PC Mafia: The City of Lost Heaven

Korben_Dallas

Zwame Advisor
"Illusion Softworks has been working on their 1930's gangster action game Mafia: The City of Lost Heaven for quite some time but until just a few days ago they and the game's publisher Gathering of Developers have been operating under a press cone of silence (the game wasn't even shown at last May's E3 show). However, Mafia is finally close to being completed and is scheduled to be released to store at the end of this month. HomeLAN got a chance to chat with the lead designer of the game Daniel Vavra to find out more about their plans for Mafia.


HomeLAN - Why do you think gangsters and organized crime continue to attract an audience?

Daniel Vavra - I don’t think basic low profile killers or criminals are special people. But there’s a certain level of freedom that mob bosses enjoy. They do what they like, they are independent of the system - they break the rules. No one gives them orders, they are the ones who direct and control the world around them. It seems like a very attractive life, but it definitely has a dark side. It is dangerous and people around you may not like it. You may gain everything, but you can also lose everything. Our game shows what life in the Mafia in the 1930’s was like. We are creating a game about gangsters as they really were. Our goal is to make something fresh, original, innovative and enjoyable. We are not trying to use any gaming clichés, and we want to make it as historically correct and enjoyable as we can.




HomeLAN - How did the actual idea for Mafia come about?

Daniel Vavra - The development of Mafia started before Hidden and Dangerous was finished. Illusion Softworks had a brand new team of people in house, and we wanted to create something new, something that will make people get really excited at the mere concept of the game. After some pretty long brainstorming sessions the team were not sure what kind of game it should be - and then, one night, I dreamt of my favorite movies – “Heat,” “Millers Crossing,” “Ronin” and “Goodfellas.” The next day at work, I explained the concept of Mafia -- thirties setting, lots of driving and shooting, one huge interactive city -- everybody liked it. Today we are the verge of delivering something more ambitious, immersive and powerful than just another game we have all already played.



HomeLAN - Did you do any research into the real mafia for use in the game?

Daniel Vavra - Yes, I read a lot of non-fiction books, and watched lots of movies. I was very surprised when I read about what the mafia did during this era. In the 30’s they caused a state of emergency in Chicago and regularly fought with the army in the streets. I couldn’t believe something like that really happened in the civilized world.

We also collected a large volume of literature, photos, and movies on architecture, period clothing, and automobiles in the 1930’s. Buildings used in our towns have been created according to originals and architectural styles of the period; we took photographs of period costumes. Our archives hold several thousand photos. We studied as many gangster movies as possible including the ones made during the forties, such as “Angels with Dirty Faces.” Our designers also read quite a large volume of factual literature.



HomeLAN - What is the storyline in the single player game?

Daniel Vavra - One regular guy gets into a war between two Mafia families. The game follows the life and fortunes of a young taxi driver, Tommy, whose taxi is taken over by a gang of runaway mobsters chased by their enemies. Tommy manages, thanks to his exceptional driving skills, to shake off the pursuers. Consequently, he is offered the job as a driver for Salieri family who controls the gangsters he saved. He initially refuses but when the pursuers find him, destroy his taxi, and nearly kill him in revenge, he reconsiders the offer and accepts the job. The game follows his fortunes in the Family. Tommy narrates the entire story in retrospective.



HomeLAN - What sorts of levels and settings are being created for Mafia?

Daniel Vavra - We have the huge city, plus many real world interiors including a bank, a harbor, an airport, a farm, a motel, a hotel and a church.



HomeLAN - What kinds of weapons will be in the game?

Daniel Vavra - All weapons used in the game are real, with characteristics that are as close as possible to actual weapons (range and rapidity of fire). There are a lot of different guns and rifles, plus some cool weapons including Tommy guns, Colt 1911s, sawed off shotguns, sniper rifles or knuckledusters.



HomeLAN - What are some of the characters that the player will meet and battle in Mafia?

Daniel Vavra - Corrupted politicians, police, gangs of hooligans, bosses of other families, even some ex friends. You can’t rely on anybody around you.



