Chicago 1930 : The Prohibition
In the state it’s in, it should deserve a negative, but I’ve paid less than $1 for it so I’m gonna be more lenient.
The premises are all good, there’s the good vibe of an old-school game and the levels should keep you occupied and entertained, with actually some planning skills required to clear them. That said, the game IS buggy and crashes randomly. The way you operate your characters is also quite clunky, and frankly, a bit frustrating.
Be patient and work around the bugs, you’ll at least enjoy it for what it is.
– Real player with 23.2 hrs in game
I have no idea which stupid idiot decides to publish this game in this condition but seriously - I’m impressed. I just don’t know how it is possible to bug game without bugs. How you can fuck up selecting characters is just unanswerable. To change the guys you literally have to kill someone in the mission and hope that game will not select automatically another one by itself. Overall I love the game - but CD version not STEAM edition. Bought it only because CD version doesn’t work on anything above XP and I just couldn’t record it with FRAPS on XP. If you need to record it or if you have Vista or newer… You have to buy it… Unfortunately… But if you just want to play and you have access to PC with something between 98SE and XP than just find and buy CD version.
– Real player with 11.7 hrs in game
Mafia
Oh boy where do I even start, “Mafia” is an old classic, a very underrated game by today’s standards. I remember playing this game when i was in grade school, much later in 2011 I bought this game on Steam too and I have never actually wrote a review for this game.
Reading through other reviews by people, the media and even newer “retro” reviews I was glad that people do still remember this great game even after more than 16 years since it was released. On the other hand I was annoyed a bit that people still try to compare “Mafia” to the “Grand Theft Auto” series which just blows my mind, this game isn’t GTA and it was never meant to be a “GTA” game. Just because there is a semi-open world with a bit of driving involved, a character that you control in 3rd person doesn’t mean it’s automatically a “GTA” clone.
– Real player with 59.4 hrs in game
Read More: Best Classic Story Rich Games.
Nothing to complain about Mafia, this is objectively a masterpiece that came out in 2002. The game tells the story about a Taxi Driver, Tommy Angelo. Tommy, while working at night in the 1930s, stumbled across 2 gangsters from the Salieri’s Family. Since that night, his life changed entirely.
Sound and Music:
While playing Mafia, the player will completely dive in the atmosphere of the game: perfect sound and music experience (I’ll talk more technically about sounds and music later in this review). I highly recommend playing the game with Stereo Headphones. Just as an example, during the “A Trip To The Country” mission, that thunderstorm effect really makes you feel like you’re in the game during the whole chapter.
– Real player with 48.6 hrs in game
Bonanza Bros.™
Bonanza Bros is a 2 player sidescrolling action game originally released in arcades in 1990 by Sega of Japan. And what Sega Genesis got was a port in 1991 on usual-at-that-time 4 Megabit ROM cartridge, a bit cut here and there, but still keeping 2 player mode. Though, I heard that this conversion ITL. Or maybe Sega of Japan was involved as well. Who knows. Not me.
It also came out for SMS and PC Engine CD thing. I think. And computers. And Ages 2500 rerelease on PS2.
The game that you have here is nothing more than emulation of Sega Genesis version. Well, European-Japan one, but it’s english and 60hz, no worries.
– Real player with 0.2 hrs in game
Read More: Best Classic Stealth Games.
– Real player with 0.1 hrs in game
Kingpin — Life of Crime
(1000+ hours now!)
I have played this game for over 500 hours since Spring 2019 now and I can honestly say it is better than any other game I have played. The amount of enjoyment I managed to get out of the singleplayer campaign, multiplayer deathmatch and mapping is eye watering
Everything that made me sink so much time into this fucking masterpiece of a video game:
The singleplayer campaign took me a couple of attempts to get into but once you recognise all of its quirks and the ways it works differently to other first person shooters you’ll be in for a mofoing ride - Kingpin’s grungy urban environments carry this oppressive atmosphere that no other game in the FPS genre does. The game doesn’t hold your hand, which at first may lead to a frustrating experience in Skidrow but you only need to talk to crucial NPC’s to learn about objectives and information about the area. Skidrow has the best usage of open level design with many things to do; a good number of later areas are simplified and linear in design but still feature elements from Skidrow in some capacity.
