{"id":125,"date":"2025-01-28T20:22:31","date_gmt":"2025-01-29T01:22:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/btphotographer.com\/postdraft\/?p=125"},"modified":"2025-03-02T17:15:42","modified_gmt":"2025-03-02T22:15:42","slug":"snowuary-2025-mafia-ii","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/btphotographer.com\/postdraft\/snowuary-2025-mafia-ii\/","title":{"rendered":"Snowuary 2025 &#8211; Mafia II"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"\">(Autumn, from the Ranged Touch Discord, encouraged people to play snowy games in January and February and write about them. I used this opportunity to motivate my return to <em>Mafia II<\/em>, a game whose snowy beginnings have stuck with me for nearly 15 years).<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"\"><a href=\"https:\/\/btphotographer.com\/postdraft\/snowuary-2025-silent-hill-shattered-memories\/\">Second Snowuary 2025 post, on Silent Hill: Shattered Memories<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"\">What I remembered was the light &#8211; that bluish tint that reflected daylight gives to snowy shadows. It&#8217;s still there, upscaled on my Series X&#8217;s downloaded copy of the game. The quality of urban light at night in the snow and the rain. It&#8217;s good.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"\">The game is also, yknow, hella racist. Partly because this is playable mediated-organized-crime: people and behaviors codified by their work and their ancestry (be that Italian, Sicilian, or Chinese). Part of it is &#8220;realism&#8221; of the 1940s\/50s setting. Part of it is &#8220;hey, this character shouting racial slurs is a shithead&#8221;. And part of it exists in the game-product itself (The Gaylord&#8217;s &#8220;Chow Mein&#8221; playing on the radio after a mission where you assault a Chinese restaurant full of gang members).<\/p>\n\n\n\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity\"\/>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"\">\u201c<em>Mafia II limits all the character\u2019s positive experiences to cut-scene &nbsp;montages, leaving you to play the bullshit work and think, \u2018Boy, they &nbsp;really didn\u2019t do a good job of changing mechanics\/mission designs up as Vito climbs the family ladder\u2019 and then realize that\u2019s the point, that &nbsp;he\u2019s still just the sucker moving someone else\u2019s crates at the dock.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"\">I wrote the above for Kill Screen&#8217;s 2010 <em>High Scores<\/em> end-of-year best-of poll. I had forgotten that the argument is made in the game itself, when the final boss monologues about how much of a pawn Vito has been.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"\"><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>(Autumn, from the Ranged Touch Discord, encouraged people to play snowy games in January and February and write about them. I used this opportunity to motivate my return to Mafia II, a game whose snowy beginnings have stuck with me for nearly 15 years). Second Snowuary 2025 post, on Silent Hill: Shattered Memories What I [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[6,18],"tags":[27,28],"class_list":["post-125","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-games","category-words","tag-mafia-ii","tag-snowuary-2025"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/btphotographer.com\/postdraft\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/125","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/btphotographer.com\/postdraft\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/btphotographer.com\/postdraft\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/btphotographer.com\/postdraft\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/btphotographer.com\/postdraft\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=125"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/btphotographer.com\/postdraft\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/125\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":149,"href":"https:\/\/btphotographer.com\/postdraft\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/125\/revisions\/149"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/btphotographer.com\/postdraft\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=125"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/btphotographer.com\/postdraft\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=125"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/btphotographer.com\/postdraft\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=125"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}