Zero desire for GOdfather game

Andrew, is that for real? Or with detail turned all the way down in Godfather?

Well first let me start my post by telling Witta how wrong he is. Not wrong as in he’s a broken human being that can’t stand true intimacy but wrong as in the Godfather movie is the best ganster movie of all time.

How can you not empathise with Michael, the good boy who came home a war hero and was going to make good but family love got in his way and messed up his life. Or is it the story of a man who had it in his genes to be a gangster and couldn’t escape? Or a story of the seductive influence of power and wealth? Great flick.

Anyway most of the sites are giving it a decent score on the 7-9 scale. IGN is the lowest and in my book that’s a freaking endorsement.

Well anyway you next gen snobs can all make fun of my ps2 graphics (the screenshots look pretty good for a ps2 game) but I’m gonna become a made man next weekend.

You 360 owning trolls may now return to your regularly scheduled game of Joust and stop trolling the thread of the best game evar (that most of the people in this thread have never played including me).

I stole the image from another forum. It would be more fun to assume it’s completely legit though.

Where IS Red Alert 3?

I remember mafia looking like that . Didn’t see the godfather, but going by a pc screenshot I’d say it might be correct.

Did… did they even texture the cars?

I replayed Mafia recently, and it’s held up pretty well graphically. The cars are the stars of the game, and a lot of effort went into them, so they still look really good at high res and maxed out options. However, the world detail has noticeably aged a lot. The textures of buildings are fuzzy, and there’s hideous pop-up even with the view distance maxed.

The Godfather has passable graphics. The cars aren’t great, but the city looks quite nice. It does suffer from technical stupidity like cars and people popping into and out of existence right in front of you. I like the ultraviolence and the extortion system - it’s quite shockingly violent in that respect, much moreso than soemthing like GTA. Watching the extortion tutorial movie had me crying with laughter and I couldn’t wait to try out smacking baker’s heads into the cash till, or holding them over the oven. As others have described, the combat controls are very odd, but you do get used to them after a while, and they do provide a lot of flexibility in the number and type of moves you can do.

The gameplay is a bit bland outside the combat. I’ve never needed to visit an weapons dealer as you always seem to pick up enough from turning over businesses. It’s really, really difficult to rile the cops, even if you’re killing people in the streets. Taking over rackets gets repetetive as there’s only a small number of “racket interior” maps, and the mafia goons are always numbered and placed identically. There are general UI annoyances, like the map being the most useful screen and yet it isn’t directly hotkeyed or assigned to a button. Watching unlocked film clips can only be done from the “load game” screen, which you can only get to by quitting out of your current game and going back to the main menu. The same is true for wardrobe changes for your character - the option is on the Load Game screen. It’s stupid, and cheap. Could they not have added a wardrobe for your character in your safe house? What about buying clothes from a gasp clothes shop? Talking of the safe house, has anyone figured out the purpose of the extra room with the two semi-naked women?

The story is okay, and rides the coat-tails of the film, but the use of film clips is really, really clumsily handled. I’ll give you an example - early in the game you’re going through the tutorial missions with Luca Brasi at the same time that the Don is meeting Sollozo to turn him down. You unlock a clip from the movie to illustrate events that are happening that you aren’t directly involved with, and it’s that exact scene with Vito turning Sollozo down, however it stops before the whole point of that scene is revealed - i.e. the bit where Vito collars Sonny afterwards and tells him “Never tell someone from outside the family what you’re thinking”. That scene is entirely about showing the viewer that Sonny is unfit to be Don, and why, and it’s lost completely, because some EA doofus chopped up the film to serve the game’s story. Lame.

While the game does have a few hours of decent enjoyment in it, even for Godfather nuts it would be best to wait until it’s cheaper.

How do you get the horse’s head in the guy’s bed?

Most of the great Westwood Studios employees went to Petroglpyh Games. http://www.petroglyphgames.com/ ----> and the developers there are simply fantastic people. I’m not sure EA can make a Red Alert or C&C game with the heart of its development team gone. I thought C&C Generals was “OK”, but it lacked the soul of the previous games.

Wouldn’t they just put the BFME team on it?

The generals and Zero hour game had a horrable story. RA2 had a very intresting story with really intresting bad guys.

However, the gameplay of Generals was by far, the best of all the RTS games westwood had ever put out. Infact I was ready to totally write off westwood as anyone who could make a game after the string of crap they pushed out, Generals took my be surprise and proved that they did have some hope after all.

You might be joking, Dirt, but that’s actually in there as a stealth mission. And not a very good one at that.

-Tom

Ha! No wonder Coppola hates it.

Well I played this for a bit today, and I can’t say I’m impressed. It’s not the graphics - they seemed pretty decent actually; the game does a good job of conveying the sense of the period and creating a reasonably populated world. My main problem is that I found myself fighting against the control scheme most of the time. Mouse and keyboard control is really fiddly - I had to fuck around with the orientation of my character just to get him to answer a phone - and some keys just don’t do what they’re supposed to. There’s this cool character-sensitive combat system where you can throw people against walls, bang their heads off nearby objects, etc, but I couldn’t get any of it to work properly. It’s a big exercise in frustration. I suspect this all works somewhat better with a gamepad, so I think I’ll just put this on hold until the 360 version comes out and try that.

My biggest issue though is how blatantly derivative the gameplay is. It really is just GTA with an old-school gangster wrapper (no pun intended) put over it. From the major gameplay mechanics all the way down to the little touches, I haven’t yet encountered anything that isn’t lifted wholesale from Rockstar. I think that’s pretty outrageous. They really didn’t think that, having spent so much money on the license, it was worth maybe trying to come up with an original design to go along with it?

an old-school gangster wrapper (no pun intended)

Nice!

I haven’t yet encountered anything that isn’t lifted wholesale from Rockstar.

Hey, what about Mobface?

Seriously, though, isn’t the extortion stuff unique? Not really well done, but certainly unique.

-Tom

I’m getting a bit tired of the whole create-your-face stuff. But then, I was never much into it to begin with. Once the X360 camera comes out and you can start mapping your face onto your avatar, that will be cool. But as it stands, I usually just pick the default face. That’s what I did for my Godfather character, “Gazlioni.”

The extortion stuff is basically smashing things up until the meter reaches a certain level, yes? I kinda like that idea and suspect there’s a bit more finesse to it as the game goes on. But it still feels like just a minor tweak added to a design otherwise lifted lock stock and barrel from the GTA franchise. I don’t mind playing this kind of game again (I anxiously await news of the next-gen GTA), but it just seems like real bare-faced cheek to shoplift an entire game design so entirely. I haven’t been this shocked by such a brazen design theft since Simpsons Road Rage.

That, and it just seems like a really cheap and cynical move to deploy a second-hand design in service of such a prestigious license. Is EA becoming the Fox of the videogame industry? Waiting for someone else to innovate with a hit format before rolling out their own clone?