"This game clearly had so much work put into it"

Mafia III is just the latest example of this, but I've noticed that I have a tendency to go soft on something or even forgive some creative missteps if I feel that the object has had a lot of work put into it, and I'm wondering why that is. This is more common with games and especially ones with bigger budgets as they tend to involve teams of dozens, sometimes even hundres of people all working very long hours giving their blood, sweat, and tears to the project. Mafia III is a great example of this because it took people no time at all to see that certain aspects of the game had less time in the fire than others (cough cough mission designs cough) and I know enough about game development and corporate culture from my own experience to realize that sometimes you just don't have enough time to everything you want with a particular game, and that's the normal case. The best studios are the ones that can hide the crunch and stick the landing with a mostly complete, hassle-free experience - smile for the cameras, in other words. Their hard work clearly paid off, but what about the Mafia III's of the world? It's impossible to say for sure, but I doubt most of the people at Hangar 13 were just phoning it in and I find myself struggling to figure how to quantify that as I think about the game.

Take Shadow Warrior 2, for example. It released to mostly positive reviews (more positive than Mafia III), comes from a respected developer/publisher team, and is, as far as the ten or so hours I've got in it indicate, a pretty solid game. It's also far, far less ambitious or big as Mafia III or even something like Far Cry 4, so it's.. weird for me. The obvious conclusion is just that Mafia III  didn't utilize the man hours put into it as effectively as Shadow Warrior 2 did, but it does so in such a strung-out, running-on-fumes way that it's tough to tell what they thought were the strong points of the game (narrative, setting). Shadow Warrior 2 is a great little game, but it's undeniably little, hollow, like a carnival game - there's no distant anticipation of narrative payoff or using systems to illustrate a point about the real world. Mafia III is a very long ways from perfect and probably even a long ways from excellent even, but I can't help but feel in my gut that just trying to build something like that with such a commitment to fidelity and setting is admirable even in the failure-case. If Mafia III's storyline was some sort of zenith of the genre (No Country for Old Men) than all would be forgiven and I could put this all to rest. But the fact that all this work, time and money was sunk into telling such a dyed-in-the-wool revenge story makes me wonder if it was all worth it in the end. Does it even deserve respect as a suck cost? I think so. Even in the end, with all it's problems, there are enough small glimmers of real honesty and emotion buried inside that pushes the balance into the black. But damn if that margin isn't thin.

Mafia III

The Mafia series never seemed to be able to catch the big break it seemed due for. Despite winning over critics and a small but jealously protective cult audience over the course of two titles - Mafia in 2000 and a loose sequel Mafia II in 2010 - development was never simple, with runaway feature creep, unreliable tech foundations, and a cumulative ten years of delay spent working on just these two games (a staggering amount of time nowadays, in the time of the two-year AAA development cycle) all resulted in games that, while certainly being impressive, especially on the technical side, never lived up to their Icarus ambitions. Six years on past Mafia II's release and with the freshly formed supergroup studio Hangar 13 at the wheel, Mafia III is able to coast over the potholes created by a foundation of rote mechanics into the sunset on the rock-solid tires of its narrative.

One of the biggest strengths of the Mafia series is immersion, which is not something you see developers really push for in large open-world titles. Minute daily tasks like actually working on your car yourself in Mad Max or cleaning your weapons in Far Cry are generally not part of the simulation boundaries, for better or for worse, but Mafia games bucked that trend by focusing (frequently to the detriment of larger narrative and gameplay elements) on the tiny details that really ground you in their worlds. Your character in Mafia II is not some legendary mercenary or chosen warrior - he's just a guy. A guy who likes to eat food, buy clothes, answer the phone and have long unskippable conversations, put gas in his car, and say "fuck" over two hundred times by the end of story. He can't really regenerate his health or take much damage before buying the farm so you kind of have to be careful, he can't run very fast, and he gets pulled over by the cops and given bullshit tickets just like anyone else. And that's great! Participating in all of those small chores and getting to know his limitations was a huge part of selling the idea of this protagonist Vito as being an actual person in this world, and having rules about how the game world worked made it seem like a real, actual place that at least kind of made sense sometimes.

