Mafia II
After like six months, I’m finally playing a game that I got through GameFly, and I’m not disappointed in my decision, because Mafia II is not as bad as I thought it would be. It does a lot of things that sandboxes do, although it’s a lot more linear, with your mission being pretty straight forward in each chapter. The controls are a bit clunky, and the dialogue isn’t edited correctly, but it does offer a really intriguing story, and twists in a way that I was not expecting.
The story tells about the slow rise of Vito Scarletta, who is back from the war on disability and is suddenly sucked into a life of crime because a real job is just too much boring bullshit. It’s an odd motivation, that he becomes a criminal mainly because he didn’t want to do a real job. I guess he also needed to raise a lot of money really quickly to appease loan sharks that were bothering his family, but that almost seems like a throwaway excuse.
I played for a good many hours, including having to redo a mission after I had technically completed it because I accidently ran into a streetlamp at 80 miles per hour. It gets into a nice rhythm after a while, although I’m amazed how long I’ve played and Vito is not actually in the mafia yet.
There is a cool moment where Vito’s taken out on the town by his obligatory fat friend, and after the fat friend and another guy get very drunk, Vito starts driving home, only for the other guy to remember, “Oh darn, I forgot there’s a corpse in my trunk.” So as the only sober one, Vito has to drive to the woods and bury the body all by himself, while the other two act drunk. After Vito cleans up the mess, he starts driving home and a Dean Martin song comes on the radio. They scream at Vito not to change the channel, and start drunkenly warbling along. It is hilarious, and it feels very natural. It’s probably the funniest moment in a sandbox game I’ve ever seen, because it doesn’t feel forced.
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