[Mattsius]

You better save some strength for me, dear.

[gillyruless]

Originally Posted by Mattsius

You better save some strength for me, dear.

Reread my post, you dolt. I'm saving you until the end.

[samIamsad]

Imagine your character having a conversation with a nice girl while he's taking her home. It's evening, the sun's going down.... everything's fine. And then suddenly.....

This scene's almost entirely interactive -- no non-interactive cutscenes in this particular bit of the game. Okay, maybe one. My jaw almost dropped. gilly, I'm further into the game now and it gets pretty hard, admittedly. Anyway, I love this game.

Hm, I had to turn the level of details quite a bit down and it gets still a bit choppy in some areas. Is it the engine, or is it my machine (XP2200+, GF4ti)?

Originally Posted by Kolzig

This game really doesn't need a sequel, unless it's an entirely new city with all new characters etc.

Maybe you're right. I'm not even halfway through and haven't seen the ending yet...

[squarejawhero]

Originally Posted by samIamsad

Imagine your character having a conversation with a nice girl while he's taking her home. It's evening, the sun's going down.... everything's fine. And then suddenly.....

This scene's almost entirely interactive -- no non-interactive cutscenes in this particular bit of the game. Okay, maybe one. My jaw almost dropped. gilly, I'm further into the game now and it gets pretty hard, admittedly. Anyway, I love this game.

Hm, I had to turn the level of details quite a bit down and it gets still a bit choppy in some areas. Is it the engine, or is it my machine (XP2200+, GF4ti)?

What's your memory, resolution ingame and level of detail?

[samIamsad]

I have 768 MB of slow SD-Ram installed in my machine. It never relly gets bad, but sometimes it feels a bit choppy.

Ingame resolution: 1024x768, 32 bit, trippe buffering deactivated
Texture quality: Non-compressed
Lightmaps: True color
Sound: Software mixing (onboard sound chip, Take 2 recommends software mixing for onboard chips), no EAX
Shadows: Low
Effects: Low
Particles: Low
Range of sight: Approx 75%
Detail: Approx 30%

Maybe it's just driver problems. I'm not using a certificated Nvidia driver. Anyway, it's a bit odd.. These are the recommended specs..

OS:Win98/ME/2000/XP
CPU:500Mhz Pentium3/Athlon (700Mhz recommended)
RAM6MB minimum RAM (128MB recommended)
Hard drive: 1.8 GB free space
CD-ROm drive: 16x speed required (32x recommended)
Graphics: DirectX8.1 compatible 3d accelerator with 32MB RAM

[squarejawhero]

Originally Posted by samIamsad

I have 768 MB of slow SD-Ram installed in my machine. It never relly gets bad, but sometimes it feels a bit choppy.

Ingame resolution: 1024x768, 32 bit, trippe buffering deactivated
Texture quality: Non-compressed
Lightmaps: True color
Sound: Software mixing (onboard sound chip, Take 2 recommends software mixing for onboard chips), no EAX
Shadows: Low
Effects: Low
Particles: Low
Range of sight: Approx 75%
Detail: Approx 30%

Maybe it's just driver problems. I'm not using a certificated Nvidia driver. Anyway, it's a bit odd.. These are the recommended specs..

OS:Win98/ME/2000/XP
CPU:500Mhz Pentium3/Athlon (700Mhz recommended)
RAM6MB minimum RAM (128MB recommended)
Hard drive: 1.8 GB free space
CD-ROm drive: 16x speed required (32x recommended)
Graphics: DirectX8.1 compatible 3d accelerator with 32MB RAM

Change your driver to the official NVidia driver. Defrag overnight too. SD-Ram is going to give you hell, it's far too slow. I'd recommend a motherboard upgrade so you can get a nice stick of 512MB PC3200 or PC2700 DDR. I guarantee your mobo and ram are bottlenecking your graphics card and CPU... your computer simply isn't running at the speed it should, and despite its age Mafia does take up memory and CPU resources. There's a lot going on in that game.

[samIamsad]

I know, but I played Doom3 and Half Life 2 last year with the very same machine. Sure, both had their choppy moments, but especially HL2 ran very nice overall. No problems with UT2004, either. Or Kotor. Or Morrowind. Battlefield Vietnam. Thief 3. Broken Sword 3... Or GTA3, which was released during the same time as Mafia. Okay, every game is different.. It seems like I caught myself a virus yesterday. Again. :mad: So perhaps that's where a possible slowdown is coming from.

[Once A Villain]

Originally Posted by samIamsad

I know, but I played Doom3 and Half Life 2 last year with the very same machine. Sure, both had their choppy moments, but especially HL2 ran very nice overall. No problems with UT2004, either. Or Kotor. Or Morrowind. Battlefield Vietnam. Thief 3. Broken Sword 3... Or GTA3, which was released during the same time as Mafia. Okay, every game is different.. It seems like I caught myself a virus yesterday. Again. :mad: So perhaps that's where a possible slowdown is coming from.

