By Glenn Song - May 25, 2005

The Godfather impressions

Recently at E3 we had the unique opportunity of viewing a playable demo of EA’s upcoming 3^rd-person action title, The Godfather. If you haven’t yet read anything about the Godfather, it’s meant to be a free roaming game in a style similar to Grand Theft Auto (which is probably a taboo around the EA folks). Generally speaking, players will have the freedom to do anything, including but not limited to intimidating people, killing, extorting, jacking cars, and general thuggery. One fresh and new feature supplied by The Godfather will be the Einsteinian premise that for every action you make there will be a reaction. This extends beyond the base reaction of “I beat up a pedestrian and six cops came after me.” The Godfather will employ a more refined system where if your malicious activity gets written up in the news the cops will put out an APB for your arrest for being a public disturbance. The idea of respect which was a hallmark feature of the movie and book series is also in this game.  You extort shops for protection fees and you can give the police chief a kickback to keep your good name off of the most wanted list. The Godfather is supposed to bring finesse to the world dominated by GTA clones.

The first thing we were demoed was how to target a pedestrian and beat the hell out of him – always entertaining, but an aspect of the game that will undoubtedly enrage video game watchdog groups. Then to make matters worse, we strangled a cop. Following that, we brought another poor guy to his knees. Then we beat up a woman – seeing as how we are equal opportunistic thugs, of course. Extorting victims in the game isn’t always as simple as making idle threats.  Our first attempt at extortion was with a butcher. He didn’t take too kindly to us trying to intimidate him with our abrasive words, so we magically pulled out a baseball bat, smacked him upside the head a few times, and asked him again. As sadistic as it is, you have to respect the knuckles, baby. He was easy to win over with a cracked skull and internal hemorrhaging. Then we put him out of his misery and got rid of some poor bastard that wandered in trying to buy a cut of steak just for good measure. You know that’s smooth, man. It’s all about finesse.

All of that violence certainly raises the concern that possibly the game isn’t as much about respect as it should be.  Unfortunately, the finesse in the game comes in the very subtle stuff that isn’t so easily demoed in a brief E3 showing.  The coercion however seems to be one of the main selling points of the game, along with the branding value of having the Godfather title.

The graphics that were demoed weren’t as impressive as we had hoped. After seeing the pre-rendered movies we expected the same quality or something approximating it. We wanted to see more cinematic lighting, but the lighting information was baked into the characters. Some of the in-game cinematography had characters and objects that looked like they were floating, without any shadows to root them to the ground. Certainly this level of graphical detail is possible.  After all, they are releasing Half-Life 2 on the Xbox. Then again, it’s still only half-way through development so maybe the engineers behind it will have something more incredible by release.

 
If GTA-style beat-downs are your thing or if you are a huge fan of the Godfather franchise, this game will probably end up on your shopping list.  For all other gamers, we’ll have to wait and see what the finished product has to offer.