Rock, Paper, Shotgun

With Mafia II news due to break any moment, this week seemed a sensible time to go back and play the 2002 original. Which is what I did, and is now up to read on Eurogamer.

“Mafia is still a radical game. In 2002, just a year after Grand Theft Auto III had shaken up everyone’s expectations of sandbox gaming, Illusion Softworks’ open city went deeply against the grain. Rather than embracing the freedom of choice a living city offers, it chose to make a tightly scripted, extremely linear story with little else to do. And thank goodness, because seven years on, Mafia is still compelling despite its aging technology.”

It carries on here.

Tonight we will have the very latest information on Mafia II right here on RPS. Be here.

News reaches us that Take Two have been reaching into their bag of many dollars to add another studio to their collection, buying the Czech Republic’s largest developer, Illusion Softworks, creators of Hidden and Dangerous and Mafia. After the undisclosed sum was paid, all 200 of Illusion Softworks employees will be working in the cleverly named “2K Czech”. Now, we wanted to write a serious piece of analysis, comparing the purchase of Irrational while developing future 2K heavyweight Bioshock (and profiting from the closer relationship i.e. Money) to the purchase of Illusion Softworks while developing hypothetical future 2K heavyweight Mafia 2, but we started worrying about what pun to call the article.

I mean, immediately I wanted “Woo-Ha! Got you all in Czech!”, but Jim countered with the elegant “Take Two Moves For Czech Mates”. I’m considering the traditional crime-based “An Offer They Couldn’t Refuse?” before Waker goes into pun-overdrive with a “Take 2 software developers into the shower? Why, when you can buy them all and take only one?” which is too long to fit on the title line, but is quite a devastating array of terrible punnery. Finally, Alec unleashes the tri-pronged offensive of “Mafia: City of Lost Revenue”, “Use Your Illusion II (Make More Money)” and “Illusion Incur Irrational’s Indignity”, and I’m left all confused and no idea what to write. Poor me.

What do you think? Also, about the sale?

If you’re the sort of person who goes on excitedly about how brilliant the end of Mafia was, and how it was the most mature take on the GTA-style game the world has ever seen, then you have a reason to celebrate. Its creators, Illusion Softworks, are working on a sequel, called, in a flash of inspiration, Mafia 2.

To be honest, I’m not among them – I thought it good, but far from Great and it always felt a little barren in terms of interactivity. That I played it before you were able to skip the early, murderously difficult, circuit racing mission which blocked progress in a way akin to the hilarious and infinitely infuriating driving-test section at the start of Driver. Anyway – enough ‘orrible whining. Little else to say. Details are sparse at the moment; there’s a press release whose meaning can be boiled down to “There will be a sequel to Mafia. It’ll come out on some formats, one of which will be the PC”.

However, it does look pretty. For more pretty, go to its (particularly bare) site here where there are four other examples of pretty. Yes.