Mafia III wisely continues (mostly) in this vein and Hangar 13 clearly wanted you to feel like protagonist Lincoln wasn't just some blank-faced killing machine: police react to you (slightly) differently depending on what area of the city - a fictionalized portmanteau of New Orleans known as New Bordeaux - you're currently in, and will respond to calls in low-income and minority neighborhoods slower than to disturbances in the more gentrified areas. People on the street will say hello to you and in what is probably my favorite detail in the whole game, Lincoln will actually answer them. He'll beat his hands on the dash if you tune the radio to a song he likes, he has real relationship history with characters you encounter and doesn't get along with all of them, and is aggressively pursued by police in a way that other NPCs aren't, which ties into the game's supposed preoccupation with institutionalized racism. Like Vito before him, Lincoln actually feels like a real person, mostly.  The almost simulation-ist details from Mafia II - the restaurants, clothing stores, gas stations, etc., are brought back in form only, denying you any opportunity to take a breather from your long, long list of dudes to kill to grab a bite to eat, buy some new threads, or really just exist in the world of New Bourdeaux as a person. Shops and diners now exist only as containers for collectibles or as free stops to grab a quick health pack from before driving to your next mission, which... kind of accomplishes the same thing, just in a less interactive way.

Interaction in the greater open world has been replaced with a much bigger emphasis on actual meat-and-potatoes gameplay, which revolves around taking down the criminal rackets of each district of the city. 10 districts, 2 rackets per district, ranging from extortion and bribery to construction fraud and organized auto theft. The unique nature of each racket is tempered by the similarity of the objectives you'll complete to trash them: interrogate some guys, slaughter a couple of small groups of guys (usually guarding something emblematic of that racket, like a warehouse full of stolen cars or a brothel) and destroy some stuff, and keep doing it until you trigger the racket's "stronghold" mission, which involves infiltrating a building and killing all the bad guys inside it, like a railyard used to stash guns.The high quality of the animations and the general beefiness of the combat coupled with the sandbox nature of the encounters allows for a bit of emergent gameplay to emerge, but it's unfortunately much too simple too cruise up and indiscriminately ventilate most of these guys without having to put much thought into it. Even on the highest difficulty enemies exhibit some pretty generous nearsightedness at odds with their Terminator-like aiming abilities, making it way too easy to get the drop on them, especially considering Lincoln isn't exactly built for stealth with his jeans and Army jacket getup.

Your willingness to experiment with the tools Mafia III provides will be a big part of whether you joyfully proceed through the districts or trudge with heavy feet. There's a large selection of handguns, shotguns, and rifles to play with as well as some upper-tier special weapons not available until you finish around 2/3s of the game, but the lack of variety in the enemy types coupled with the limited ammo capacity you begin with encourage brutal efficiency over playfulness. It took me about 30 hours to complete the game and for the last 10 of those the remaining objectives felt like a tax I had to pay to make it to the next cutscene. Maybe I'm just burned out on open world games at this point after spending so much time with Mad Max but the prospect of replaying Mafia III right now only seems enticing to see how the story turns out after favoring other characters.

Like previous games in the series Mafia III lives and dies by it's narrative, and thankfully the one presented here is an absolutely magnetic period piece. The game begins with a lengthy tutorial segment that pulls double duty as the setup for rest of the plot, introducing you to major players like Sal Marcano (the game's antagonist), his son Giorgi, and Lincoln's surrogate family in Sammy and Ellis Robinson, de facto leaders of a small blue collar district known as The Hollow. You're introduced to the game's mechanics at the same as the story is ramping up into the inciting incident that informs the rest of the game, and it's easily the best part of the game next to the last hour. The writing has an honest, intimate quality to it that lends the characters a true-to-life quality that makes them endlessly watchable (and since this is 1968 pretty much everyone is either drinking or smoking 100% of the time). There are no twists. There are no surprise betrayals. There is no bullshit. We the players simply propel Lincoln Clay along his course as he channels Anton Chigurh and delivers cold, systematic death to Sal Marcano's operations. It would be a lie to say it isn't gripping as hell to watch, or cathartic. The extended length of time spent coming to grips with Sammy and Ellis make their deaths at least slightly more impactful than usual and the weirdly few real, actual cutscenes are very well done, it's just disappointing when get about 6 hours into it and realize that, well... this is it.

An open, lifeless world. Hilariously repetitive missions and gameplay, coupled with some of the most inoffensive, boring AI I've experienced since Far Cry 3. Playboy collectibles in a game "about" racism in the Deep South in 1968 (really). Side missions seemingly designed to elicit religious levels of boredom and a distinct scent of "not finished" hanging over the entire experience. Any yet, a simple narrative that clearly had so much work put into it, and is surprisingly affecting at times, occasionally dragging itself out of a pit of genre conventions and cliches to stand on its own as a real piece of art. Mafia III is a lot of things to a lot people and I don't regret the time I spent with it, but God damn if it bums me out seeing the potential they had with this.

