Mafia - PC

I remember when I played Mafia a few years back, it was the most awesome game I've ever played! Fantastic story plot, great game-play, never a boring moment, just kept coming back for more! The story was so good, it was like watching a movie, but your "In" the movie. The story even made me cry in certain parts it was so emotional. I was talking to a friend about this game awhile back, then I said, "Man, I'm gonna order it tomorrow, just so I can play it again!" Order Mafia, you won't regret it! NOTE: Make sure your computer will run the game, since it's an old game, it might not work on modern computers. I have windows vista, but I was able to "hack" the game to make it work smoothly.

This game is a lot of fun. I actually purchased it after playing it at my moms. But does not play on Vista! And can actually really mess with your computer if you try. My computer was only a week old and it really scared me that I messed it up bad, but was I able to fix it and put it in my older computer. Plays great on XP. I am not a huge gamer, but still have played a few and really liked the old time feel to it and I like that you don't have to be a great gamer to play it. You do need the joy stick though for best fun. It is great for a little challenge without being impossible to play and you can choose to just Taxi around or get involved in the game. I understand a new version will be coming out in 2009 and look forward to it for my Vista.

One, you must drive everywhere, frequently from one side of the massive city to the other. This is fun at first and later quite tiresome. Two, many missions consist of multiple objectives with no opportunity to save progress in between. If you die at any point you have to undertake the mission from the beginning. You'll find yourself driving the same route over and over only to face the same obstacles again and again. This can be frustrating. Overall, however, this game stands head and shoulders above the rest. It develops as a story into which you are slowly drawn --- believable, intriguing, and exciting. Even the frustrating aspects lend themselves to making you cheer out loud when you finally complete a difficult objective. This is a game to savor, although you probably won't want to play it more than once. For ten bucks it doesn't get much better than this.

I had this game before and played it so much that it broke inside of the drive.

This game tuyrned out to be a different game than what I was expecting. I must have gotten my information mixed up. What a great surprise. I really enjoyed this game, once I learned the keyboard commands. I am only about half way through, and they keep surprising me with new things. This game is a joy to play.

I just picked up Mafia -- more than 7 years after its release -- mostly because of the positive ratings (more on this later). If you can get past the fact that the graphics are dated (although remarkable considering the limitations they worked with) and learn about the game in terms of gameplay alone, read on. First the basics: Mafia tells the story of Thomas Angelo as he joins the ranks of the Salieri 'famiglia' and gains power within their ranks. The story -- which seems to be one of the selling points of the game -- is delivered through twenty multi-staged missions and in-engine cutscenes. The many interactive challenges in each mission are delivered through two distinct gameplay modes: driving and third-person exploration/combat. The third-person mode is the most versatile. From menial work to secret dealings to baseball bat beatings to all-out tommy-gun massacres, this is where the most action will come from. These segments can be pretty challenging: the AI doesn't waste its chances. If you CAN get shot, you WILL get shot; you, in the other hand, will leave lots of bullets in door thresholds as the game misrepresents your line of sight. It's probably too preoccupied with cooking threats -- be it a couple of shotgun-toting goons out of nowhere or a well-placed shooter -- to bother with those pesky details, such as saving your progress. You'll find yourself going back to square one quite time a few times as the game just decides that it's not handing you any more ammo or health refills, and tough luck, here comes yet another trigger-happy batch, freshly teleported from Screwjoo. Every failure (and there will plenty of them) will set you back from twenty minutes to an hour of 'gameplay', and it won't spare you any of the mind-numbing chores that saturate the 'experience'. You will have to go drive all the way there again, talk to guy A and guy B again, search for and fetch C for them (most of the time without knowing precisely what you're looking for or where to begin), and even load boxes into trucks and wipe out puke from a backed out toilet... and it's just as fun as it sounds. Not all of the game is made of tight spots and grunt work, though. You will be doing plenty of driving too: some missions involve vintage car chases (which at 30 mph somehow fail to be the adrenaline pumpers you'd expect), and the miniature city of Lost Haven is big and labyrinthine enough that most of your time will be spent traveling between points A and B. Going any significant distance in these roads (which apparently were designed by M.C. Escher) means a lot going around blocks and finding the entrance points of bridges and tunnels. You can try to cut corners, but policemen and cop cars will show up when least expected to punish you for running that red light or speeding. Lastly, there's also a little circuit racing; here, your main task will be not to engineer those sharp turns in a way that will keep you car from spinning like a top, which is harder than it sounds as the car seems to like it. That about sums it up. Oh, I forget: Mafia has been compared to the GTA titles, but in truth the resemblance is very superficial. It should be likened to the Sims -- Sure, you can roam about and steal another car and victimize random citizens, but it doesn't reward wanton violence the way GTA did. No powerups, no better guns or cars, no cool stuff to be stolen... fuggedaboutit. Veredict: Avoid like the plague. Unless you're a masochist. What should have been a three-hour game was padded into a much larger but radically duller and more frustrating experience. What little genuine fun remained was irrecoverably marred by obtuse, artificial difficulty (stiff controls, the savepoint system) and brain-dead chores. Whether the team ran out of ideas five seconds after development began or they just hate gamers, I don't know. I theorize that the positive reviews given to this game either a) come from a time where much less was expected from games and b) nobody dares tell the emperor that he's naked. Look elsewhere for a genuine vintage thrill; I've heard Max Payne also comes pretty cheap these days.

Decided to check this out in anticipation for Mafia III. Plus it's touted as a classic, big mistake. This game is not meant to be played, it's meant to be watched. You'll find yourself using cheap tricks just to progress. The world is immersive (although the voice acting sucks) which is what kept me going. Overall I wish I would've just watched a lets play of it

I actually bought this game a few years ago and never got around to playing it. I finally opened it up and installed it about a month ago and gave it a ride. Unfortunately, that is all this game really seemed to be for me: a ride. I did not get very far into this game before becoming bored with the constant car driving missions. I am probably not being completely fair to the game, perhaps there was a lot of great action later in the game that did not involve being a taxi service, but I could not stand anymore of it and gave up. I am not a person whom enjoys timed missions; in fact, I find them almost completely useless and very aggravating. Nearly every video game I have ever played that has timed missions gets marked down in my book. Mafia is no exception. I found the graphics to be decent, especially for an older game. I also enjoyed the dialog quite a bit. But I just can not get past the monotonous driving sequences. How many times do I have to taxi some schmuck across town before I can actually do something else??? In my humble opinion, this is a slight knockoff of Max Payne, which is a much better game without the needless driving sequences. I love the whole Mafia storyline, I am just disappointed it didn't play out a little better in the beginning. Overall = Average