As we've pointed out ad nauseam in our coverage of Mafia II this week, the first Mafia set a high bar for storytelling in GTA-style crime games. Assuming it follows through on the standards set by its predecessor, Mafia II will likely be as much about the complex relationships between its deeply flawed criminal leads as it will be about shooting mooks in the face and blowing up storefronts.
To give you an idea of what you can expect from this 1940s-'50s mob drama, here's everything we know about the game's main characters so far: ...
» Read MoreMafia opens in 1938, as gangster Thomas Angelo arrives at a little diner to meet with an Irish cop named Detective Norman. Tommy's come to Norman to ask for police protection for himself and his family, but Norman - abrasive and impatient - scoffs at the idea. Tommy insists that he doesn't expect something for nothing, and that what he knows can help bring down a notorious mob boss named Salieri. Norman, still skeptical, demands to hear the ...
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Ah, the box art story. Ol' R'liable we like to call it, always good for a laugh and sure to inspire conversation about what makes cover art good, bad or legendarily awful. This time though, we're going a different route and focusing on covers that totally botch the simplest rule of box art - it should reflect the product cleanly and clearly. These poor examples couldn't even keep it together long enough to be regular old "bad box ...
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Videogames, television and movies frequently overlap. With so much cross pollination, you'd think the biggest and best film franchises would have respectable game adaptations by now, but that's just not the case, is it? Sure there are a handful of successful tie-ins, but many series flop around for years, seeing game after terrible game created with little or no regard for the source material. Well, we're sick of it. ...
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When Fox News anchor Martha McCallum broke the story that Mass Effect contained full graphic nudity and player-directed sexual encounters, we immediately loaded up the game and went back for another play-through. How could we have missed such an opportunity? But for some reason we could only find the same two tired, barely R-rated cutscenes. Since we had a bunch of Mass Effect footage already on hand from other projects, we decided to compile a ...
Derp! Ready the eBay accounts, cause that company that prints game box art - Acme Video Game Box Art Co. Inc. Ltd., we believe they’re called - pulled a gargantuan boner and misprinted a shitload of our favorite titles. We don’t mean to call them out, but we can’t allow the public to be misled. ...
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As anyone who bothered to play or research Mass Effect knows, you're free to make decisions that directly affect the plot, the characters and even the ultimate outcome of the game. Most of us try to stay on the nice-to-neutral side of the law, generally helping people out while occasionally dipping into the renegade pool when a particularly devious choice presents itself. But what if you play the entire game as a rootin' tootin' ...