S1E10 - The Sopranos: Road to Respect

Welcome back to another episode of Discrete Air, the podcast where every week we dive into the fascinating and extensive library of the greatest selling video game console of all time, the PlayStation Two. I'm Derek Kicker.

I'm in Golding.

And this week we're talking about the Sopranos road. Due respect. This game came out in November of 2006. It was developed by Seven Studios.

Is that the name or were Seven Studios involved?

It's the name Seven Studios. And it was published by THQ. I guess they really will publish anything.

Anything they can get their fucking grubby mits on, they'll fucking put out.

And HBO, I guess, was heavily involved in this game.

That does not surprise me.

Seven Studios hasn't done a ton of games, and it looks like the last game they did was in 2009. So I think they're gone.

It seems like we're getting closer now to the this was their last game.

They had a few after this, but not great. But it looks like they done a lot of movie tie ins. They did the Fantastic Four game for PS. Two.

Wow. They did.

Shrek. Super slam.

Okay. They did.

Pirates of the Caribbean. The Legend of Jack Sparrow.

Okay.

They did shrek the third. They did the Fantastic Four Rise of the Silver Surfer. They did Napoleon Dynamite The Game for PSP and DS.

I had no fucking idea that was a thing.

Yeah.

They did Six Flags Fun Park for the Wii and DS. And their last game appears to have been Space Camp for the Wii and DS.

Is this based on the 1980s movie Space Camp?

Yeah. No.

Oh, damn.

It barely looks like it's a game.

Okay.

It's probably just you go through all the things that a kid would do in Space Camp.

Remember? That was a big thing. What happened to that? That was a big deal. When I was a kid, the best thing you could possibly ever win in a sweepstakes was fuck going to Space Camp for me.

I don't know about the timeline, but I feel like maybe it's because it went out of my mind as a thing. But as soon as the challenger exploded, spacecamp was no longer a thing. But you're young enough that that if you remember Space Camp. That was after that.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It went the challenger exploded in what?

88, 86.

86.

I wasn't even born. But I do remember on Nickelodeon, it was always like the winner of Double Dare or Guts Camp. Guts. Space Camp. You get to go to fucking Space Camp and they show the kids at the G machine. It's like, yeah.

Riding around the thing from spies like us.

Yeah.

That was like, the coolest thing in the world. Has nothing to do with The Sopranos, but it is an interesting bit of, like, nostalgia for me.

Yeah.

So back to Sopranos road to respect.

Yeah.

It was published by THQ, and apparently there was a version for the Xbox 360 that was set for release but canceled, I'm assuming, due to the game not being very good.

Yeah.

Not selling well, at least.

Yeah.

Which sucks because are you a Sopranos fan?

I love the sopranos.

How could you not love this product? It is the best television show of all time in my humble opinion.

It's up there.

It's incredible. Yeah. And soprano's creator David Chase did consult on this game.

This blows my mind.

From what I can surmise on the Internet, all he consulted on was the script was to make sure that the characters sounded like their characters from the show. So new characters in the game, he had nothing to do with. And apparently when the game came out, he was very much in the camp of that was all HBO. I had very little to do with it, of course, except for he did make it clear that nothing in this game is canon.

Right.

And that no storylines overlap into the game.

Not a surprise. Yeah. Well, we'll get into it, but it doesn't have any significant impact on The Sopranos cinematic universe as a whole.

Yeah.

Absolutely not. This game is I guess we'll go into the story welcome to the family.

About fucking kind.

So basically, the story is that you are Joey La Roca.

La Roca.

Joey italian hands. And you are the illegitimate bastard of Big Pussy who, of course, whacked in the season finale of season two of The Spraano. Spoiler alert for being a fucking rat.

He was a goddamn rat. He was a steel pigeon.

I think it's my favorite episode of The Sopranos. It's called funhouse. Tony gets food poisoning from bad clams at the studio and Hallucinates, a fish talking to him. And Hallucinates in his hallucination in his food poisoning state is when he realizes that Big Pussy has to be the rat.

Has to be.

Yeah.

It's truly an incredible and experimental piece of prestige television before that was even a term.

Yeah. This started that whole thing. That whole prestige television.

Yeah.

And truly incredible. So you play as Big Pussy's illegitimate son. And as he attempts to work his way up in The Soprano crime family.

So would you say he's on the road to respect?

He is.

Is on the road to respect. And we'll get into how respect comes into this game because it comes into this game in a very stupid fucking way.

Yes.

But like the story of this game, joey is wildly incompetent.

Yes.

