Mafia is one of the few games I played through two or three times. The story, characters, I remember it being labelled as "delivering on what GTA promised". The world in it is alive, there's always something going on that creates atmosphere, just seemingly because the NPC's actually do their own thing. That alone is great, but the one thing that stood out for me was the driving. This game features an awesome way of switching between steering wheel and mouse and keyboard, that works flawlessly. The moment you get into a car, and move your steering wheel more than a few degrees (I still have the red Logitech Momo Force I used then), the game switches to steering wheel input, and the force feedback (which is way up there in terms of believability and realism) just comes alive. Stop the car, get out, start working with the keyboard and mouse for normal third person moving and shooting, and the steering wheel switches off again. I spent hours just driving around the city, enjoying the feel of the different cars, the different surfaces, and the scenery. You can stop and get out anywhere, get on a bus, get out wherever else, and even steal another car if you saw something that looked nice. Highly recommended, it beats any other game that tried to deliver on "open world, good story, good driving physics". Haven't played anything like it since, glad it's going on modern OS's!
