managed to drive up a wall once :D

Stu, since in the US Sega GT 2002 is receiving lower scores than GT3, I think EG will get a lot of hot mail from PS2 and Cube fanboys if the score (assuming there's one) is not lower than GT3's. I'm willing to bet that 8 or 9 will leave Xbox fanboys quite happy.

Well, reviews aside momentarily, comments are that the graphics are better and the AI trumps GT3's. The AI comment is fair enough, the graphics I would expect. As I said to someone who posted

"GT3 Killer!!! I'm ordering this one",

"Well, it only took them two years or so to better a game on a 2.5 year old system. Well done lads".

Still, the tone you guys offer doesn't exactly inspire me to add another console to the collection.

Worth mentioning on that last point, that mafia has gone out to the shops at 29.99, so it's a good bit cheaper than many games released these days.

30 quid is still a lot compared to movies, dvds et cetera. Especially books. It's still hard for games to compete for quality time spent with media, most are too long, badly structured, boring and so on. But then again, some are so brilliant that they make the whole field of interactive entertainment worth following.

Worth mentioning on that last point, that mafia has gone out to the shops at 29.99, so it's a good bit cheaper than many games released these days

Perhaps this is also a sign that the publishers know that they will not get any more for it (after all the 'bad' reviews).

Is there ever going to be any 'closure' on this thread ?