HomeLAN - There has been a lot made of the game's vehicles. How are cars integrated into the gameplay and how hard was it to put in this feature?

Daniel Vavra - It was very hard. We have lot of cars and very realistic physics. It’s not easy to set up everything to be fun and realistic. Cars are integrated very simply – when you want to get somewhere, you have to use car. When you do something wrong, you have to escape in a car. When somebody tries to escape in a car, you have to chase him in another car. There is also simulated street traffic in the city, supervised by the police. Players can also travel by trams and elevated railroad.




HomeLAN - What other gameplay feature do you feel are unique to Mafia?

Daniel Vavra - The thing I like about Mafia is that it doesn’t use a gangster theme to imitate another action shooter with thousands of enemies. Of course sometimes there is more action than there would be in real life, but mostly you are performing real tasks in the real world. It all feels like a regular story usually used in action games. When two people talk, they talk, they don’t just spit mission objectives at you. When something happens, there is a reaction and it does not include gun shooting every time. I hope that we created a believable environment and believable characters.



HomeLAN - What other important features are in the engine being used for Mafia?

Daniel Vavra - Building the huge city and cars, indoor missions and movie sequences were very tough. I hope that we were successful with making the huge city and making the outdoor missions look really good. We had to tweak it a lot to make it happen. The terrain of the city itself has around 100,000 polygons. There are over 15,000 models in the city not including all the pedestrians and cars. We had to fit this into memory and make it run. All the other graphic effects were really simple after that experience.



HomeLAN - Are there any plans for a demo to the game?

Daniel Vavra - No, there are no plans right now - we’ll have to revisit this when the game is launched. It's hard to find a section of the game that will do the whole thing justice and give people an idea of the scope of the game.



HomeLAN - What is the current status of the game's progress?

Daniel Vavra - This game is on target to hit stores by the end of August.



HomeLAN - Finally, is there anything else you wish to say about Mafia?

Daniel Vavra - Don’t try this at home kids!"
fonte: homelandfed.com

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Aí está mais um jogo que promete bastante... e que supostamente sai no final deste mês :)
 
Preview IGN:

"Due to circumstances, some need for refinement, and scheduling issues, Mafia (minus the La Cosa Nostra now) had its release date pushed back. Enough back that they weren't about to tell us when the game was actually going to be released. The publishers would say nothing about it. We would say, "Yous guys gotta tell us about this game, see?" And they would say, "No." Which of course would be followed by our, "Mnyah, see!" comeback. Of course neither our horrible gangster speak nor the horses heads we sent in the mail as "presents" could convince them to tell us how the game was progressing. All we could get was halfway confirmation that it was progressing. Then we received a letter one day from a reader saying they saw Mafia's release date as August 27, 2002 on our own damn gamestore... so we moved our tactics from mafia cliches to constant whining and nagging. I guess annoyance works a little better because they've finally let the cat out of the bag. Gathering of Developers brought a version of the game by to show us how its looking and even let me get behind the controls and slip into the persona of Tommy, a lowly cabbie that just happened to be in the right place at the right time.

Tommy was just a regular guy with the regular dreams and a regular life. He was a cab driver wishing that he didn't have to work for a living (making me instantly relate to him, the sorry sod). The beginning of the story has him pulling over and taking a fateful smoke break. Meanwhile, a few streets away, the soldiers of the mafia families in Lost Heaven are having a little bit of an argument. Instead of flinging insults and words around, they're flinging bullets and driving like maniacs through the streets. While Tommy is leaning against his car, the mobsters on the losing end of the argument crash their car and run from the scene, right into Tommy and his cab. Through a little gun toting persuasion, the chase begins anew and this time Tommy's behind the wheel.

Immediately you're dropped behind the controls of Tommy's less than agile taxicab with two of the Salieri family mob riding shotgun and the game begins for real. It's now in your hands to escape and deliver both of these men alive. The trick here is, your cab is a pretty crappy car. But rich rewards await if you can drive through Lost Heaven and get your passengers to safety.

