Tag: mobster media

The Mafia Series: A Three-Part Saga

TiberiusLeave a comment

Induction, Made-Man and Destroyer in that order

Here, reader, I bring you a tale of a video game series known only as Mafia. 2K Games released three installments between 2002 and 2016: Mafia: The City of Lost Heaven; Mafia II; and Mafia III. Depending on how you view the series, it’s either another welcome addition into the open-world genre, or yet another GTA clone, especially in era when that was all too common. And like the series, it may or may not be accused of ripping off along with other video games, the Mafia series draws from the inspiration of mobster media from Godfather to Goodfellas, but what sets it apart from GTA is that the satirical take on American society is nonexistent and the controversy that lingers over the GTA series like a noxious cloud is also nonexistent.

The focus in the games is based strictly on the Mafia and all the mobsters within, so while some characters may be inspired by someone like Bob Hope or Lauren Bacall or Tippi Hedren, the most you’ll get are throwaway lines of dialogue or even cinema boards advertising popular films from the era… which I count as a worldbuilding plus as it captures part of the atmosphere in the games, but I’ll explore that aspect later.

Mafia: The City of Lost Heaven (2002)

Set in the city of Lost Heaven, an amalgamation of several major midwestern cities (especially where the Purple Gang and Al Capone were based in), during the interwar period and Prohibition, cab driver Tommy Angelo is coerced into aiding and abetting mobsters Sam and Paulie into helping them escape a rival family. Already mafia material; on the way back to their territory, these members of the Salieri Family compensate him for the damages and buy his silence, which considering how corrupt law enforcement was at the time, may not have been necessary, then again, not everyone was eating bribes like beans on toast at the time.

Being given time to think about becoming a Salieri gangster himself, Tommy initially declines until the rival Morello gangsters wreck his car again, and attempt to break his legs. Now it’s a matter of survival; those f[aah!]kers were gonna eat him alive. Over the course of the rest of the ’30s, Tommy continues his work with the Mafia and learns firsthand how complicated things could get: enemies with connections, friends who want out, strict adherence to the laws of the Mafia, and even betrayal.

Compared to other open-world games, Mafia’s strength comes in its more grounded and serious portrayal as opposed to simply being a video game. It gets to be cinematic at times with Scorsese/Tarantino-esque set pieces and dialogue. The influence is strong enough that it can feel like any one of the movies it draws inspiration from. Lost Heaven’s setting was reflective of the time period. When the government passed the 21st Amendment in repeal of the 18th, they moved onto other profitable avenues of illicit activity. Hollywood had to get those drugs somehow…

Such a waste…

Incidentally, this won’t be the last time drugs make their way into the Mafia series. Lost Heaven seemingly ends on a high note, but just because Tommy’s tale is done doesn’t mean the consequences don’t find him later. Such as the case with real-life mobsters Abe Reles or Albert Anastasia. And where does he face these consequences?

Mafia II (2010):

In this game where the next protagonist, Sicilian immigrant, Vito Scaletta, takes the helm in the fictional Empire Bay, which may or may not be an amalgamation of a certain northeastern megalopolis. In all seriousness, the name immediately makes me think of New York, accents and all, but if I was a bit more well-traveled, I could probably make the case that Baltimore, Boston, and Dover are equally referenced too.

I haven’t seen any Silver or Golden Age films as of late, but one I do remember was 1933’s King Kong and all its primitive claymation ape suits, as well as 1932’s Scarface. Yeah, the 1983 one with Al Pacino is a remake of a classic. Bet you didn’t know that.

From what I remember of those films was the way the respective cities looked: the clothing, the buildings, the cars, the people and their accents, the outside world and its influence on the story–similarly, the case is felt in Mafia II. Vito says that his family moved when he was seven and he was born in 1925, which would mean he moved to the U.S. in 1932 before prohibition was repealed. He also claimed his father was an alcoholic who was probably also a frequent buyer of bootlegged booze until speakeasies were replaced by legitimate bars and taverns. Maybe some of the booze smuggled into the States made into his flask back east. Who knows?

Fast-forward to when Vito is 18, Japan had since roped the U.S. into a two-front war, and Vito’s gonna find himself on the frontlines after a robbery gone wrong. Drafted into the 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment (Currahee!), Vito is specially chosen as a native Italian for the U.S. combined effort to invade Europe through Sicily, for which his unit convenes with the Italian resistance. After guest-starring in HBO’s Band of Brothers for about two years, Vito returns to Empire Bay where his best friend, Joe Barbaro, has made a name for himself amongst the cities’ wiseguys.

