Introduction & The Godfather

As part of an assignment, I have to maintain a blog on apparently any topic of my choosing. Considering the perks of my job - I can't say what they are or where I work - I think a weekly games review could work.

So, let's start with The Godfather on Xbox 360. First impressions are frankly, bad. It looks like a straight port from the PS2 version and as anyone who read a review of Pimp My Ride will know, this is a very bad thing. It can be argued that the graphics hardly push the 360 to its limits. More realistically it can be argued that the poor machine would be very, very bored with a small chance of suffering dementia playing The Godfather.

Although I will accept that it's set in New York in 1945, EA have done something which really annoys me on GTA clones. And face it, that phrase can be used to describe any free roaming game involving cars, guns and crime. The annoying thing is that the roads all seem to look about 3 miles wide and are met with a tiny, overpronounced curb and the buildings surrounding the roads are as square and flat as something really square and flat. Let's say a big glass box.

That's a pet peeve out of the way, now down to being more mature and professional. In an attempt to give the vehicles weight (all 4 of them), there's a very subtle sound from the suspension when you drive over a bump too fast. An original idea, mostly because no one actually cares. The illusion of weight was only slightly destroyed when a hit squad chased me at blistering speed, and rammed me off the road. Literally off the road, the pavement and indeed the laws of physics when my car jumped 15 feet in the air and spun around, landing completely unharmed. Speeking of blistering speed, another thing I noticed very quickly was that the game governed the speed of everything chasing me based on just how much they wanted to kill me.

Driving more vigorously when chasing someone is fair enough, but these are 1940's American cars travelling at mach 2. On the other hand, some of the cars the game will let you drive can achieve mach 1 and corner like house flies when the mood suits them. The rest of the time, they'll happily slide uncontrollably into a civillian sideways, crushing the poor soul and making you very unpopular with the local police.

I suppose at this point I'm just being a bit childish about the driving sections, partially down to having titles such as Forza Motorsport 2 on my shelf, but mostly down to enjoying the downright evil reviews by one Yahtzee Croshaw. On a serious note, The Godfather is actually a rather enjoyable game, with an interesting (if stupidly named) control system.

Rather than the traditional idea of pressing buttons until you're foaming at the mouth or even the "radical" idea of using timed controls (I'm looking at you Assassin's Creed), The Godfather replaces the use of buttons in favour of controlling your mobster's hands using the right analogue stick. One problem of this is that the only way to do any melee attacks is to lock on to your victim, even if it's a bin in the street that rubbed you up the wrong way. The system takes some getting used to, which the game caters for by kneecapping all your victims for the first few missions so you can spend hours removing their teeth without sucking any bullets yourself.

The targetting system itself is very good, similar to Crackdown's system of locking on and selecting a body part to shoot, although it has its flaws. Firstly is the selection. For the live of me, I have no idea how it works. In a room full of enemies, the game chose to target someone far away in the corner of the screen picking his nose, rather than the bloke dead ahead getting very appreciative of his tommy gun. There is also the use of weakspots at the shoulders, knees and crotch (seriously, when I found this out I explored it extensively). A headshot is an instant kill, which is fair enough as long as you can actually hit your target, and the weakspots occassionally disappear.

The story is basically all the hits in the original film you didn't see and some you did (such as Fontane and his horse), with some dialogue lifted straight from it, which is nice. The rest of the game involves being not so gentlemanly and smashing merchant heads off cash registers to get them to pay protection money. This however, is genuinely fun, provided you don't push them too far leaving you to either kill them in any manner you choose, or running off like a little girl and pretending nothing happened. Although not as fun, the latter is the best way to make money.

So that's covered the driving, shooting and the missions. All I have left to say is that the Mobface thing is totally pointless to me as I can never be bother to make my own character because the graphic artists couldn't play nice with the writers and decided to be very lazy, and there's the fact that everytime I do try using one of these, I usually make some ugly Spanniard after playing around for hours on end.

All in all, I recommend The Godfather until Grand Theft Auto IV comes out, provided you can still stand the sight of PS2 "power".