One of the hardest things to do is to publicly criticize someone with whom you're acquainted. It's much easier to tear a game apart when there are no faces to go with the game. So it is with Radical Entertainment and their latest project Scarface: The World is Yours. I feel the need to disclose the fact that the company flew a bunch of us up to Vancouver, got us liquored up and planted all manner of devious suggestions in our minds (Click Here for our coverage of the event). Still, I have a duty to represent the game faithfully and will remain honest even when I'd rather gush about the good and downplay the bad.

It almost seems moot to talk about the movie because of its notoriety. It's true some people may not have seen it, but surely everyone's heard the phrase, "Say hello to my little friend!" whether or not they knew from whence it came. Anyone who's seen the classic gangster flick will recall the impact Al Pacino's performance had and will likely identify with the video game. Anyone that hasn't seen the movie really should. The platinum edition of the DVD is out and being hyped like it's going out of style so there's really no excuse not to. After watching it, again or for the first time, you may find yourself interested in the video game as well.

After all, that's the whole reason movies get converted to games in the first place. No one's trying to pull the wool over anyone's eyes here. Marketing is about branding and name recognition, two things that Scarface has in spades. The question is not whether the name will sell copies of the game for it surely will. The question being answered is whether or not the game is actually fun and worth playing.

For anyone familiar with the movie and how it ends, you can imagine the difficulties a direct story translation would present. Who wants to play a game just to have it end the way the movie did? So the game's writers decided to take an alternate road and provide an alternate ending that leaves room for continuation. While the change does downplay the theme of the movie, it stages the game rather nicely.

The game starts out at the end of the movie, in the classic staircase scene. You play through the scene, escape the mansion and spend the rest of the game rebuilding your cocaine empire in Miami. Eventually, you build up enough Balls and reputation to go after him and get your revenge.

But is the game any fun? The answer is complex since it's a matter of tastes and depends on the audience. The first question you should ask yourself is do you like the gameplay in Grand Theft Auto. If you do, you may get a kick out of Scarface, since it's practically the same game. It definitely has the 1980s Miami look and feel, and your dealing with Cubans instead of Gangsta Rappers, but it is essentially identical. You can split hairs and point out that in Scarface they do this or in GTA they do that, but the concepts are no different at all. You drive around, you steal cars, you avoid the cops and you kill rival gangs with guns (ok, ok, Tony gets to use a chainsaw).

I've never been one to disparage a game for lack of originality, and I won't do so here. I figure if someone borrows from another person's endeavor and improves on it, we all benefit. For those who judge such a situation harshly should know that Scarface took the GTA concept, slapped the Scarface logo on it, made a few improvements and shipped it.

But that still has no bearing on whether the game is any fun or not. The second question you might ask yourself is how much you liked the movie and how fun it would be for you to be Tony Montana, the quintessential gangster bad ass in a GTA style game. I happened to love the movie, but never really had much love for Grand Theft Auto. It never had much appeal to me because it all seemed so generically ghetto. I could really get behind Tony though and spent a great deal of time playing the game. A great deal of time having fun, pure and simple.

For me, most of the appeal was in playing the Tony Montana character. I was excited about the game, and was disappointed to a major degree when I realized that it would be unavailable on the Xbox 360. Later on, when I received my review copy I was further disappointed, though not surprised from talking to the dev team, that the Xbox 360 was not backwards compatible with the game.

Which brings me to the third question you'll ask yourself. Do I play Xbox or PS2 games? The question may seem ridiculous, but consider this. Many gamers myself included have been spoiled by the latest generation of video gaming. We're used to seeing high-resolution models, full anti-aliasing, and shadows everywhere. It's unfortunate, but likely true, that anyone that's made the jump to next generation technology would scoff at Scarface and berate it simply because it's not up to the standard of the state of the art. I'll even admit that it was hard for me at first, playing the game on an alternate standard definition television set. I had to remind myself that people do still play Xboxes and Playstations and that I would have to recalibrate my senses and put away my next gen biases in order to give the game a fair review.

After doing so, the graphics that were average level Xbox and PS2 caliber bothered me less and less. The last thing to be said about the graphics is that in spite of some garish artifacts like popping in of Level Of Detail geometry and an inadequate selection of character models, the developers got Tony right. His look and his gestures are unmistakable. Since he's the main focus of the game, it's not surprising but I've seen many a movie to game conversion where the main character looks just awful. It's too bad that the same level of attention couldn't be paid to the rest of the character models. You'll see the weed smoking Cheech character around practically every corner and one time in the Babylon club I encountered an entire dance floor composed of the same low poly black dude and low poly blonde chick. There must have been ten people on the dance floor all made up of two character models.