– Real player with 1183.9 hrs in game
My review is divided between 2 sections (past and present), to give the game a fair score
Perspective of 1999 Review:
There is a large and vast library of first-person shooters for the PC on the market. This is a well-known fact, and with the emergence of groundbreaking 3D accelerators and blazing processors, the abilities to create more than “just a Doom clone” is more plausible than ever. Although a game can bust out some sci-fi elements or a tactical military background, it takes an ambitious team to create something different from the pack. Kingpin: Life of Crime is a prime example, with a setting that is quite literally “in a past that never crossed paths with the future” (also known as retrofuturism).
– Real player with 62.2 hrs in game
Grand Theft Auto
I have to say, I was surprised by just how good this game is. In the blurry screenshots on the store page, it comes across as archaic to the point of being down right unplayable, but it is, in fact, a full formed Grand Theft Auto game. Each style of car drives differently and sports the fake radio stations this series has become known for. Those stations are a little too limited for the amount of time you’ll be driving around; it’s like one song plus a commercial per car theme, but as long as you’re sure to switch between styles frequently they won’t cross into obnoxious territory.
– Real player with 26.4 hrs in game
I never got to play the first game in the series back int he day, even though I did manage to get my hands on the PlayStation version. I guess since my first ever introduction to the GTA series was already in the 3D universe I got a bit put off by the less story-driven 2D games. Now I see this was quite a fun experience. But still, I would hardly call it my favorite, and can only muster up enough to say it’s just a bit underwhelming.
First of all, it’s the very reason this was pulled out of Steam: you can only run the game once. For some reason, the port changes a file type after you play a level that makes it so when it tries to read it again to start a new level the games simply crashes. You literally had to make a backup of the original file and manually replace it every time you wanted to play or look for a 3rd party program that fixes the file before launching the game and, if you wanted steam to properly read your game time like me, make a custom exe that would replace the original one so steam knew when you launched the game. It’s a similar experience to playing Fallout Fixit, but there the vanilla game works even if you don’t want the extra fixes, here it’s mandatory if you want to play and just that is enough to get a negative review as an experience since it would just be better to get the original PC version or even the PlayStation one.
– Real player with 21.8 hrs in game
Mob Rule Classic
I’ve played this on my new setup (AMD Ryzen 7 5800X, Radeon RX 6800) and I’ve had zero issues. No crashes, no graphical glitches or anything, so this release works on a modern system. I write this, because Fable: The Lost Chapters didn’t function well with a modern multicore CPU, but required a single CPU affinity to work without stuttering.
Now, the game was initially in stretched full-screen mode, but just go into your Radeon, Intel or Nvidia drivers and make it centered. There will be black bars in the side, since it was designed for 4:3 monitors back in 1999, but now the graphic isn’t stretched and looks like it should.
– Real player with 41.9 hrs in game
Hi System 3, thank you so much!
I bought this game in support of your company and your great work all these years and especially the development of the Constructor series!
I wholeheartedly recommend this game as it is a classic that doesn’t really take itself too seriously and was unique at the time. However, these points need to be ironed out:
1.) The mouse scroll is too fast and it flickers too much
2.) There needs to be improved AI, where a lot of the repetitive motions such as stopping the enemy from picketing the fences should be dealt with automatically
– Real player with 30.1 hrs in game
Grand Theft Auto 2
This GTA is different due to the camera angle, it has more of a 2D feel to it. However the idea is the same, open world game where you steal cars, kill people and explore. The cities are like levels, you beat a city and then go to the next one. There are 3 of them and each city has 3 gangs. The thing is, you can’t travel from one city to another. Instead you gotta choose them from the menu. The way you beat them is a little different too. Instead of completing specific missions, or a number of missions, in this one you gotta reach a specific amount of money. The money system is a little bit different in this game as you get money from kills and vehicles destroyed. Missions will give you money too. So you got 2 options : Either join a gang and complete missions for them or destroy everything until you reach the amount of money needed. Be careful with gangs, respect is everything! The more you kill other gang members the more likely you will get attacked when you enter their area (kinda similar to San Andreas).
– Real player with 466.9 hrs in game
This GTA is different due to the camera angle, it has more of a 2D feel to it. However the idea is the same, open world game where you steal cars, kill people and explore. The cities are like levels, you beat a city and then go to the next one. There are 3 of them and each city has 3 gangs. The thing is, you can’t travel from one city to another. Instead you gotta choose them from the menu. The way you beat them is a little different too. Instead of completing specific missions, or a number of missions, in this one you gotta reach a specific amount of money. The money system is a little bit different in this game as you get money from kills and vehicles destroyed. Missions will give you money too. So you got 2 options : Either join a gang and complete missions for them or destroy everything until you reach the amount of money needed. Be careful with gangs, respect is everything! The more you kill other gang members the more likely you will get attacked when you enter their area (kinda similar to San Andreas).