Joe helps Vito avoid a redeployment, probably to Germany, by forging his papers, and find more work for him to do with the wiseguys, leading to crimes of a federal degree for which Vito was initially sentenced to a decade. However, thanks to even more wiseguys already serving sentences, Vito’s time behind bars is cut short and he’s released just in time to experience the early ’50s; where the mob was still going strong and official corruption was being virulently ignored long after the prohibition days.

Vito continues riding with the Mafia, reaching made man status, and reaching his highest of highs until, like Tommy Angelo, his past catches up to him and relatively quickly as well, leading to the loss of nearly all of his fancy belongings. Unlike Tommy who was forced into the Mafia out of survival, Vito did so to get riches. He worked so hard to stave off the poverty he lived through in those tenement homes and circumstances put him back at square one.

Admittedly more self-fulfilling than Tommy who definitely had his own qualms with Mafia life, Vito takes a bunch of jobs, one of which just so happens to include (spoilers) an attempt on Tommy’s life. Mafia II starts impersonal and gradually becomes more and more about Vito. He’s clearly not the first Italian to leave Italy and join the Mob in the U.S., but all things considered, he tried to solve his lack of money problem while also clearing a standing debt with a loan shark by dashing between odd jobs, but even if he wasn’t in debt, I still see Vito mad dashing to get the dough for himself.

Mafia II is divided into chapters and the first half has a lot of time in between them. The last half of the game though is spread out through a few days, probably the longest stretch between them being at most a week or close to it, obviously for narrative purposes, signifying what’s at stake: his life. Vito’s loose ends are finally tied, but in the end, the wiseguys who helped him in prison only vouched for him, not Joe who was there by coincidence. We the audience are lead to believe that he didn’t make it, but surprisingly, he and Vito eventually make their way to the third game’s setting…

Mafia III (2016):

Now the setting is New Bordeaux, the game’s stand in for New Orleans, Louisiana and well within the civil rights era and counterculture movement of the late 1960s. This time the protagonist is an orphan named Lincoln Clay who by modern standards doesn’t meet the genealogical parameters to be considered black, having a Dominican mom and most likely Italian dad (whom fans theorized was Joe Barbaro himself), but going off face value (no pun intended), society put him into the black community who accepted him with open arms, even praying for his safety when he joined the Army and was sent to fight the Viet Cong.

His adoptive family is still there waiting for him, and he learns that they’re in trouble with a gang of Haitian descent while also being the “lapdogs” of the Italian Mafia in New Bordeaux. The antagonist, Sal Marcano, attempts to make an irrefusable offer which then gets refused and after one last job, Lincoln and his family are left for dead, setting him on a revenge quest. Continuing the theme of a living environment, the developers this time being Hangar 13 did well to capture the feeling of being non-white in the Deep South. Segregation ended federally in 1964, but the practice was still burning out years and even decades afterward, hence the the nearly 160 race riots across the U.S. in 1967, a lot of times in northern cities where segregation also existed but was outclassed by the southern way of separate but equal.

Lincoln Clay and the setting really distinguish Mafia III from the rest of the series with a brutally raw inclusion of racism as a mechanic, and it’s everywhere, from women clutching their personal bags whenever people of color walk by to stores having signs limiting or outright barring non-whites from entry and service.

The story, not including all the DLC, had been terribly undercut by the mountains worth of technical glitches on release, but ignoring the initial release’s problems, I say the game does a great job of putting the player in the shoes of those who called that a reality back in the day. My grandmother, who grew up in Virginia in the ’40s and ’50s, has a bunch of corroborating stories from the era. It reminds me of the approach taking by Max Payne 3, making Max a private bodyguard for the wealthy in South America, isolating him linguistically as he traverses the many locales of São Paulo. You are the one nail that can’t be hammered in very easily.

From Prohibition to early Cold War to civil rights, the Mafia series had a momentous evolution. As of writing this, I’m 2/3s of the way through Mafia II and I’m still at the beginning of Mafia 2002 with plans to complete them both and the third one sometime in the future. In spite of all the faults in the games, I can’t recommend enough that you experience this trilogy at least once if you haven’t already.

Forgotten GTA Games: Part II

TiberiusLeave a comment

Finishing off with the second round of underrated GTA games

Last week, I brought attention to the likes of GTA: Vice City Stories, one of two games that I think should receive a remake, flaws notwithstanding. Even a PC port if able, and I don’t mean by way of emulation as it’s been my only means of playing the game. By the way, I want to quickly update and say I found a mission that may be worse than Supply Lines in San Andreas. The second half of the mission Unfriendly Competition ramps up the difficulty right quick. The second half of this mission can fall off a bridge. Anyway, we’re moving onto Liberty City Stories.

