That one friend who gets riled up over board games for nothingâŠ
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That one friend who gets riled up over board games for nothingâŠ
trapani family tradition
Similarities
SARAH AAAA đ„čđ«¶đœ
oh my god my shaylaaaađđ«¶đ»
the fake alex dorame tiktok account pmo so BAD
now that we see and know samâs father and the kind, patient, compassionate, man that gianluca trapani wasâ how much do you think it hurt sam to be around tommy, who was so much like his father, while he fell so short of the same likeness?
Clothes Make The Man: Paulie Lombardo
Much to my chagrin, Iâve discovered that Mafia DE is maybe one of the best video game remakes of all time. Itâs obvious from the designs to the writing to the worldbuilding that someone cared a lot about making something with intent and purpose and quality in mind.
Maybe you disagree, and thatâs fine, but I havenât seen anyone really make the case for DE in a design sense. Iâve seen arguments for gameplay, the graphics, the acting, but not so much the characters. Fortunately, I do this kind of thing for fun. If it falls to me to be the guy that talks about the fashion choices in a game from 5 years ago, so be it. Derek Guy I am not, but I can certainly try. Hello, Iâm Ray, and Iâm going here to talk at length about something no one cares about!
Fun bonus challenge: Try to guess what my major was by the end of this post.
The first thing I noticed in the jump from Mafia (2002) to Mafia DE was the choice to really shake up the character designs. This makes sense, as Mafia wants to be a cinematic series and the foundation of good cinema is strong characters. Hiring actors is part of that, but so too is the deliberate design of the characters - how they look and what they wear in specific.
Paulie and Sam and Tommy are beloved characters in Mafia Classic, but the fact that the games are so old presents a challenge to the modern designer. Audiences in 2020 need more than a cool badass player character gun guy to carry their interest, and Paulie and Sam as your sidekicks need to charm and engage the player for the game to deliver on its narrative beats.
So how do you take an old, low-fidelity character design and make him memorable? Letâs take a look.
I want to start with Paulie because I think his rework tells us the most about the goals of the designers, and we can use that in the future when we (I, me) talk about the other characters and their design choices.
In Mafia Classic, Paulie is easily described: Grey suit, red tie, no frills. The only reason his suit isnât black is because that distinction is reserved for Tommy, whoâs tie is also red.
This isnât an indictment or commentary on the original game at all. If you thought keeping the dark-haired, dark-eyed, be-suited cast of guys in a mafia movie was difficult, imagine trying to do it in a video game and all while staying within a certain polygon count. The fact that you can tell - at a glance - the difference between Paulie, Tommy, Sam, Salieri, and Frank and do so while keeping most of them in a similar uniform is a testament to Illusion Softworksâs attention to detail and commitment to making something of a particular caliber. For 2002, Paulieâs is a perfectly functional design, no notes.
Mafia DE, having the flexibility afforded them by time and a budget, makes the (frankly, inspired) choice to change the charactersâ wardrobes over the course of the story. Paulie actually gets the fewest amount of wardrobe changes of the main three with only two suits (three, I guess, if you count the one he wears to the funeral), a coat, a hat, and the single appearance of the shirt/suspenders combo we see him in at the end of the story and nowhere else.
For those curious, the funeral fit is just a recolored version of the grey suit, double left-side pockets and all.
This lack of outfits compared to Sam (four suits) and Tommy (I havenât finished counting, but itâs more than four) is interesting in light of the fact that DE also expanded his character to make Paulie something of a clotheshorse. Heâs only got a few suits, but heâs very proud of the ones he does have. As indicated by his dialogue, he hates getting his clothes wet, schemes about stealing classy suits as a way of making money, and at the very least has a passing interest in maintaining his hair. Our boyâs got a bit of a vain streak.
Note Tommy's quick pursed lips expression here. Here's a guy who's used to dealing with this shit.
The brilliant part (and this will become a running theme) is that the character design is doing as much work here as the dialogue.
Taking cues from the Classic design, the outfit we first see DE Paulie in is a grey suit and a red tie. However! The increase in graphical fidelity gives the designers here an opportunity to expand on the details.
As a quirk of what I believe to be the lighting engine, Classic Paulieâs suit often appeared not just grey, but cool grey, almost violet. The DE designers really leaned into that, giving the first suit we see him in a more purple tone, brought out even more by the (now darker) red tie. The second suit he starts wearing after A Trip to the Country leans into this even more heavily, purple windowpane check with a rich purple tie and matching pocket square.
