Scarface: The World is Yours

 Throttle wide open like a bat out of hell

Scarface, another entry on the long list of movies loved and enjoyed by people who seem to have left halfway through the flick and didn't seem to grasp any of the salient messages held within. (Just line it up next to Goodfellas and The Wolf of Wall Street) This movie marked Al Pacino's other biggest role after that one crime movie he did that one time, and I guess Heat was pretty big too. It followed the endeavours of one Tony Montana as he entered a world of crime and organised hard drug selling, becoming steadily more infused in the fake glitz of dirty money and tainted pleasures of corruption, all leading him to a violent and brutal end brought around by his own greed with a tad of slipping out of his depth without ever realising. It's a fine movie, I like it, but do you know what I've never said whilst watching Scarface; Huh, I want to play the game of this.

And that might just be because the game of Scarface already existed, and it was called Grand Theft Auto Vice City. Seriously, playing that game after having just watched the movie, you'll be wondering how Rockstar can walk down the street without getting picked up by that warrant they must have for their terminal sticky fingers. Not only did they nick large chunks of the visuals, some of the premise, and a bit of the character, they even kept entire narrative arcs practically verbatim from Scarface and even 'homage' to it's dialogue with their own. So we don't really need no video game adaptation of that movie anymore... and we never got one. (That's right, I fooled you with the title of this blog, it was all a trick! Well, not quite.) There is actually a game bearing the name 'Scarface: The World is Yours', but it's not an adaptation.

Spoilers for an almost forty year old movie (which some consider a classic, but honestly no one is going to flip a table if you never watch it for as long as you live. It is very dated) but Tony Montana freakin' dies at the end. In a movie that is already decently bloody throughout, the finale goes full on action movie as our 'hero' has an extended heavy machine gun fight with the entire Colombian drug empire before some lone totally-out-place weirdo sneaks behind him and blasts him in the back with a shotgun, putting an end to his violent cocaine fuelled reign over Miami. (Parts of Miami. The drugged parts) This mysterious figure manages this somehow and was never seen before or after, so I guess Tony died to a rando. (Seriously, how did he get behind Tony? Only his office was behind him. This guy must have pulled out a Dimension door or something) So that's how the story pans out. To quote an angry Pinkerman agent: "You people venerate savagery and you will die savagely." So what do you think could possibly happen in the game based on this movie, bearing in mind what I now tell you; it's a direct sequel.

If you answered 'they obviously devise a clever way for the legacy of Tony Montana to be carried on by another character, thus mirroring the moral dilemmas of the movie whilst leaving ample space for the writing to grow past it's roots and branch out in new directions', then you have a lot more faith in the gaming industry then anyone else did back then. No. Instead this game just starts with that exact final shootout and basically says, 'what if Tony was a video game protagonist?'. So yeah, you start off gunning down armies until a hit marker tells you that someone is chipping away at your backside so that you can swoop around and dome that shotgun guy. Tony Montana lives. All the ethos of the movie, getting your just desserts, completely waived. Tony is now free to become an even more violent, terrible human being than he already was. (Yay.)

'Scarface: The World of Yours' tells the rather straightforward, but still pretty fun to experience, tale of Tony Montana going around and restarting his cocaine empire, only this time with as few middle men as humanely possible, (given that he literally sells it on the street himself) and a little bit of rampant revenge thrown in there too. I found and played this game back in the days when I was a Nintendo Wii kid and so yes, this and Dead Rising were games that I played  on my Nintendo Wii. And just to hammer home how weird that is; this is a game with rampant swearing, wherein the currency of missions is 'balls', and for which the signature feature is to activate a first person rage mode wherein the player's gun somehow starts shooting bullets powerful enough to blow off limbs. Nintendo welcomed a port of that game to their consoles. (And yet a proper 3D Grand Theft Auto had to wait until current year, why?)

Back in those days, when I was on the most dire of Grand Theft Auto draughts, Scarface was my everything, and it's commodification of the 80's drug dealer lifestyle is always going to go down in my hazy memory as that one special little open world experience that no one else quite remembers but me. Whatsmore, when I squint my eyes and peer just through that fog of ages, I can actually recall this game not being all that bad at all, but in fact coming together as a half decent and enjoyable title with it's location changes, gambling  cock fights, mildly customisable home, (Rockstar still hasn't introduced home customisation in any of their games) and by-the-books but still kinda dumb fun shooting combat. I just... don't feel like picking the game up again anytime soon in order to prove those elements are as good as I remember them to be.

And if there is one boon I can say about Scarface the game which cannot be said about 90% of other open world video games on the market; it's that the soundtrack freakin' slapped. I don't know what it is or why, but typically whenever anyone other than Rockstar goes shopping around for licencing deals, they come back with bargain bin crap that only five or six other people in the world has even heard of before, yet alone like. The only notable exception I can think of is Saints Row, and even then only most Saints Row games. (I don't know what 3 and 4 were on.) Maybe it was because of the pedigree of the name attached, disillusioning the contract negotiations, or maybe it's simply because the setting of this game meant that the developers could shoot for more old school tracks that weren't as hotly contested on the licencing scene, but this game has some true bangers. Super Freak, Push it to the limit (obviously) and freakin Planet Rock by Afrika Bambaataa.

Unfortunately, like a good many games out there, this is one of those ones that has slipped into obscurity once the team didn't have the ability to host it anymore. Nowadays you can't even find it on any online storefronts, and there was a PC version released so I guess this just means people aren't interested in buying these rights and hosting them on Steam or GOG. (Heck, who even holds the rights at this point? Is the thing just left approaching public domain? Online data laws are so stupidly antiquated that I don't even have a clue, to be honest) But if, through some means I shall not name, you magically come across some way of playing this game, then I would definitely recommend it's rough, sometimes bad taste, but always flashy gameplay for it's appeal to that inner juvenile somewhere in us all.