– Real player with 39.0 hrs in game
Mafia: Definitive Edition
Mafia the City of Lost Heaven is one of my top 5 games of all time. What Definitive Edition did was suck the soul out of an incredible game 19 years later, leaving behind a console-fied, dumbed down, version. Where to begin?
The voice acting is the first thing you notice. Paulie, Sam, and Tommy all went from sounding like Italian mob guys who aren’t caricatures to NNNYEEEEH SEE, FUGHETABOUTIT. Paulie keeps his character more or less, but his voice actor is horrible and obnoxious. Sam sort of retains his voice, but his persona goes from the “straight man” that Tommy would confide in, to a cocky jerk. Tommy’s voice actor was okay, but his personality got assassinated. Whereas originally he was a mellow but confident man and definitely not bloodthirsty, he went to being a cocky greaser type who happily kills scores of men and then hesitates to kill one more. Inconsistent character delivery and inconsistent motivations all around.
– Real player with 45.4 hrs in game
Good remake, but not enough. Let me explain myself.
Mafia the City of Lost Heaven was a game that I personally enjoyed more than i expected to back then, this game makes me feel like they removed every piece of the puzzle to make this memorable.
Pros:
-Good graphics (Night in this game is beautiful, day not as much)
-It has been nicely done for somebody that never played the first one, or that just wants a game with something solid, that, this game does it.
Cons:
-Does not have the full mob experience that the first one had, characters were entirely re-made (Voice and personality), making them seem some random street gang that wants to have fun without obeying the Don
– Real player with 37.3 hrs in game
Déjà Vu: MacVenture Series
A very limited and simple quasi-real life simulator that has troll gameplay which makes you die unpredictably just because the game wanted you to die because of a particular choice you made, so, while playing this game, make your peace with death and prepare to die, LOL. At least the game has a great sense of witty, sarcastic and dark humour and a sense of showing the rope about life 101 to help players free from their own naivety and ignorance.
It’s very admirable that, as an adventure game, players ain’t tasked with most of the adventure games' usual boring errand-runner tasks that require them to solve a moon logic puzzle. What this game mostly ask from you is finding a key to open particular doors. As simple as it may sounds, the actual complexity of the game is figuring out who you are, what happened to you, where to go and how you can make things right for you.
– Real player with 8.6 hrs in game
Deja Vu was the first of the MacVenture entries that was released in 1985. It places you in the role of Ace Harding, a retired boxer now detective gumshoe set in the 1940s.The only problem is, you’ve woken up in a bathroom stall and worst of all - you don’t remember a single thing of who you are!
This leaves you in the challenging role to solve the problem before you become a vegetable. That’s not the only worry because it just so happens that a band of criminals have framed you for a murder and a kidnapping. This is requiring you, the player, to think out of the box and think like a detective to help Ace.
– Real player with 6.6 hrs in game
Hitman: Codename 47
Hitman: Codename 47 is the game that started a whole franchise and presented one of games' most recognizable characters: Agent 47. This game has great ideas impaired by technical limitations, both from the technology of the time and the budget, but counters it by having fun gameplay and a flawless story.
It is amazing how intelligent games were back then, detailing storylines and interesting characters displayed with an easy-to-follow presentation. At the beginning of every mission you go to a briefing where you learn about your target and the details surrounding the hit you are going to perform. This is presented all in text and all you have to do is read it. One of the most interesting aspects of the game is the video of the target filmed by an ICA agent - which gives us an idea of how organized the Agency is.
– Real player with 50.9 hrs in game
Codename 47 is certainly an interesting nut to crack. I’m playing the Hitman series for the first time and doing it in order, so I can’t compare to later games in the series yet, but I think this game is an experience worth having, even if it’s not something I’d say everyone should rush out and buy.
The game’s best and worst feature is that you can’t save. In some levels, the more medium-sized ones that are more along the lines of “here’s the level, here’s your weapons, kill this target”, this can make for a very tense, suspenseful stealth experience and you can find yourself resorting to some interesting tactics to just try and survive a minute longer, but as the levels get longer and longer, and as you experience levels that have certain things to be done in a specific order, it becomes incredibly tedious and frustrating. It definitely comes from the 80’s school of game design that wants you to die over and over again until you get it exactly right, so think Cuphead if some of the levels took 3 times as long to master and you’re on the right track for this game’s difficulty. You do get two “lives” but the enemy’s suspicion of you doesn’t reset so you’re still in a bad spot if you died.
– Real player with 38.8 hrs in game