Like a child who clambers up a drainpipe onto the roof of a crotchety neighbour and becomes a hero cheered by the assembled masses as she flings down years of lost footballs and frisbees, deflated and sun-bleached but still treasured, GOG have rescued another two games from the digital gutter. This time, it’s the Hidden & Dangerous games. They’re a pair of tactical squad-based World War 2 stealth-o-shooters release in 1999 and 2003 by Illusion Softworks (who are now 2K Czech), and they’re still quite good. They’ve been off the radar for a while but are now sold DRM-free on GOG. Read the rest of this entry »

One of the great pleasures of the original Mafia was flicking on the speed limiter and cruising around 1930s New Heaven, obeying the traffic laws. I remember people complaining about its slow, period-appropriate cars at the time, but now it seems to be a fondly recalled part of the experience.

Mafia 3 seems to be going for something more traditional for driving in 1968 New Bordeaux, in that its motoring is inspired by Steve McQueen movies like Bullitt. So says the developer video below.

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He is a funny one, that Ian Video Games. I tell you, he spends all his time on The Internet doing the strangest things. No, not like that you cheeky madam. Ian – you’ll love this – he’s working on a sort of a phone book for the Internet, so people can look up any website. He spends all day searching for new sites, and notes every single name he finds in his notebooks. He’s filled hundreds of them! Says he’s taking the idea to Dragon’s Den.

And you’ll never guess what – Ian says in his research (his “research”, lawd!) he came across signs that we might hear about a new Mafia game from 2K soon.

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They might call it a “restructuring”, but whatever word one applies to it, it’s bad news for a venerable studio with a rich heritage. In this partial death, let them once again assume their true mantle. 2K Czech were and always shall be Illusion Softworks, creators of Hidden & Dangerous, Mafia and not enough else. Subsumed into the 2K mass in 2007 and renamed in 2008, sadly it did not reach the dizzy heights of contemporaneous acquiree Irrational, as its expensive sequel to Mafia proved disappointing (though it does have its passionate fans). Tennis sequel Top Spin 4 was its sole release subsequent to that, and as of today’s revelation that the studio’s Prague-based headquarters has been closed down by 2K, perhaps we shall never know if Illusion Softworks might have one day reclaimed their reputation for ambitious, complex and atmospheric historical action games.

Although reports today (including this one) have something of the eulogy to them, this is not in fact a full closure.
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