Forget everything else at The Game Awards, between Like A Dragon dev RGG's mysterious new game and a semi-leaked thing, the real winners last night were lovers of early 20th century scraps
Look, I just like getting into massive barneys that slightly pre-date the two world wars, ok?
Among the many, many things that were shown off at last night's Keighleyfest - The Game Awards - were few things that I'm really excited about. Sure, The Witcher 4 was a big one, but there were others, and two of them have more common ground than you might expect from a couple of games set literally miles apart. They're Project Century and Mafia: The Old Country and they both look like they'll scratch my weird itch for fights that take place when my great grandad was alive.
Now, of these two, Mafia's probably the one that's playing the Robin to Project Century's Batman. After all, we already knew it was a thing prior to last night, and it lost a bit more mistique when its freshly narrowed release window leaked ahead of the show.
We still got a fresh trailer for it, though, and I quite enjoyed seeing how its plot about gangsters in 1900s Sicily looks to be shaping up. It might not be an absolute blockbuster that redefines how we all see gaming, but it looks like exactly the kind of just plain good fun title that's the bread and butter of any great year in gaming.
A bit like I did with Star Wars Outlaws this year, I'll likely fire The Old Country up, spend however long it takes to play through it, and just have a plain old nice time. After all, look at all the potential for dicking about in a historical setting, getting up to crimes, and doing some old school fighting that it has. I've not been kidnapped and replaced by Jim Trinca, I swear, these are just the kinds of things I also often get a kick out of in games.
Plus, there are old cars, and plenty of cosa nostra storytelling stuff that I'll presumably at least like as much as I did the previous Mafia games, even if it doesn't end up being quite The Godfather of The Sopranos level.
While - based on what its predecessors were like and the little we've seen of it so far - Mafia might not have the juice, that something that takes a game from good to great, Project Century looks like it definitely could. Announced last night, this is a rather mysteriuous new game being worked on by Yakuza/Like A Dragon series developer and bringers of the pirate Majima RGG Studio. It's set in Japan in 1915 and the trailer showed off some pretty brutal - i.e a bit more bloody than the average Kiryu brawl - street scrapping between its unnamed protagonist and your usual street toughs.
So, like Mafia, there's a historical setting and the chance to batter people before the invention of Penicillin in it, but there also seems to be a bit more bubbling under the surface. The protagonist's eyes are glowing in the main promo image, and at one point he fights a huge, hulking bald figure that arguably tooks more monster than man. Maybe a bit of sci-fi or alt history to spice things up?
Then again, Kazuma Kiryu did once fistfight two tigers and it was played off as just being a normal thing to happen to a guy living in 2006, so who knows.
At the end of the day, both of these games have the potential to be great things since they're still existing in the pre-release nether world right now, and I'll definitely be keen to give them a go when they do drop, even if it's just to beat up some historical lads.