Edit on racism: This is probably the biggest disappointment with Mafia III as it is a game "about" racism as much as Bioshock is a game "about" Objectivism. As a combat trained Special Forces vet with access to basically unlimited money and transportation (while being somehow immune to traffic laws), Lincoln is elevated above the mundane institutionalized bigotry that people in real life and even other characters in the game experience. It's hard to feel persecuted by a random NPC's snide comment when you can just blow his head off and immediately call off the cops for a nominal fee, and it's hard to instill a sense of vulnerability or world-weariness when the actual game seems so afraid of actually impacting your experience. Taken more charitably, you could say that the developers worked to minimize the impacts racism would have on the minute-to-minute gameplay in order to anesthetize you to its presence and consider it as just another aspect of the world, like the architecture or people's accents. And while that is an interesting target to shoot for, Mafia III suffers more than any game I've played in a long, long time from being made in our age of "gameplay and story" should be separate. Just makes you imagine how it would've turned out if someone like Clint Hocking had been leading Mafia III's development instead.

Mafia III First Impressions

I'm nearly twenty hours into this thing so I figure now is a good time to take a minute to write down some of my thoughts. Coming off of Mad Max, maybe the most well-optimized game I've ever played, Mafia III hasn't exactly knocked my socks off and everyone and their dog was putting the developers on blast for releasing a game that manages to run distinctly less-well than you'd think a game of this graphical caliber would. I'm not going to get into all that stuff here but suffice it to say that it ran decidedly poorly on my system initially, and after the patch it runs... better. Not Mad Max level smoothness but a definite improvement, so performance-wise at least things are alright.

The real meat and potatoes of this game is the story, and so far I've been impressed by the writing. The first hour of the game in particular is a really, really effective tutorial/plot hook setup and the way the story is being told in the past-tense through a kind of documentary and archival footage has kept me interested so far. Open world games tend to be terrible at this kind of thing with all of their faceless quest-dispensers but it's obvious that the developers tried to give these secondary characters at least a modicum of life, and it's very much appreciated since the main thrust of the narrative is pretty straight-ahead: revenge. Combined with juggling the loyalties of your capos (which I thought was introduced a little late actually) and I'm really looking forward to seeing how it all turns out.

The gameplay at its base level is pretty repetitive, as every district I've tackled so far has followed a similar template of progression: talk to an NPC, get some objectives that pretty much always involve killing dudes in certain locations, interrogate a certain enemy to reveal a bigger objective in the area and take it down to flush out one of the district mini-bosses. You do this twice for each district before taking down the leader of that district in a special, unique mission that have so far been pretty good. This type of stuff can really get old if you aren't someone who likes "making your own fun" and messing around with the sandbox of the game world, so buyer beware. As someone who spent hours fucking around with the outposts in Far Cry games I'm naturally predisposed towards enjoying this kind of stuff and the raw game feel of the gunplay and cover system go a long way towards keeping things from turning too stale as they're pretty great. The AI is mostly pretty blind but on the highest difficulty you're easy enough to kill that there's at least some tension in combat. Oh, and the soundtrack is incredible - lots of great period music and some almost Red Dead Redemption level soundtrack material, but the main menu sells Mafia III hard: a sunset over the bayou as Jimi Hendrix's "All Along the Watchtower" blasts out at you. So far, so good.

Edit: Literally 10 minutes after starting the game up for the first time after writing this I get a watch a great cutscene ruined by one of the character's eyeballs being apparently replaced with giant black shark eyes. Then I got trapped in an infinite loading screen. Nice.

Mafia III: Overexposure

Mafia III is due to release in a couple of days and I find myself kind of amazed at the amount of preview material available for it. Hours upon hours of gameplay, a wide selection of trailers and short teasers, and two developer-commentated, heavily controlled walkthroughs of pretty significant length, not counting all the social media posts and interviews that have the made the game and its developer Hangar 13 their subject. The frankly overwhelming amount of raw gameplay released (seems like everyone Youtuber and their dog got some hands-on time with it) gives potential buyers a much more informed picture of what the game is actually like than is usually offered for high-profile releases like this. In the wake of No Man's Sky-gate it's refreshing to see a tentpole release like this being clearly and plainly marketed by the publisher and to have so much of the actual minute-to-minute interactions showcased for anyone interested.

