Mafia being a realistic simulator of the protagonist's life is a tertiary point to my main argument.

My main argument boils down to that Mafia is great because it is one of the most immersive, most atmospheric, best written, best characterized, best acted (all the voice actors are exceptional), stories that has ever been put into a video game. And that is accomplished by blending all of those things with excellent gameplay.

There are probably less than 5 games ever that can even hope to compete with Mafia in those regards.

Sure it can take a long time to get places...but that's not a bad thing. It's not a 100-yard dash. There's no rush. There is no reason not to take one's time and savor every moment. Except for, say, the many heated chase sequences in the game, including one at the very start. Mafia is fast when it needs to be, and not fast when it doesn't need to be.

Mafia 2 and 3 sucked very badly in comparison to Mafia 1, in large part because the sequels tried to turn Mafia into a GTA clone by dumbing-down the gameworld and gameplay mechanics to the levels of GTA. That's not a good thing. That's not progress. That's regression.

No, they didn't keep authenticity by doing that. Cops ignoring crashes, and red light jumping, and speeding, and unconcealed weapons as a suspicious person wanders through the streets, etc. is not authentic. It's arcadey and dumb and immersion-breaking.

The instances you mentioned as non-story parts in Mafia actually are story parts. They are letting the player share Tommy's experiences of becoming acclimated to his new mobster lifestyle. Those moments are among the beautiful little touches that make Mafia brilliant.

I'm not sure what your reasoning is behind thinking Mafia sucks at being a game, it doesn't though. Yes, Mafia does resemble a movie, but that's not a bad thing. Each mission features plenty of interactive elements and a huge variety of them too. You praised Mafia 3, even though 95% of Mafia 3 consists of doing the same one boring task over and over again ad nauseaum. Mafia 1 doesn't have that problem. Most modern games have vastly less variety than does Mafia 1.

Mafia 2 didn't improve any aspect of Mafia 1 game's design. I've played Mafia 2 all the way through, and everything about it is terrible in comparison to Mafia 1.

For example, Mafia 1 gives you a huge garage that you can walk or drive into and out of. When a mission starts, you can walk through that garage, admire the beauty of all your shiny cars, and manually pick one to drive for the mission.

Contrast that great gameplay with Mafia 2: Mafia 2 has no interactive garage. Your "garage" in Mafia 2 is literally a slide show! You can't walk into it or out of it. You can't park in it or drive your car out of it. You can't stroll through it at your leisure. All you can do is stare at an incredibly boring slide of a car, and then click the 'next slide' button to change the frame to an equally boring slide of a different car. That's pathetic!

In Mafia 1, you can take cover, or not, at your own volition. In Mafia 2, you have to spend 90% of your time under cover in every single firefight, because it's horrible "cover mechanic"-based game design requires that. And if an enemy flanks you while you are in cover in Mafia 2, you die instantly guaranteed. By the time you press the "remove myself from cover" button, in order to be able to point your gun at the enemy (which you cannot do while in cover, if the enemy is right beside you) who is about to kill you, you are already dead.

The characterization in Mafia 2 is also horrible: the main character receives no development at any point in the game, and his only motivations are to get money and women and fast cars, just because reasons. He has no psychological or emotional depth whatsoever. In contrast, Tommy from Mafia 1 is fully-fleshed out as a person with complex emotions and psychological motivations for his actions, and he changes over the course of the story.

Mafia 1 mediocre and unremarkable? No way. A lot of time I disagree with the marketing-speak on GOG's store pages, but one time they got it right was with Mafia: even in 2017, it remains unsurpassed. Mafia was, is, and always will be an example of a video game at the very top of its art form, a bona fide masterpiece.

You could try this: https://thirteenag.github.io/wfp#mafia

I'd try it myself, but the price is a bit high for me right now as I limit how much I pay for games that don't support Linux (I plan to buy it and try it in Wine eventually though, once it's discounted enough... will see about making a Wine wrapper for it then as well)

Better not to re-release it then. Better to leave the original intact and keep the game off the market entirely rather than to bastardize it, which is exactly what this re-release does.

Modding this re-release is not hard for the moment because some great Mafia fans happened to step up to the plate and offered fixes that restore the game to its original form. But there was no guarantee that they were going to do that. There is also no guarantee that those mods will continue to work if & when GOG patches the game in the future. There is also no guarantee that every GOG user is going to be aware of all the great moments that they are missing out on with the GOG re-release in it's vanilla form, and that mods exist that can fix the game for them.

That is to say, the existence of a mod to restore the game to its original form does not make the initial act of bastardizing the game okay.

No.

Individual choice is actually better, we don't need you doing it for us.

eh, what i said was unnecessary

I was afraid that the soundtrack was going to be removed when this was released. Now I'm worried about this going to Steam. If it does go to Steam I suspect that the soundtrack will be removed from the version in everyone's library via "update". Take Two has done something similar via Rockstar.

Hopefully I'm wrong about this. Maybe this came to GoG as an exclusive so they don't have to remove the soundtrack from already purchased versions on Steam.

Not at all! The race was my favourite part of Mafia.

The one and only thing I disliked about it was the unskippable cutscene leading up to it -- I seriously did want to hurt someone over that, because it took me a while to figure out why I was doing so badly, and I had to sit through the cutscene a lot.

Eventually I realised that absolutely everything that had made the race seem difficult was a simple matter of physics, and 100% understandable and logical. Car vs track. That's all there was to it. The moment that I understood this, the challenge became simple: learn the track, and recognise the limitations of the car.

As soon as I realised that, everything fell into place -- I wasn't losing because the game was too hard or unfair; I was losing because I'd been a terrible race driver. The race wasn't actually hard at all (although it was still exhilarating!); it just required me to recognise a few simple facts.

I was sad when there wasn't more racing in the game, and I was sad when I heard they'd patched the game to make the race easier, thus depriving other players of the same thrills I'd experienced.

I don't want to be the one doing this either. Everyone should be respecting the original game for what it is: high art. Removing the original music is a desecration of that art. It's morally wrong. For those reasons, it shouldn't be done.

And the "individual choice" is not an informed one for new players to Mafia. They have no frame of reference to know how the removed music will drastically reduce the value of their playing experience and the emotional impact that the game will have upon them. There is no way to capture in words or adequately communicate to new players what is being lost here.

I too was sad to find that was the first and last race. Maybe an indie out there will give us the goggle-eyed racer we crave, set to a swinging soundtrack...

So I'm guessing this is the patched, easier race version?

I'll add it to the wishlist for now. It's a little pricey, but I've been looking forward to this release.

Relevant

Also,

Well, I suppose it's a step in the right direction.

I was hoping for a newer X-Com (probably won't see X-Com 2 for a while since it just got an expansion and is still selling well on Steam, but Enemy Unknown/Within are past due for a release here) game or Borderlands, but seeing more 2K titles on GOG is a good thing even if it's one I bought, played, and beat ages ago.

IIRC this was a PS2 game, no?

It's been a while, so I could be wrong there, but I'm pretty sure I played this just before Final Fantasy XII.
There will be patches.

I have a game where the music was replaced with vastly inferior tracks due to licensing, I didn't even need a patch from somebody else for it, I just extracted the audio from the PlayStation version and stitched it into the video files for the scenes where they originally were.

Wow, the original Mafia! I never had the chance to play this one. Maybe I will in the future, and it's good to know it's available here on GOG ^_^

Oh, by the way, there is a wishlist entry for the original licensed music now. Not that it will help much, but perhaps it can encourage some negotiations with enough votes. https://www.gog.com/wishlist/games/mafia_1s_licensed_music