I’ve had the game a week now (cheers, eBay) and am now uninstalling it. It was fine while I could get it to work but the perplexing absence of sound in the video cutscenes (of which there are thankfully few) and the recurring, play-ruining animation-loop I can’t stop Tommy getting into (or break him out of; it’s still there when I reload or start a different game mode!) have finally forced me to give up on it. It’s a real shame: there is obviously a great game here, and a very well-written story feeding it all, but the technical problems even in the patched version are just pissing me off right now and have killed dead any desire to continue playing.

Reminisce at your own peril.

In other news, Steam won’t let me play Zeno Clash because it keeps trying to apply the new update and failing to find a server to do so – they’re “too busy”, apparently. That’s right: this miraculous wonder-service won’t let me play a game I’ve bought and paid for. The next person who sings Steam’s praises on this site is getting hit in the face.

I’m rather ashamed to say my experience rather echo’s that. I dug up the game tonight and tried to re-installed it but now I can’t due to hanging on the 2nd CD during install. I wonder if I can still bother take2…

Without quicksave, and with astonishingly high difficulty in places, I remembered that many of Mafia’s best missions are about repeated attempts, refining your approach until you find the slickest, subtlest, and cleverest technique for surviving the situation.

I just wanted to say that it’s pretty weird of you to say that, and still have issues with the race :) Your comments here are completely applicable to that mission, and that is precisely why the race is one of my favourite memories of playing Mafia.

Sure it took a few attempts, but come on people, it’s a race. You’re supposed to have to learn the track and your car’s abilities a little. Seriously, what kind of satisfaction is there in a racing game that has no challenge?

Now that’s not to say that I don’t think they should have patched it — Mafia isn’t actually a racing game first and foremost, after all — but I was seriously pissed off when I heard that they’d made it easier in the patch without given you the option of playing it in its original form! That really, really sucked.

Its worth trying just to see it. But, you will need a pretty kickass machine to keep the framerate reasonable. Also its a pain to setup because you have to manually alter about 50 files. Happily, someone at MafiaScene.com has altered them all and packaged them together. The pack is something like the optimised draw pack or something, have a look.