The car moves down yet another virtual New York street, circa 1960. I press a button on a plastic controller and the car stops, press another button and my mobster antihero and the two goombahs with him get out. (I'm going through the motions in The Godfather II , a Mature-rated video game released this week for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, but try not to think about the movies and books that share its title; in fact, it's best to keep the films and all other art forms out of this.)
I guide these stock game characters over to a woman with a symbol shining above her head and press a button to initiate a canned conversation. The woman says she wants a former boyfriend roughed up; in exchange she will tell me how to kill a member of the rival Rosato family.
This transaction is duly rendered, but it still requires closer scrutiny: It is one of the pillars of a commercial game developed by a large studio, EA Redwood Shores, and published by its parent company, Electronic Arts. The shining symbol means the character has a favour to ask, mostly involving revenge for everyday matters - bad landlord, blind date gone wrong - and requesting a specific act of violence on my part. What I get in return is a blueprint for murder - how to execute a rival using the "proper" method, such as strangulation or a push off a rooftop.
Even leaving aside the casual brutality, none of this makes any sense. From a narrative point of view, these interactions are lessons in abject falseness. Why do random strangers know how your made man should kill another made man? Previous Mafia-inspired entertainment properties have shown that the style of a killing sends a message - and this game exists wholly within a world created by other entertainment - but that is a thin foundation for a sequence that must be repeated a dozen times or more.
The flawed favour system simply doesn't hold up to the weight placed upon it, which tells you all you need to know about The Godfather II as a game. Like the 2006 original, it owes more to Grand Theft Auto , with its third-person shooting, driving and make-work missions, than to Mario Puzo or Francis Ford Coppola, who really should not be pulled into this.
The last time out, EA brought in the voices of some heavy hitters from the acting world - Marlon Brando and Robert Duvall - to flesh out a competent, sometimes enjoyable trip through a familiar set of rules. In the sequel, the flash is gone and its replacement is supposed to be a deeper play experience. In theory, there is a strategy element here that puts the player in charge of a business. You have to wrest control of various criminal enterprises - drugs and prostitution - away from other families by invading their turf and then managing each enterprise.
In practice, such corrupt capitalism requires no more strategy than it takes to order a faux-Italian pizza. You have to make sure the money you spend on security doesn't exceed the cash coming in, and occasionally send underlings to defend or invade a brothel off-screen.
The rest of the game is set up to give you reasons to shoot and beat people, or robbing a bank to beat a credit crunch. On that front, too, The Godfather II abstains from anything approaching a challenge. Your guy, backed up by a growing squad of henchman, seems boringly invincible a few hours in.
For a game supposedly aimed at adults, the whole thing is frankly insulting. Underneath the bluster and violent stupidity - the brass knuckles included in the press kits, the opening credits with their gunshots and blood splatter - there is no game here. EA could change things up in The Godfather III by making an actual business simulation, and perhaps show their development team a season or two of The Wire. Otherwise they, like gamers considering The Godfather II, should spend their resources elsewhere.
Will Arnett's not enough
There are all kinds of games in Eat Lead: The Return of Matt Hazard (rated Teen, for the PS3 and Xbox 360). It is a spoof of third-person shooters with Canadian funny man Will Arnett ( Arrested Development ) voicing Hazard, a veteran video-game hero set adrift in a corrupted piece of code.
Arnett gets to grit his teeth and deliver some passably funny lines in his mock-serious way. Later on Neil Patrick Harris ( Doogie Howser, M.D. and How I Met Your Mothe r) adds his voice to the mix as a game-store executive with nefarious motives.
Combined, they almost make this worth playing, but not quite. It does have a passable cover system, based on Gears of War , that allows you to hide Matt behind barriers and jump to other safe points while shooting at its rogue's gallery of clichéd opponents. There are in-jokes, like the Master Chef character (in place of Halo 's protagonist, Master Chief), and entire sequences lifted from Metal Gear Solid 2 . But playing it and laughing at it are two different things because Eat Lead is repetitive in the extreme. Evil guys pop up, evil guys get shot, then move to the next room and make fun of repetitive games.
At times, I started to confuse it with The Godfather II , especially when background objects started disappearing. In one game it was a glitch, part of a pattern of creative negligence, and in the other it was a joke about glitches. But the easy comparison does not do Eat Lead any favours. It too happily stomps all over that fine line between poking fun at games and being a bad game on its own.