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Have You Played? is an endless stream of game retrospectives. One a day, every day, perhaps for all time.
I thought of the Hidden & Dangerous games as Rainbow Six: WWII. That was no bad thing. Combining stealth, squad management, action, and lots of careful planning that often ended in a few brutal seconds of panic and failure, they were wonderful things. I’ve been revisiting the sequel following its recent arrival on Steam. Read the rest of this entry »
After five years of not being sold for download anywhere (and long being out-of-print on disc), the first Mafia has returned to sale. GOG this week dredged the digital bay, hauled the crime ’em up out, and chipped off its concrete boots to re-release it DRM-free. This version has an edited soundtrack with the licensed music removed, mind. Presumably music licenses expiring is what got the game pulled from sale back in 2012. I’ve not played Mafia since ooh it was on CD, so I am tempted to see how it feels 15 years after it came out – and after two sequels of varying quality and direction. Read the rest of this entry »
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.
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.
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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It seems pretty clear that Mafia II is going to be one of those games where the publisher-released assets are going keep on coming until they flood the internet, burying life as we know it under a series of informative or excitingly-edited game footage clips featuring well-dressed men doing violence. (Because, if you hadn’t already realised, dudes are going to get shot.) This latest trailer is probably my favourite so far, because it’s not spoilering so much as just leaping from event to event. It’s also reminding me that I need to nip over and see John to get a glimpse of the thing in action. If you want to see what he thought about the early preview build, go have a read of this handsome preview.
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I got a chance to sit down with Mafia II on PC, and play through a complete mission. Then run on a lunatic rampage around the city. Read my impressions below.
Mafia II is the year’s most anticipated game about watching lavish cutscenes, driving to places and shooting people then watching more lavish cutscenes before driving to places and shooting people. Expect vast quantities of gloss and pizazz from this one. Oooh, I’ve never written the word ‘pizazz’ before. It’s fun, isn’t it? Anyway: I believe our man John ‘Giggles’ Walker will be presenting you with a write-up of his forthcoming hands-on time with the PC build in the not-too-distant, but in the meantime here’s a few of the devs (including Czech guys dubbed into English) talking about and, more importantly, demonstrating some of the finer points* of this highly anticipated driving/shooting/watching game.
*I.e. “smashing men’s faces into car doors.”
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Last week, I finally got to spend a little quality time with the rarely-seen, much-delayed Mafia 2. While I was there, I made Alex Cox, one of the game’s producers, an offer he couldn’t refuse. He refused it anyway. So I decided to ask him about the game instead. Read on for the chatty chap’s thoughts on the game’s excellent music, open world versus linear and whether ‘dickcheese’ is an authentic 1950s swear word or not.
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The new Mafia II trailer (below) shows some neat gangsterism, and has a John Lee Hooker soundtrack. That’s going to doom me to a morning of Blues while I get on with writing all the words about videogames. The game itself has been delayed again, apparently, with 2K saying that it won’t make the first half of 2010, as anticipated. However, the game is coming along handsomely, and we might just have some more news on that progress soon. Worth keeping an eye out for, I think, because this could just be one of the games that makes 2010 worthwhile.
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GameTrailers has interviewed 2K producer Denby Grace about the forthcoming Mafia II. They did it on video, so we can watch it, without all the hassle of reading boring old words. Stupid words. It shows off some of the lesser-spoken about features of the game so far – the open world elements. There’s discussion of how encounters on the street occur, as well as side missions. The second video goes on to talk about environmental destructibility, and then the plans for realistic police. (Which means not only their being strict, but also it being easy to escape their primitive ways. Finally it goes on to discuss the ways to upgrade cars. So that’s most of the things I’d be wondering about – good work, GameTrailers.
A couple of months ago we brought you lots of information about 2K Czech’s forthcoming Mafia II. A new mission has been demoed at E3, this time one set near the beginning of the game in February 1945, so it’s time to tell you some more. (You can see some clips of it in the trailer released this week.) The war’s still raging, and Vito Scalleta was recently back from Europe, flat broke, looking to get himself some well paid work. Hello the mob. By the start of this mission, called The Buzzsaw, Vito’s already met his buddy Joe, along with Italian immigrant Henry, both acting as his wingmen. It’s time to go kill the Fat Man.
2K Games have released a story-telling trailer for their open-world historical gangster thriller, Mafia II. This is kind of dark, and I could hardly be looking forward to it more. For a reminder of why we’re excited it about this one check out (Czech out? Okay, no) John’s extensive preview. There should be a bit more info about this coming from the show, later this week.
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After a few unofficial leaks, 2K have made sure there’s a far more comprehensive set of game footage trailers for Mafia II. Three of them, in fact, which you’ll find below. The show the truncated mission that was shown to press behind vast stone doors earlier this month, which show off the three main aspects of Mafia II. There’s the walking and driving around the remarkably detailed streets, the way the cutscenes work, and some of the shooty-gun-bang action. You can read more details about it all in our preview and interview.
During my travels to deepest Czech Republic (look countries, can you pick names that work in grammatical sentences please?) I gathered you all the Mafia II information I could carry in my arms, providing what might well be the most detailed preview ever in the history of the universe. But I still wanted more. More! So I got hold of associate producer Alex Cox and had him answer all sorts of questions about the game. We find out about the choice behind the setting, the logic of a narrative game in a sandbox world, the background behind new player character Vito and why AI will play such an important role in the game. Read on.
RPS is very pleased to have been one of the first websites in the world to see Mafia II running. We took a trip to 2K Czech, in their Czech Republic headquarters, and saw how the game is coming together. So far, so good. They were allowed to continue with our blessing. Below are detailed impressions of the game at this stage in development, along with five brand new screenshots (click on them for the full versions).
Some more images of the new Mafia game have turned up over on CVG. It’s the one free-roaming urban crime we PC users have to look forward to at the moment… And what we’ve seen so far is pretty impressive. I’m going to try and sort out an RPS interview with the 2k Czech team in the next few weeks. No release date has been set for Mafia 2 as yet, but we’re hoping it’ll arrive for Christmas.
Happy Friday! Five new screenshots of 2K Czech’s Mafia 2 have appeared. And lummy, it looks rather lovely. Ooh, I’m looking forward to this.
Click the pics for bigness. Four more below.
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?
