This game would have had to hit a 95% average score for me to buy it, and right now it’s averaging <less>
So for the $800 million wank numbers EA’s is throwing out? Was anyone ever that excited about this? What did the licesne cost? $799 milion? EA is out of touch. Where’s my C&C Red Alert 3? Where’s my SimEarth 2, where’s my Simcity 5?
Also - a good version of this game was made in 2002 allready. It was called mafia.
You think?
Let’s not forget Kingpin. Arguably as close to the films as this recent hunk of crap is.
Another game trying to top GTA… too bad it sucks… I think… haven’t played it yet…
etc
I watched the video review at Gamespot and was thoroughly unimpressed.
Sucky graphics, re-used models and layouts, and 15-20 hours of gameplay?! I put 30+ hours in GTA3 back in the day and was about 25% of the way through.
I only buy games if the aggregate rating is a Prime number, or divisible by seven.
Or worshipped by an unnameable cult.
I think this will sell well, despite any lukewarm reviews. A friend of mine who is a casual gamer asked what I knew about the game. I told him that I knew very little about it and that there were no reviews of the finished product out yet.
He was still going to buy it day one just so he could become Vito Corelone.
Never underestimate the power of the Godfather name.
Troy
But the game is a bonanza for review-magazine blurbs, page headers, screenshot captions, etc.
“Leave the game… take the cannoli.”
“Now here’s an offer you can refuse.”
“Godfather, you broke my heart!”
It will, no doubt, for the same reasons BFME (and Fox News, sorry, jab-jab) and its like sidestep critical scrutiny. I reviewed it for OXM and…will just say I wasn’t at all as pleased with it as GS.
After a few hours of play, I’m pretty impressed at how thoroughly EA managed to cock this one up. This may be the worst GTA clone I’ve played, and I played Roadkill. The whole “brutal rape of a classic film” thing is just icing on the cash-in cake.
Interesting that Pacino refused to lend his voice and likeness to this game, but agreed to do Scarface. Of course, buzz on Scarface is through-the-roof positive, so maybe Pacino’s handlers simply know a bad idea when they see one.
It is? I haven’t seen anything on Scarface in quite a long while but it looked like a crap Vice City clone when it was announced.
Wasn’t it the other way around?
I think this one could be a money pit. They spent $15m on the game, plus whatever they paid for the license. Apparently a sequel is already in the works. Hopefully that will follow the pattern of the films and be better than the first one.
Amazing that Mafia was released in, what, 2002? And it STILL looks better than this game.
I also think they fucked up big time by not getting the 360 version done on time. How are they planning to move to next gen if they can’t even hack a simultaneous release? If they release Godfather 360 in, like, 6 months (assuming they ever release it at all) is anyone really going to care by then?
Just got back from eb and had a chance to play the ps2 version. Besides the character models the city looks like crap. The controls are pretty sloppy and button controls are all over the place. For example you need to hold L1 to lock on to someone, right stick to fight, square to bob, r2 to finsh.
I like how you take over businesses but it gets stale pretty fast. I heard from the person at the counter that the 360 should be out around june.
I’m having a decent amount of fun playing it, but jeez I can’t stand how they fuck with the movie. Micheal Corleone is not a “hanging out of a car blazing a Tommy Gun” kind of dude, and when they whacked Paulie he didn’t go running into a maze of explosive barrels. Spoilers, I guess. Whoops.
Also, yeah, gah on the controls. I thought the GTAs had crappy controls, but this is terrible. Switching weapons(like for a bonus on a hit) is terrifically confusing, and then the switch from the right trigger to the right analog stick for melee? Welcome to deadsville, population some dude that looks like Charlie Sheen.
GUN did such a terrific job with the controls that I can’t believe anyone would do anything different, yet here we sit fucking around with terrible “lock on then fiddle with the analog stick to aim at his knees” systems.
Finally, the cars handle like hovercraft from the future and take an insane amount of damage. So yeah, I think this game’s biggest “pro” is that it reminds me how sweet Mafia was.
Yeah. It’s not that it’s bad or anything, it’s just damned repetitive. Story takes less than ten hours to zing through, then the city’s just a glorified four-quad do-it-to-me-one-more-time (and one more, and one more still…).
All the buildings and such look the same (from a few templates), same hit guys standing in the same places, same reactions, same exact places you’ll take cover and shoot it out. And there’s absolutely no sense of danger or unease as you’re knocking over businesses once you get the hang of it. The other families never fight back or try to take anything–no sense of tug-of-war at all. By the 50% mark, I was just looking at each remaining business a drudgery. “I gotta shake another guy around again and kick in his cash register? Oh boy.”
I’d also like to complain that there was the germ of a pretty good idea in this game. A game about an low-level Corleone soldier during the events of the movie could’ve been sweet in a “street level view of his parallel little struggle”, but the way your nobody is constantly getting inserted into events from the movie grates on me like nothing else. WTF? I’m sure I didn’t see said Charlie Sheen looking motherfucker in the version of the movie I have.