Sam, I vote that it's the virus. Seriously. Because my PC (though it has run everything except the F.E.A.R. Beta and Everquest 2 on max settings at 1600x1200) kicked Mafia's ass. The game is three years old. If you were running Doom 3 relatively well, then it MUST be the virus. Period.

[samIamsad]

I think so, too. Problem is: Norton AntiVirus says: Unable to repair the file. :/
(It's the wininet.dll and some other dlls in the system32 folder).
Virus name: Bloodhound.W32.EP. I'm scared and that stupid thing doesn't even allow me to acces my desktop settings anymore!

[Once A Villain]

Originally Posted by samIamsad

I think so, too. Problem is: Norton AntiVirus says: Unable to repair the file. :/
(It's the wininet.dll and some other dlls in the system32 folder).
Virus name: Bloodhound.W32.EP. I'm scared and that stupid thing doesn't even allow me to acces my desktop settings anymore!

That sucks... I wonder if anyone knows what to do? I'm afraid I don't...I use McAfee and don't know much about Norton.

[Once A Villain]

Hey sam, do a search on google for that virus. I did a while ago and I got a bunch of links where people talk about ways to get rid of it. Also, these people are saying the virus DOES slow down computer performance.

[Orange Brat]

Mafia was notorious for sluggish performance on fast machines. It's an engine problem given it was so rampant. It ran fine for me, most of the time, but gave others hell.

[friedmonky]

I love this game! It has never left my hard-drive since the day it was released. I never tire of playing it.

Make sure that you have patched your Mafia game. The cumulative patch makes a number of fixes and performance improvements.

http://www.take2games.com/index.php?p=support&product=92%2C3%2CMafia%2CPC%2C Gathering%2Cmafia&section=patches

Rusty

[samIamsad]

Thanks, villain! I didn't manage to get rid of my infection, but I found out that Bloodhound.* is a Norton thing. Bloodhound.* is a virus that isn't known to them yet.

Back on topic: Whoa, this is getting really hard. Mission 12. A big deal. The parking garage. I'm sure it rings a bell for those who played the game.

[Orange Brat]

Originally Posted by samIamsad

Whoa, this is getting really hard. Mission 12. A big deal. The parking garage. I'm sure it rings a bell for those who played the game.

Yeah, that's the demo level. I remember it taking forever. Don't forget to grab the grenades behind the car on the middle floor.

[samIamsad]

I've made it to mission 17 now. Anyway, once, I spent 1-2 hours cruising the countryside at night. I took a field path through the woods at a whopping 15 mph or something, stopped, got out of the car, heared a wolve's howling and quickly drove away. Weird. Yeah, I know: It's just a game. Nerd!

[Kolorabi]

Originally Posted by samIamsad

I've made it to mission 17 now. Anyway, once, I spent 1-2 hours cruising the countryside at night. I took a field path through the woods at a whopping 15 mph or something, stopped, got out of the car, heared a wolve's howling and quickly drove away. Weird. Yeah, I know: It's just a game. Nerd!

It's sad that the countryside is so under-used by the game. It's essentially a huge area that you only have to visit once or so during the entire game. This is one of the things that indicates that the developers had lots of plans for the game that didn't make it into the final build (they spent all that time making the whole area, and did virtually nothing with it).

In previews, I read things that there would be races that you could join (outside of the campaign missions), that the city would evolve during the game (the construction work at the building site would, for instance, be finished during the game so you'd get a new building instead of a construction site that stays the same for 20 or so years), et.c.

Btw, how did you like the racing mission? There were so many complaints about it that I think they made it easier in a patch. I never understood what the fuss was about - sure it wasn't easy (none of the missions are particularily easy), but it was quite enjoyable and not particularily hard either.

[samIamsad]

I don't have the patch installed, so the racing mission wasn't particularly easy. BUT I made it, after I had wrecked the car for about ten times. The parking garage is harder, because of some AI quirks. "What? Paulie's dead? Again? Dork!"



Paulie

Spoiler:

I LOVED the birthday party of the city council on the ship. Granted, it's a bit small (the ship itself), but soooo niiiice. I listened to the conversations between the guests, chatted with some seamen, enjoyed the sunset, and even solved a simple inventory puzzle. There's so much detail in this game. It's a world coming to life.

I'm near the end now (mission 19). There are so many "Wow!" moments in this game. It's the story of a man, who somehow gets involved with the Mafia in the 30s. What's really great about it - and I can't stress this highly enough - is, that the game's not just reduced to the gunfights. A lot of what happens in between the action is entirelly interactive. Like just a couple of minutes ago, when

Spoiler:

I met Paulie in his flat in Little Italy, where he told me about his plans to rob a bank. Then, we took the train to Central Island, went to this particular bank and entered. I examined the place, and after that he revealed his plans in detail. We left the bank again. Paulie went back home, and now it's up to me to arrange a car and a weapon. Everything's told without relying on cutscenes here. Again.

AWESOME!!!!!1

[samIamsad]

Oh, and hearing Joe Pesci's "German voice" (Paulie) in a game is priceless.

[samIamsad]

Okay, 6 a.m., I'm finished.