And so begins your career and eventual rise to made man in the golden age of gangsters, the depressing as hell 30's. While there are a few games out there that hearken back to these days, Mafia's style of setting players as a singular foot soldier in an ongoing war for control over the seedier side of a Chicago-like city sets it apart. The prohibition was a tough time for all, but a lucrative time for the mob as you'll find out on your rise to the top. But being a gangster isn't exactly all perks. You get shot at an awful lot and when you mess up you get hit in the head with a baseball bat. Around IGN we only use soap in a sock and that hurts a lot... I don't think I'd like the baseball bat.

The time period is brought alive with some amazing model and texture work from the Digital Illusion art team. Everything in this game is amazingly detailed, colorful, and has almost a washed out sort of feel you get when you think of the 30's. It'll instantly remind you of gangster flicks like The Untouchables. All characters wear the right clothes, the 60 classic cars you'll find in the game are all faultlessly modeled, the music and background noise is appropriate to the time (and very well done), and the attitude and personality of the characters in reflects that awesome 30's gangster mystique.

After giving a quick tour of the game, I pushed my way in front of the controls because I couldn't take just sitting by and watching someone else play anymore. Before too long, I had Tommy running and gunning. Controls are easy enough to learn for anybody that's played a game before, and probably some that haven't. Use the arrow keys to move around (or remap to WASD like a normal person) and the mouse to look and fire. Double tapping strafe keys cause you to do a roll dodge while crouching will give you cover and allow you to aim a little easier.

Mafia is all 3rd-person perspective, much like the recent May Payne, and the camera looks to work just about as well. When your back is to a wall and the camera would normally cause you fits, you'll see Tommy go transparent as the camera moves into first-person. This is the only time you can get into first-person in order to keep the game looking more like a cinematic experience.

And it really is cinematic. From the bit I got to play, cutscenes, both the cinematic ones and the ones that flow within the gameplay, are done very well and add to the excitement quite a bit. They can be pretty surprising sometimes and get the adrenaline and stress level flowing before you actually start into the action. More on those in a second.

The missions themselves are pretty linear, though some do have different solutions. You'll move from objective to objective as you follow the story and climb up the ranks. While the entire city of Lost Heaven has been modeled here, you aren't going to be running around haphazardly like in Grand Theft Auto III. Everything has an overall purpose to the story making the experience much more focused. There will be some opportunity to just wander around the city however, stealing cars, riding the railway, heading out to the countryside, and basically taking a tour. But you aren't going to find any hidden jumps or too many of the extra little things like was in GTA III. The times you'll be able to wander will be when you already have a mission that isn't immediate or under a time limit.

While we skipped around the levels a bit so that I wouldn't be able to understand the story or be able to ruin everything for those that buy the game, I got a really great look at the wide variety of levels in the game. The first I was treated to was actually very near the beginning of the game, before Tommy had really leaped feet first into a life of crime. The guys that were chasing the mobsters that Tommy drove away in his cab, weren't very happy about his involvement in the fiasco. So they decided to pay him a visit for a little payback. Okay, a lot of payback judging by the baseball bat and guns. Seeing as how he's still a cabbie at this point without weapons or any experience fighting gangsters, he quickly realizes his only option is to run like hell. So he breaks away and control comes over to you, and you get to help him run like hell while the bad guys run after you shooting at you the entire time. While you don't have any real active combat in this portion of the game, it was actually quite entertaining and a little stressful trying to escape to the Salieri Bar.