Thank you Nikita Nanako on Artstation for uploading this to his portfolio. Makes my life easier.
Even without knowing the historical significance of purple in fashion, this marks Paulie immediately to the playerâs eyes, and certainly in the eyes of the other characters. Purple is a flashy color, historically expensive to manufacture, associated with royalty. By the time Paulieâs wearing it in 1930-whatever, it was an artificial dye and much less expensive to make, but that doesnât stop it from being a statement. Purple is a color you wear when you want someone to notice what youâre wearing. And as weâve established already, Paulie very much wants people to notice. Thereâs also like, literary implications to the color choices here, but I think thatâs another post.
The lapels on the DE suits, too, say a lot about the kind of guy Paulie is. Both suits have peaked lapels as opposed to the notched lapels of the Classic design, and indeed, everyone else in DE. Peaked lapels - like the color purple - are a deliberate choice, one that draws attention to itself. Theyâre sharp-looking, or as Paulie says, âreal classyâ.
More importantly for our purposes as students of design though, theyâre not always appropriate for every situation. A peaked lapel is usually reserved for a highly formal look. To our modern eyes, we see a peaked lapel and think âhigh-powered courtroom dramaâ, or âclassy social eventâ. Itâs not exactly out of style, but itâs a bold choice to wear to, say, an illicit moonshine deal at an old abandoned farm. Paulie does not care about the context. Unless the situation demands discretion, this is a guy who is pulling up in his Sunday best no matter what.
And the hat. Oh, we canât move on without talking about the hat.
Note the windowpane check suit has a hat with a shinier band too!
Paulie is the only character in the game to sport the homburg, again setting him apart from the more classic fedoras the Sam and Tommy usually wear. The homburg is a favorite of online menswear aficionados, but despite years of tireless blogging, this particular hat has yet to come back into fashion the way the fedora has. As a result, to the modern eye, the homburg looks very old-fashioned. It has a tall, broad profile that⊠Hey, see if you notice a running theme here: draws attention to itself.
Importantly, the homburg (in the American cultural consciousness anyway) is very much a bad guy hat. Thereâs a few contributing factors to this, but it comes primarily from our genre fiction and the images of the mobsters of the â30s and â40s. In gangster flicks, the good guy detective wears a fedora. The big, bad, cigar-chomping gangster wears a homburg. If youâre British, you might be able to get away with wearing one as a stuffy upper-crust sort, but if youâre American you are immediately ranked amongst the likes of Michael Corleone and Lucky Luciano.
The urge to add a picture of Diamonds Droog here was a little too strong.
Thereâs more I could touch on. His ostentatious little peacock pocket square alone has bewitched me.
But really, I want to get to the crux of the thing, which is that like⊠Despite everything about him saying he pays attention to these things, none of these aesthetic choices heâs making are actually working for him.
The peaked lapels, the big, fat hat, the garish colors. They might command a hefty price tag, but they donât actually *look good*. This is a guy who has learned what good taste looks like in theory, but has not made himself master of it. The clothes are wearing the man.
Would you trust this man with your money? Your car? Dating advice?
It makes sense when you think about what his background would have been. What does a poor son of immigrants know about expensive suits? Only what he can pick up by observation! He wasnât raised in a high-society environment, he wouldnât know the difference between a suit you wear to a warehouse shootout and a suit you wear to a wedding just as he wouldnât know the difference between a fish fork and a salad fork. To a guy like Paulie, the details donât matter. He just knows the suits are expensive, and that a younger Paulie would never have been able to afford them.
Many real-life gangsters had this problem as well. Al Capone went from being a poor bootlegger to an extremely rich and powerful gangster, and all the money in the world couldnât buy him good taste either.
He's swimming in those lapels! And hey, that tie looks familiar...
There were other gangsters who had this problem too, but some were smart enough to look to their peers for cues about what to wear and how to wear it. (Weâll talk more about that when I get around to Sam.)
The fact that Paulie doesnât do this, however, tells us everything we need to know about the guy just by looking at him. Heâs stubborn, stuck in his ways, unable to tell the difference between expensive and tasteful, and wouldnât know subtlety if it clocked him in the jaw. All from the design decisions the art team made, and without adding a word of dialogue. This is brilliant stuff. Iâm in love with him, obviously.
That's all for now! Thanks for reading.