What's really interesting about this is that the publisher, 2K Games, isn't sending out review copies ahead of time so there won't be any up by the time the game releases on October seventh. People got upset about this as they always do, even though there are hours of gameplay available to watch on Youtube so you can decide if Mafia III looks fun to you or not. I just find it really strange that people place so much stock in professional reviews and would sooner trust some random asshole from IGN over their own personal judgement. Is it possible that the game comes out and is actually a total bomb? Of course. Watch_Dogs released as an ugly, bug-ridden mess and it went on to sell incredibly well in spite of that (or its story, characters, themes, gameplay, etc.), so it even working on a technical level isn't a sure thing. It's totally possible the game is buggy as hell and boring as shit, but from the ads I've seen - I mean "gameplay videos" - it looks like I'll enjoy this one. If you find yourself worrying about what review scores a game gets so you'll know if you should buy it or not, you really need to ask yourself: Why is that I trust the system (IGN/Gamespot/Polygon/Kotaku) over my own personal opinions and judgement? If you can't even decide which piece of media to consume because one got a 7.8 from Polygon and the other got a 8.1 from Gamespot and everyone knows that Polygon is a bunch of SJWs who knock games down for not having trans options for the protagonist, then Houston, we have a problem.

OSI - Fire Make Thunder

2009's Blood saw OSI iterate on their sound with some noticeable progress towards a fully blended mix of electronica and prog riffing. The groups hopefully-only-temporarily final recording as of this writing, Fire Make Thunder dropped in 2012 to sweep away all doubts that the group was done evolving by delivering their most crystallized sound yet.

Forgoing the use of any guest musicians or vocalists for the first time, Fire Make Thunder again sees Jim Matheos handling guitars, Kevin Moore providing lyrics and keyboards, and Gavin Harrison taking on drumming. Written in the same back-and-forth long distance fashion as the previous OSI records, what stands out about this album right from minute 1 is how rich and vibrant it sounds in comparison to Blood. Moore seems much more present vocally on these tracks as he drones out some of the best lyrics he's penned yet on "Invisible Men" and "From Nothing" while Matheos' playing is taken to another level thanks to the roomier production and less overtly electronic sounds found here, which had a tendency to obscure his picking. With less effects layers to take up headroom, his riffs are finally able to sit up straight in the driver's seat and hit the gas, as testified to by the opening crunch of "Cold Call", basically the entirety of "Enemy Prayer", which might be in the top five best instrumentals of all time, and his David Gilmour tribute in the second half of "Invisible Men". His bass lines have improved as well and the interplay between him and Harrison's drumming seems much more familiar and confident than what was found on Blood. Individually the songs still mostly alternate between Matheos' gorilla sized riff emporiums and Moore's samples and quite pieces but their is a unity of composition here that elevates the material noticeably beyond what they achieved with Blood or Free, for that matter - "Wind Won't Howl" starts off as textbook Moore electronica before gradually building into a full-forced climax once Harrison and Matheos join in to bring the song home. "Guards" is a teetering house of cards built on a skittering drum sample and an almost funk synth line by Moore before Matheos enters after the chorus. The closing track "Invisible Men" wraps the disc up by combining all the elements of OSI into one lengthy piece that makes "ShutDOWN" look like it was written by Twitch: Moore's lyrics and atmospheric keyboard work combine like never before until Matheos brings the thunder, and the song shifts into a Lynchian groove that recalls Pink Floyd at their best.

Matheos and Harrison's renewed vigor is confidently matched by Moore. Whether he's chopping up and distorting a drum beat for the into to "Big Chief II", delivering some crushingly dark lyrics in a near whisper in "For Nothing", or applying his talent for crafting atmosphere in the haunting synths of "Invisible Men" and "Indian Curse", he steps up to the plate and really adds that special ingredient to Fire Make Thunder that sets it apart from the rest of their catalog. "Warm" or "Hot" were never words anyone would use to describe OSI's music, but the spark of life visible throughout all of Fire Make Thunder adds a human element that Blood was missing. With this album they finally achieved the aural synchronization they've been striving for ever since Office of Strategic Influence. We can only hope they'll be able to build off Fire Make Thunder's success and deliver an even greater follow up.

B+