From here we moved on to combat oriented missions. The first was a quick visit to a farm where an illegal whiskey pickup has gone horribly wrong. Shotguns and Tommy Guns (which each have their own quirks and kickback) show up in copius amounts in levels like these and you'll soon be rolling around, hiding behind obstacles and trying like hell to keep from getting shot. The action can get pretty intense at times. Two of these levels in particular that I was able to play were both pretty challenging and a hell of a lot of fun. They take place later on the timeline after Tommy has gained a few ranks. One takes place in a car garage where you go to meet with a whiskey dealer to broker exclusive rights to purchase his merchandise. One of the slick interrupting cutscenes fills in here where your conversation is interrupted by two cars full of rival mob members screaming up and dumping out soldiers with tons of ammo. Bullets start flying all over the place, things start exploding, bodyguards fire back, your mob friends fire back, you're trying not to get killed while taking out the bad guys, and all of this begins and ends with a certain ferocity. It's exciting as hell and a whole bunch of fun.

Another takes place in a restaurant as you sit with Don Salieri. Enemy gangsters roll up with their guns in tow peppering the place with bullets and even toss a grenade in. After the initial barrage (in which quite a few innocents got in the way) Salieri instructs you to try to get out the back and flank them while he holds down the burning restaurant. After getting behind them a brutal firefight incurs. The trick here is, they will kill the Don if you take too long to wipe out the enemies. It's a tricky mission and one where you'll definitely feel the need to dispense a whole lot of violence really quickly.

Some levels will require a little more sneaking and thought then the run and gun levels, meaning you'll have to be careful about what you're holding. Your coat can hide one large weapon (like a shotgun or Tommy Gun) and a couple of pistols. More than that and they'll be in your hand for everyone to see. If you haven't noticed, guns tend to scare people a teeny bit. Having people running around screaming gun won't help your situation. One level in particular gives you the care of a locksmith as you try to break into a rival Don's mansion and steal some papers. Not only will you have to sneak and try not to be seen, but you'll need to protect the locksmith so he can break into the house and the safe with you. Gunfire is unacceptable here, as guards will come running, so a bat and a good follow through are your best friends. Of course, not everything always works out the way it was planned to. Then there's the puzzlish levels like one where you're on a steamboat to assassinate a VIP. You'll first have to figure out where he is, where the gun that's hidden for you on the boat is, and how to get him out of his room. After all of that, you still have to be able to take him out with only a few bullets in your gun and armed bodyguards everywhere on board and escape via a lifeboat afterwards. Good stuff.

On the levels with random people in them, which is most of the levels, you'll be able to talk to each of them by running up and clicking the right mouse button, which is your default activation key. (This also allows you to pick up items on the ground.) They'll all have something different to say and often have a few different things to say. Actually finding the right people to talk to also makes a difference to getting through some of the levels successfully.

Some of the missions, or their submissions, will require some driving skills as well. One bank heist mission involves you robbing and then trying to escape from the police. You'll get to choose your own getaway car (I unfortunately was stuck with the crappy taxi thanks to a developer joke) for the heist so you better choose a fast one. The cops have some of the best cars in the game and aren't afraid to ram you off the road. All cars take damage and will eventually cease to function. Tires can be shot out, bullet holes appear from shots, and scratches and dents appear during driving. No matter where you are in the car, you can always hang out the window and take a few shots back at your enemies as well.

The 60 different cars vary from Model A crap boxes to the fast and furious race cars of the day that can get up to a whopping 100 mph. It may not seem like much, but handling on these things wasn't exactly like today's Ferraris so those speeds are pretty excessive. At least you'll have a map of the city with a X marking where you're supposed to get to in these missions. There'll be shortcuts to take as well, but if all else fails, following the map will get you where you need to go.

If you're being followed by the cops, you can always try to hide as well. Your wanted level will slowly decrease over time until the police have forgotten you just robbed a bank and murdered 20 people. Often times, you'll also have to employ some slick driving skills to keep your partners alive. Cops aren't shy about throwing bullets your way and they'll go through the windows and into your buddies, if you're not careful, meaning you lose the mission.

For having been out of the public eye for so long, and not totally in it for a long while before that, Mafia's comeback into the spotlight is well appreciated. It looks really good and from the hour and a half I had with it, plays well too. If the story turns out to be as well orchestrated as they claim, this may turn out to be one of those must haves for the PC this year. Gathering of Developers is telling us the end of August for release and our gamestore still says the 27th, so expect this one to hit gold soon and hit stores around that date. Make sure to keep you eyes open for the announcements."
fonte: ign.com
 
"Take 2 have confirmed that the game has gone gold. Looks like it's going to be released on September 6th."

