PC game collection

This is my boxed PC game collection as of 2016. I added some more games recently that aren't pictured. My big boxes are on a bookshelf and media cabinet, I put the small boxes on a smaller shelf. 

Mafia PC game review

Mafia is one of the BEST PC games ever, capisce?!

Mafia is a 3rd person shooter and open world driving game developed by Czech studio Illusion Softworks and released August 2002 on PC. Mafia was code named Gangster. It was originally going be a driving game similar to the game Driver with a multiplayer racing mode and set for release in 2000. Illusion was going to use the engine from their previous game Hidden and Dangerous, but it wasn't advanced enough so they created a new engine LS3D.

Mafia has a fantastic and memorable story, amazing graphics and sound, and great voice acting. It feels like you are playing a movie! The story and characters are really believable. The main character starts out as a young guy, he's a good person but makes some bad moral choices. The voice acting is excellent from the entire cast, a lot of the cast of the Sopranos lent their talent for Mafia.

Some players were turned off by the amount of driving and how slow some of the cars are. Your first car the Bolt Ace (Ford Model-T - There is a real car names mod) only has a top speed of 40 mph on a flat road, but down hill it is about 60 mph. The cars feel like they have a weight to them so when you go down hill your car will speed up a lot. The later cars you unlock are much faster.

 Mafia was released only 3 months after Grand Theft Auto 3 came out on PC, it had been 10 months since it's release on PS2. Comparisons were made to GTA3 but besides being an open world it shares little in common with GTA. It's a lot more realistic and more of a linear story based game. Cops will pull you over for going over 40mph, running red lights, and crashing your car. I crashed into a trash can and they pulled me over! It's not too difficult to outrun the cops even in a slow car, if you change cars the cops won't be able to find you. Mafia's engine allows for more realistic car damage than GTA3. Windows can be broken, headlights  fall off, you can shoot out tires. Cars feature real time damage deformation. On my playthrough a cop car was hit by a trolly and looked flattened! In GTA3 cars simply catch on fire and explode.

You have to learn to lock pick cars in the game. There are 51 cars in the story missions and 19 bonus cars you unlock after completing the main game. You also need to refuel your car at gas stations. The game doesn't use money, it just shows the attendant pumping gas and you paying a fine when the police pull you over.

You play as taxi driver Thomas Angelo. The game takes place in the fictional city of Lost Heaven,  a combination of San Francisco and Chicago. In addition there is also an expansive countryside to drive in ! The story spans from 1930-1938 during the Great Depression and the later part of prohibition. In 1930 Tommy isn't making a lot of money as a taxi driver, but he says a lot of people are worse off then him. On his shift one night Tommy runs into and Paulie and Sam, they are being chased by rival gangsters of the Morello gang and Tommy takes them back to the safety of the bar.





The gangsters compensate Tommy for the damages to his car, and offer more work if he's interested. he decides not to join the criminal organization, and goes back to his regular job.





The taxi missions are a really slow part of the game. You have to take a few passengers around town, they will complain if you speed or crash.

After a dropping off a few customers Tommy takes a coffee break. Members of the Morello gang tracked him down and attack him.

Tommy escapes the two men and runs to the safety of the Salieri bar. He decides to join the gang thinking it can't be that bad. I don't want to give away any more spoilers for people who haven't played the game yet.


Besides the story missions, the only side quests are given by auto mechanic Louis Bertone. Do him a favor and he will teach you how to unlock new cars.







I think it's a cool concept not being able to get all the cars right away, when you add a new car to your garage it's awesome. In addition to the vehicles you can also take the train and light rail around the city.

My garage

In the 1.0 version of Mafia, the Grand Prix race was so difficult that many people gave up and never got past this point. I was able to beat it as a kid but it was really frustrating, you couldn't make any mistakes. The patch allows you to choose a difficulty all the way down to very easy, Later versions of Mafia sold retail with the 1.2 patch.

                                       


                                            original release (top) Version 1.2 release (bottom)




                                               The jewel case of the 1.2 version-

Mafia got a small box release. 2002 was around the time big box PC games went away and the small box became standard.

The graphics in Mafia were amazing for the time.  I was very impressed with the face graphics. but hands are kind of blocky. Cars are shiny and have reflections. I originally played Mafia on the first PC I ever built, a Pentium III 800 mhz with an Nvidia GeForce 2 GTS 64 mb graphics card. My PC was two years old by the time I played Mafia, but still ran the game well. I always got 60 fps indoors and about 30 fps outside.

There are very few repeated textures and each building looks different. The only compliant about the graphics at the time was that some of the building textures up close weren't very detailed.

On my modern PC I was having problems running Mafia on Windows 10 until I used an app called WindowedBorderlessGaming, this allows the game to run full screen in a window. Now the game runs fine at 1080p (1920x1080) In my opinion it still looks great!


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I ran into a couple bugs on my play through. When you go inside a building if you're not close enough to the door you can get stuck outside in this weird limbo world and all the buildings vanished, shortly after I fell through the ground! Later in my play through a police car was chasing me and one of the police officers got out, after taking care of him the car stopped and the other officer got out, but the car was still driving by itself. Also there were a few path finding issues when NPCs try to get in your car. These bugs were nothing major and could be fixed by reloading the game. No game is perfect but I think Mafia comes close. In fact, I don't remember encountering any bugs on my original play through as a kid, but that was way back in 2002!


Mafia has three modes.The main story, free ride, and free ride extreme. In Free ride you can cruise around the city or the countryside and set the population, there's also some rival gangsters driving around you'll have to watch out for.

Free ride extreme is unlocked only after finishing the game. It's like a new game + mode.In Free ride extreme you'll go on hilarious missions to earn really cool cars, like this one Flower Power. The city is changed a bit in this mode, there's ramps. Some of the missions include chasing down an NPC who runs super fast  and driving to a location with a car that keeps running out on gas. It's a shame that Mafia 2 didn't have a free ride mode.

Mafia was removed from Steam in 2012 because the music license expired. Currently the only way to play it is to get a copy of the original CDs, but it can be found for a decent price on Ebay, and runs perfectly on a modern OS.

In conclusion I highly recommend Mafia. If you like open world games and games with a good story this is a must play.

Video Review below