Liberty City Stories is set in 1998, which is three years prior to the start of GTA III. So to outline the timeline of the 3D era: Vice City Stories starts in 1984; Vice City takes place two years later in the mid-spring of 1986; San Andreas begins in 1992; LCS takes place in March of 1998, and GTA III being set in the modern day at the time takes place in mid-Autumn of 2001, and the real-world politics of its real-world counterpart were felt during the development of the game with all the content that was cut.

As a side note, I want to make a post about the uncanny references to 9/11 prior to the actual 9/11. See for yourself, it’s unreal.

Anyway, LCS centers around the character of Antonio “Toni” Cipriani. After lying low for a few years on the orders of Don Salvatore Leone, Toni is called back to do more mob work and help the Leones put the city under mob influence, fighting gangsters, cartels, and the Sicilian Mob itself across the map.

If you ask me, forgetting this game and VCS doesn’t make a lot of sense. You could argue that since they both feature one-off characters and GTA III itself (whom Toni appears in) is the last game chronologically, the point remaking LCS and/or VCS wouldn’t be worth it. But I argue that one-off or not, Victor Vance from VCS and Toni Cipriani from LCS have both been influential even if it’s not all that felt in the games that they serve as prequels too.

No, no one really honors Toni in GTA III and Victor Vance doesn’t appear again, save for the intro to Vice City while other characters like Maria Latore and Phil Cassidy et al have more screen time and became mainstays, but this highlights further problems with prequels. The lack of foresight that can often accompany them. If RockStar thought ahead, they would’ve had Phil Cassidy age properly from gun nut (like his appearance in VC) to drunkard (as shown in VCS) to old man heavy weapons dealer (as seen in GTA III and LCS).

Further, LCS has inherited the water puddle death that made seafaring so nerve-wracking in GTA III and Vice City. The three cities repeatedly lampooned in the GTA series (LA, NYC, Miami) all have beaches, but if you splash a little bit of water on Claude, Tommy Vercetti, or Toni, straight to the hospital. Though, after 2002 and until IV in 2008, motorcycles would make a permanent appearance.

As a sidenote, RockStar got around the lack of motorcycles in GTA III by stating in-universe that a petition to get them off the streets of LC pulled through. So bikers were essentially outlawed. Personally, I grew up in the Bronx and having seen a fair share of bikers growing up, they don’t play a very large influence, but biker gangs in NYC would still show up from time to time.

Thankfully the absence is quickly remedied following 2002’s Vice City, though the 3D era games have showcased several design flaws of the time. In the case of Liberty City Stories, at first glance it was structurally similar to III and Vice City, just asset flipped and this time making use of the map in-game as opposed to hoping the player could memorize from the mini-map in III. But like those games, swimming was against the law. Bikes and bikers were given an appearance, but aircraft would still take a backseat until the pilotable helicopters after 2002.

But a move RockStar made that would change the face of GTA going forward would be non-silent protagonists. Claude in III literally nods and sets forward blasting. Without a single word of dialogue, Claude portrays himself to be one hell of a sociopath. Employers and allies who stay by his side are left alone, but give him a briefcase of cash and a target and he’ll pursue it to the ends of the earth. This serves as a vague spoiler, so those of you looking to emulate it should be on the lookout.

Speaking of III, Toni debuts as an employer in that game and trying my best not to spoil, the character models in both show a difference. Unlike what became of Phil Cassidy, more attention was at least paid to Toni’s model.

See the difference? I want to say RockStar doesn’t focus on progression all that much with characters from previous games quietly retiring or outright dying (Johnny Klebitz deserved better.), but within an established universe, and with the right amount of dedication, they can do good with a before and after. This isn’t related to anything plot wise between games, but at times in LCS Toni will be told that he’s remarkably, almost skeletally thin. In 1998, he was lightly mocked for being underweight, and over the next three years and change, he became overweight. A bit like Nikocado Avocado, except even with the extra pounds, Toni can still move around a lot faster.

Actually, if you’ve ever seen weightlifters, bodybuilders, or the most recent incarnation of Thor, packing on the weight helps plenty for those guys. Toni turned himself into an ox when you think about it. The way the GTA games are written gives away a sense of a Hollywood influence, and mobster movies get the most spotlight depending on the setting. Vice City combines aspects of shows like Miami Vice and any mobster movie set on the East Coast, and III and LCS both give me more New York Five Families vibes. Pick your favorite movie, but for me it’s Goodfellas, with a hint of Godfather, and maybe also Miller’s Crossing with these wise guys dedicating themselves to the mob from birth, the lot of them being mobster brats as kids.