Where the game lacked in visual resolution and detail it more than made up in the voice-acting department. The cast is a seemingly random amalgamation of well known actors led by an amazing Tony Montana played by Andre Sogliuzzo. Playing the game, you'll recognize Cheech Marin easily, but the list goes on and on. From the original movie, you've got Steven Bauer who played "Manny" Tony Montana's best friend and Robert Loggia who played the part of Frank Lopez the drug dealer that gave Tony his start in Miami. They don't play their original characters for obvious reasons, but their voices can be heard throughout the game. Jay Mohr and James Woods are some other actors you'll recognize and the game even has Michael Rapaport, the curly blonde haired gym teacher from Boston Public and the father in War at Home.

When you combine all that together with an original story written by American History X writer David McKenna, the result is a very believable world that you can instantly identify from the movie.

If you find that after answering all of the preceding questions, you're interested in what the game has to offer, you'll most likely be interested in some of the relevant aspects of the game engine itself.

In the movie, Tony describes his plan for the world by saying, "First you get the money, then you get the power, then you get the women." While it doesn't necessarily happen in exactly that order, the quote does sum up the game

The game is an open world. It can be slow to pick up, because the game leads you through so many different elements before actually letting you do whatever you feel like. When you finally do though, there are some fairly basic patterns to the game.

You start out small, dealing a couple hundred grams of coke here and there and trying to buy businesses to act as drug fronts. Once you get fronts going you gain reputation and start making contacts that will hook you up with larger supplies if you do missions for them. You pay to fix up your mansion and buy furniture, cars, boats, businesses and even people. As you make more money, you can afford more powerful defenses and you gain more powerful friends. Then you'll use your power and reputation to fill your mansion with hot low polygon chicks.

You have to be careful though, because rival gangs are always trying to take you down. You can't forget about the cops either, if they catch you while you're in possession of any drugs or drug money, it'll all get confiscated. If you're not smart you can easily lose millions of dollars by forgetting to go to one of your many banks to launder your "dirty money."

The driving engine is top notch. You can power slide around corners, steal cars from commuters and if you get enough heat from the cops get your tires blown out with a spike strip like in Need For Speed: Most Wanted. The third person engine is also well implemented. You can auto lock on making targeting easy, or you can manually aim requiring more skill and also more Balls. When your Balls meter fills up (I'm not joking at all here folks) you can go into a rage not unlike the coked-out adrenaline pumping craze that Tony experienced in the famous staircase scene from the movie. You're invulnerable while enraged and every baddy you kill gives you health back. It's a great ability when you're in one of those desperate situations where you're low on health.

The only thing I didn't like was the chainsaw melee engine. On one mission, you're forced to use the chainsaw in a revenge situation and the control is just difficult to get used to. The range is very short as it should be, but you can't move quickly while sawing so if you accidentally start sawing too far away you really get messed up. Needless to say, after the mission that forced you to use it, I never used it again.

There are some other utilitarian features that are worth noting since they could be considered improvements over the GTA style. The first is the Satellite Phone. Using this and a combination of employees you can purchase or call for weapons and ammo, cars, boats, and furniture for your mansion straight from your phone and have them delivered. This is a cool feature that eliminates the need to drive over to so-and-sos because they are the only guy that'll sell you ammo or furniture. It doesn't start out that way though. The ability to make one phone call and have people jump to attention and do your bidding is something that you have to earn, so don't expect it early in the game. The power comes later.

The game has fairly significant duration. I played it for about eight to ten hours and had managed to take over Little Havana, Downtown and was just getting to the point where I was able to deal directly with coke connections in the islands. I would have played it longer and may still try to find the time to play it to completion, but time doesn't always permit. The main reason is because I enjoy playing the game despite many of its shortcomings; not least of which is its last generation look.

A secondary reason is to figure out what the developers put in at the end of the game. During one discussion in particular, one of the producers indicated that it was too bad that in general reviewers don't have the time to complete the games they review because they have to get them out the door. His disappointment was based on the fact that there was something very cool at the end of the game worth experiencing that the press would never have a chance to witness until well after the article has run. Perhaps it doesn't matter much since it would be rotten to spoil it here anyway.

To summarize, Scarface is a game with a very specific audience in mind. With the next generation here and forcing us to update our perceptions of video games, Scarface can't help but look dated in comparison. It's not bad for an Xbox or PS2 game, and it is quite fun even if it is basically Grand Theft Auto with some convenience features added. That's what ultimately matters. Not what I say or what your buddy says, but whether or not you, the player, had fun.