My friends call me Stefano. But you…you’re no friend of mine, so you can call me Tommy—Tommy The Hammer. Yeah, that’s right. The Hammer. And don’t forget it, or I’ll clip you faster than you can say “arrivederci.”

So you wanna know about this here Mafia II, huh? You wanna know how real it gets? I’ll tell you this—it’s as real as you’ll ever see, punk.

It’s all about this kid, this cugine. Goes by the name of Vito. Vito lives in Empire Bay, a 1940s town that’s big enough to feel like New York but small enough that you get to know all the hot spots. And he’s a punk, like you. But he’s a punk for a reason, see. He grew up poor, then the Nazis shot him up good in Europe. His father died and left his family in debt—it’s a crying shame what happened to this kid.

But he’s got this friend, this goombah, who calls himself Joe. Joe associates with…an unsavory crowd. And Joe, he wants to cut Vito in on the action. And Vito, you know, he needs the money. He needs to help his mamma, and he wants to be a “somebody.”

So he and Joe, they’re told to pay a visit to some lame-brained, no-good losers, some jamokes, and let’s just say they take care of business—bada-bing, bada-boom!

It’s like this from start to finish. It’s not about bosses and wise guys: It’s about soldiers—the guys in the trenches. And it’s not all wine and roses either: You gotta have the stomach for it. Guys are whacked all over the place, and it ain’t pretty.

Sure, sometimes Vito’s gotta think about what he’s gonna do next, and sometimes he fights with his own…whadya call it…morals? And sometimes his mamma, she ain’t so happy about what he does. But he’s in too deep to get out, and the payoffs are too good to stop.

Drive, explore, shoot!
The game is like Goodfellas, ya know? It’s what you call…linear. There’s only one ending, but the ride that gets you there, now that’s reeeally somethin’.
It starts in the 1940s, ends in the 50s, and if you’re lucky and don’t die, you’ll get to see the city change right before your eyes. And if you’re really lucky, you might get to pop a few gavones along the way. Maybe you use your gun. Or maybe you smash their freakin’ heads in with a lead pipe—whatever.

What’s that? Oh yeah, Empire Bay. It’s ten square miles—not as big as Grand Theft Auto’s Vice City, but it’s heavy on the details and filled with places to go and people to see. Put it this way, kid—you’re gonna hafta drive a car to get around.

Hell, half the fun is driving your car, or any other car you…um…acquire. And these cars—all fifty of ’em—drive like real cars. If a cop shoots out a tire, you feel it. If you’ve stashed one too many bodies in your trunk, then you can’t pull away from the guys chasin’ ya. And if you want to hear a little Dino or Peggy Lee on your radio, just turn the freakin’ dial. Got it?

But look, there’s a lot of…um…visual atmosphere. Me and my boys, we put the heat on the 2K Games’ bosses to cough up the straight goods, and they spilled the beans faster than John Gotti in a New York courtroom.

Fancy PhysX
Turns out 2K worked real close with the gang over at NVIDIA on this one to incorporate this stuff called PhysX and Apex. Anyways, this PhysX deal is a real-time physics engine that uses what they call “GPU parallel processing” to help make the action in the game look more realistic. But they tell me the big news is this thing called Apex. It’s a development platform that makes it easier for designers to add GPU-accelerated physics effects to their games. 

So the upshot is that when you see a broad struttin’ down the street on a windy day and her skirt blows up, it ain’t because some bum programmer came up with some freakin’ canned animation. It’s because the wind’s blowin’ and bouncin’ off buildings that way at that particular moment, see? That’s what this Dane Johnston character at NVIDIA told me, anyway. He’s what you call a “PhysX engineer.” Word is the action is simulated, not animated, across each scene and each and every important character.

But a babe and her skirt are small potatoes. Mafia II head honcho Denby Grace says the big thrills come when you break out the heavy artillery. Like when you and your enforcers shoot up a bar somewhere because some no-good, dirty-rotten maggot ratted you out. Denby says, “Man, everything comes apart.”

So, when a Molotov cocktail explodes, everything nearby reacts to the blast—even those fancy cuffs on that handmade Italian suit of yours. That’s a thing NVIDIA calls “force field.” And Grace says if you pump a few shells into the bar, you’ll see glass and hunks of wood and tile fly all over the freakin’ place, bouncing off solid surfaces and off each other, too. And when they stop bouncing, they’ll lie on the floor in plain view, so you gotta kick ’em outta the way just to get by. Remember the final gun battle in Scarface? Then you get my drift, dontcha?

All of this is Apex at work, and there’s four parts to it: Apex Clothing, Apex Destruction, Apex Vegetation, and Apex Turbulence. This here game has two of ’em in action—Clothing and Turbulence. As you might expect, Clothing makes characters’ clothes look and behave like real cloth—and this is the first game ever to use Apex Clothing. Meanwhile, inside this Turbulence thing is a superset module called “Particles.” That’s the deal that makes all that crap fly around so authentic-like when you’re shootin’ up a bar, house, car—anything!

Look kid, Apex is built into almost everything you’ll interact with—all of the characters, your car windows, even the garbage in the dumpster where you toss your “excess baggage.”

And listen up—just so’s you get a good look at the bullet-riddled corpse of that dirt bag who disrespected your amico, you got these dynamic cameras all over the place too. You know, so you feel good about yourself.

2D? Fuggedaboutit!
Oh yeah, Mafia II also supports 3D Vision. What the hell does that mean? It means that if you have one of those fancy-shmancy NVIDIA 3D Vision Kits and a 120Hz-capable display, you can play the game in full-on stereoscopic 3D. That Dane guy says, “People who’ve never experienced stereoscopic 3D will be blown away. It’s the same thing as going from standard definition TV to high definition—it substantially modifies how you feel while you’re playing the game.”

What’s that? You wanna know what sorta gear you’re gonna need to pull off this job? Well kid, one of the real nice things about Mafia II is that it’s what they call fully scalable, so it adjusts itself to your hardware and should run well on low-end machines. But if you wanna play the way Denby and his boys meant it to be played, with graphics and physics that’ll knock your socks off, you gotta have the right equipment—just like for any good hit. You better make damn sure you have an NVIDIA video card, ’cuz nothing else will make those physics fly. A card like a GTX 280 will give you a good show, but a GTX 480 will give you maximum impact.
One last thing—this Mafia II is no cinch. Denby tells me it took him twelve hours to play it from start to finish. And this guy’s the freakin’ producer, for cryin’ out loud.

But you can see for yourself the game's out now and you can get the demo here. We've been playing it in triple-screen 3D glory using NVIDIA's 3D Vision Surround and it looks and plays great! Now get the hell outta here before I do somethin’ I might regret. Capiche?