That tends to be the case for both Tommy and Toni. For Toni, his mother doesn’t make a physical appearance, but more of a vocal appearance. Pushing him to step it up, bust his enemies’ teeth in, come back with at least five severed heads or don’t come back at all; admittedly, this feeds into stereotypes of both Sicilian parents and the Sicilian mob. I’m not Sicilian and I don’t know many Italians (save for the many pizzerias and Italian restaurants within walking distance of my apartment), so I can’t say how true to life this is for someone of Sicilian ancestry growing up. The Sicilian mob on the other hand gets a fair amount of media coverage in pop culture if not news outlets in and around Sicily and Southern Italy, and if Sicilian or Mediterranean-based journalists are worth their salt, the Sicilian mob isn’t one to trifled with.

Groups like Ndrangheta can and have done serious damage to people who’ve wronged them, and it’s far from pretty. Of course, works of fiction need to take liberties in case someone is dumb enough to imitate what happens in real life or for dramatic effect, but if RockStar pulled some stories from real-world headlines featuring the Sicilian mob in action, then perhaps it’s as close to accurate as can be short of interviewing an ex-mobster or watching an interview or documentary of such.

Toni Cipriani goes about doing much of what can be expected of a mobster with the strong-arming, enforcement, bribery, political meddling, malicious destruction and all that the mob was accused of doing or charged with. All this being said though, the asset taking and developing in the VC games and San Andreas are absent. On the one hand, it would fit with the narrative of the game, but it’s a bit unrealistic as several mobsters — real and fictional — operated front businesses to keep the police from sniffing around or at least bribe them with “get lost” money.

Grand Theft Auto is an ultimate in parody, but more realistic elements existed in movies and shows and funny enough JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure: Golden Wind. Golden Wind takes place in 2001 in Naples and briefly explains that many capos and even the Don’s consigliere (advisor) may have a side business if not an umbrella’s worth of them, sometimes with evidence. Mr. Pericolo (pictured above) is an example of mobsters continually hiding their identities and getting one up on the law or their enemies.

Disguises and shell companies and whatnot don’t feature in LCS. This would probably take away from the video game aspect of the video game and probably feeds into a misconception that a mobster can’t have a side hustle, which I can’t really believe after what happened to Al Capone.

And if that were the case, then the misconception is broken by way of Tommy Vercetti himself gaining assets and collecting regular payments for the latter half of Vice City. Recall that he’s from Liberty City originally, and the game follows much of the plot of Scarface 1983.

For LCS, one of the hidden perks of being an asset flip of GTA III and Vice City is that some of the problems and mechanics in SA and VCS make a comeback. This being Liberty City, the radio stations from III are all intact, albeit with different music and radio shows to listen to (Chatterbox FM is a hidden gem), mobster characters from III show up along with a few one-off characters who don’t appear in III, this being post-VC, there’s more weapons variety and I think the game fixes a minor anachronism.

Gun nuts reading this will notice that ever since the M4A1 was made famous by the U.S. military overseas, RockStar put it in all the 3D games after III despite it not being manufactured until 1994 and probably being issued to the military a year and change after that. So it makes sense at least to have that as a rifle in a game set in 1998. The games set years prior to that should all have the M16, while III and LCS have the M4 model, though this being early 2000s internet, this is assuming the internet was fast 20 years ago.

Anyway, the dialogue doesn’t sound out of place for a piece of mobster media for the time, the characters’ are all felt (especially Mrs. Cipriani), Toni is an impactful protagonist despite the lack of muscle mass, and considering he’s one of two characters to show up in at least four games, it seems as though RockStar wasn’t ready to part ways with either Phil Cassidy or the character Donald Love until it was time to use that next-gen technology to make LC look more like NY than it did back then. Now, I know I said this was a two-parter, but there’s a third game that probably doesn’t receive as much attention that I also want to get around to. Whenever that’ll be, I’ll have to rewrite the schedule, but it’ll be covered down the line, so be on the lookout.

This week, I recommend a podcast. The Trash Taste podcast is hosted by three anitubers Garnt “Gigguk” Maneetapho, Joey “TheAnimeMan” Bizinger, and Connor “CDawgVA” Colquhoun. All three have their own YouTube and Twitch channels, but I’ll only link the podcast since it’ll have the links provided already. The Trash Taste Podcast markets itself as an anime podcast, but has overtime evolved to encompass more about life in Japan especially as a gaijin/non-Japanese. They also have an After Dark channel that livestreams on Twitch as well. The podcast has a Patreon page, and while the videos are recorded for the YouTube viewing audience, if you can’t find the time to sit down and watch, podcasting apps like Google Podcasts and Spotify have their episodes on audio only so there’s more than one way to support them.

https://www.youtube.com/@TrashTaste