Afinal o lançamento foi adiado ?
 
já o tenho

Para quem gostou da série o padrinho chegou o substituto do GTA3: Mafia: The City of Lost Heaven


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mais screens aqui:
http://mafia.godgames.com/main.html


Posso dizer que o jogo é viciante, só tem um pequeno problema, para o ppl que está habituado no GTA3 a sair e entrar em carros como quem muda de roupa, aqui vão ter a vida um pouco mais dificultada pois o inicialmente nós não temos o conhecimento de como "entrar" em determinado veiculo, esse conhecimento vai sendo adquirido, outra coisa para aqueles que pensam que isto é o GTA que é entrar e andar, aqui terão de por o carro em funcionamento e só depois podem seguir viagem, operação por vezes irritante.
De resto o jogo tem missões bastante variadas e que até agora não fartam e não se tornam monotonas.
The range of missions is enormous. The first mission is a classic car chase, while in another the player, together with a safe-cracker, has to enter the closely guarded villa of a public prosecutor unobserved and steal important evidence. Then there is an assassination assignment where Tom, armed with a revolver loaded with six bullets, has to publicly execute someone giving a party aboard a pleasure steamer packed with revellers. On another occasion, Tom finds himself caught in the crossfire of a shootout between two rival gangs in a huge parking lot and, being Salieri's best hitman, he has to race in place of an injured racing driver. And - of course - he has to collect 'protection' money.
in: http://www.mafia-game.com/missions.htm
 
Já joguei um bocado, e o jogo é excelente...

Mas há um ou outro aspecto onde podiam melhorar um pouco. A inteligência artificial dos inimigos podia ser melhor...

Termos de andar sempre até aos 60 km/h é um pouco frustante. E os polícias são autênticos radares ambulantes. Um gajo passa 2 km/h acima do limite e já tá a levar com eles em cima.

De resto o jogo é muito bom. Gráficos excelentes, boa jogabilidade, uma história envolvente, até cenas mais picantes tem... parece um filme.

E aquela musiquinha de fundo é muito porreira :)
 
Mafia

Definitivamente um dos melhores jogos que eu ja vi...

Joguei :D
Historia fantastica, com graficos fantasticos, trailers fantasticos....tem uma aproximação do gta3 mas na minha opiniao melhor...definitivamente espectacular.

Se gostar de espancar mafiosos com um taco de baseball então este jogo ira ser sem duvida um dos teus preferidos :D

Para mim, sem duvida alguma um dos candidatos a jogo do ano....leva 9.7 em 10

E é muito mais acessivel graficamente do que o gta3 :)
 
Última edição pelo moderador:
Originally posted by MarcoWWE
Eu joguei esse na Dreamcast, aquela parte do gajo que se quer suicidar ta linda. :-D

O jogo estava excelente... é daquelas raridades em q tu pegas passado 5 anos e continua divertido como sempre. A versão PSX teve péssimas críticas porque o port da versão PC acho que foi um bocado mal feito. A versão DC tb dizem mal do port mas acho que estava suficiente boa para apreciar o grande jogo que é!
 
Pois o jogo deve tar mesmo excelente,mas infelizmente não o tenhu!Como é k voces arranjam isso?Ainda por cima era um optimo jogo pra minha TI4600

:)
 
Eh pah, n costumo fazer isto, mas n encontro walkthroughs do jogo e o meu medo é q tenha dado algum erro, mas se alguém me puder ajudar agraceco, na missão, salvo erro 15, "Lucky Bastard", onde temos q matar lá o Sergio não-sei-que, isto passa-se na parte do porto, onde matamos uns 500 gajos, mesmo à rambo, agora nao é encontro é mesmo o tal Sergio, alguem me pode dar uma ajudita?
 
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