TCB

[ Mood: Cool ]
[ Currently: Listening to Satan ]
That’s right, I am an ass ett to the public interest. Not only have I landed the top spot on the sci-ku contest for the past three contests in a row (here, here, and here), but I am also quoted on the main page for Subspace 80s Edition, AAAAAAND, Joe cited me in a news article.

So what am I doing when I’m not carrying this mother of a niche science fiction website? I’m making YTMNDs, playing videogames and working on my abdominal muscles via osmosis. Totally works, bubs. Anyway, in the circumstance of my sudden, violent death, these YTMNDs should be released to the press:

GBI
Bad Places
10 Great Things About America

Beware of the Fight Club moment in that last one at the end.

Also, videogames. After five days of battling it out with the Tattaliglias, Scaramangas, and Donkiokongos, I have become the Don of the Corleone family. I have beaten The Godfather for the X-Box 360, and right when it was starting to become repetitive, boring and frustrating, too.

I can’t say that I can recommend this game if you have already seen the film, or even just the first one. And if you haven’t seen it, this is a good way to get an idea of what the story was all about over a forty hour playing time period. The missions are short and sweet, but they are spread out over a very large, open environment, with confusing assed highways, no off ramps, and a frustrating amount of invisible traffic that doesn’t pop into view until you’re two seconds from smashing into it head on at sixty miles per hour. Just like real life.

As an additional challenge to just getting from point a to point b, there’s how easy it is to get rival families and police pissed off at you. If you gun down a few dozen gang members in the street, their syndicates act like there isn’t an infinite amount of other people to replace them with, which there is. Hell, kill one cop and the entire station falls on your head. This can make a one minute trip cross town to get from one mission to another into fifteen minutes of annoying battles, both with stupid AI and a stupid camera system.

But let’s focus on what’s positive. What’s nice about The Godfather is that a lot of the original cast signed up to do voice work for the game, sans Pacino and Brando. There was a lot of hype that this was Brando’s last project before he died, but the producers deemed his recordings unusable and hired an excellent impersonator instead. I had no idea until I stumbled upon the wiki, the guy was really good. Basically, the best parts of the game are the cut scenes – great character models, great voice work, and your customizable character makes for a very smooth generic avatar. He even gets a few dramatic moments to flex his soap opera acting muscles, too.

The character customization is pretty interesting stuff. You can make your character look like pretty much any white guy you know. Sliding scales for weight and muscle give varying physiques, while the standard hair/face/clothes stuff is there, as well. I made my guy look exactly like Indiana Jones, which, trust me, was funny at the time.

The sandbox gameplay is limited. After the real money starts coming in, there’s little reason to continue to play the game outside of the story and mission mode. You can visit brothels, but all the girls there will remind you of your grandmother, and you can’t actually do anything to them, which is a double whammy. You can also bribe police, but that’s not exactly gonna keep you loading up the disc. You can shake down stores, but it becomes way too easy way too quickly, and again, there’s little point in doing that since all it yields is money, which is all over the place.

The last things to do that pose any fun factor or challenge are assaulting enemy strongholds, and robbing banks and trucks, all of which, again, becomes very repetetive and unrewarding. I’ve tried to take on the same stronghold about a dozen times now, haven’t been able to beat it yet.

To sum up, there is little replay value to this game. It has an iffy combat system, bad combat controls, mediocre graphics, and a great franchise attached. All in all, its just a great port of a bad PS2 game. It might be worth a rental, if you can find a place that doesn’t have a stick up their ass about renting 360 games, but perhaps not so much a buy.

Next time: I’ll describe the smell of the inner workings of my belly button, and wax philosophic about smileys.

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