Makes all the wrong decisions 100%. And is generally unlikable. So he's the perfect avatar for this game.

Yeah, he is. This game. He could not sum up this game better as a character.

Yeah.

So let's get into the motherfucking gameplay.

Enough already. Clean them up at first. All right, forget that fuck. I'll go pick up my chain.

So you start this game and the game starts with a truly incredible opening cut scene that I feel like it was created by someone who's heard of The Sopranos but has never seen a single episode.

Not an episode. Correct. That is correct.

So it starts out with main character Joey Laroka breaking the passenger side window of a car outside of Satrial's pork shop from the show.

Yeah.

And stealing a woman's purse off the seat. And as he makes his getaway, he runs into Tony. Literally runs into Tony. And Tony proceeds to take him into Satrial's throw him against something, like a wall or something and be like, what the fuck are you doing?

You fucking kidding me? Pulling a stunt like that on this street. It was just sitting there. What do you care? Look at you, a fucking street punk snatching purses from old ladies.

I like this opening cuts in. And I like it for the reason that it kind of encapsulates the entirety of the game. Right. In that it doesn't make a lot of sense. It leaves you asking the question, but why?

But why is any of this happening?

And also, it highlights what is the absolute best part of this game which is James Gandolfini's voice performance as Tony.

Yeah, they got pretty much the entire.

Yeah, they got the entire even Veto, even fat veto is voiced by his original actor. And it's weird. It causes some conflict inside of me because James Gandolfini is so good as Tony Soprano that the very few sections of the game that have him in it, he lifts the whole game up.

I could not fucking agree more.

Yeah.

These little baby moments that you get these little brief snippets you get of what is essentially a lost Tony Soprano performance lifts the whole thing up and almost makes this game tolerable almost it's so close. Which is truly an incredible feat. And that's why I like the opening scene because it's it's horrific and confusing and stupid. But then it also is something you want to watch because it's you're. You know they're letting James Gandolfini cook here.

Yeah, absolutely.

So after that, where he gets chastised by Tony and it serves as, like, just a way to get into the fact that he's Big Pussy's son and that his dad was a snitch which is like a reoccurring theme. You can kind of see where they're trying to go with this.

Yeah.

They're trying to make it like, oh, he's got a chip on his shoulder. He is trying to live down his father's legacy. And I would say, honestly, it takes a swing at being a serious story. It just fails. And there are seamless that I wish actually came to something because it's not a terrible idea. But he sees the ghost of his father, like in bathroom mirrors. Ironically, almost always. Just bathroom mirrors.

Yeah.

No other mirrors. Not just standing there in a room.

Just bathroom mirror. Which I guess makes sense. Big Pussy did spend a lot of time in the bathroom the man had diarrhea, folks.

It's true.

So I guess that's where his spirit would reside. But then you get into, like, what I can only describe as being like a Gopher simulator, just walking. Because the first five missions are literally so the hub of the game is Bada Bing.

Of course. Yeah.

Sills strip club. And that's where you get most of your missions. And that is the hub in which you start most of your missions. And this game fools you into thinking it's going to be open world. It is. Absolutely not. This is actually a formula that The Godfather game would get perfect.

Yeah.

And I think The Godfather game is a very good game.

It's a fantastic fucking game.

And this seems like it could have gone in that direction and decided not to and decided to do something much dumber. So the first mission is one of the strippers in Bota Bing. By the way, this is also the first game on the podcast we've done that has frontal nudity. Yes, female frontal nudity, which is very funny and very hilarious looking. But your first mission is a stripper says, I can't dance to this music. Can you go tell the DJ to change it up. And that leads to one of the first unique mechanics of this game. And I don't mean unique as in, like, it's something nobody else has done. It's just something nobody else has done this badly.

Yeah.

So you go up and talk to the DJ and you have an option to talk to him in a neutral tone, a smooth tone, or get tough with him. You could get tough with him.

Get tough, yeah.

And with this first mission, there is no consequence to any of the way you talk to him. No matter if you talk to him tough, he'll change the song. If you talk to him smooth, he'll change the song. If you talk to him neutral, he'll change the song. It's how he reacts to you, is the only thing that changes. I talked tough with him and he got pissy, but this also never comes back. Like this character of the DJ, it's not like you talking to him now causes some sort of consequence down the line.

Right.

That's not how it works. And thus proceeds like the first dozen missions of this game are, go talk to Pauly Jeez. Find Syl in the bathroom.

Talk to him.

Talk to him. Go talk to Tony. Get Tony's lunch order.

Yeah.

That is 80% of the missions in this game are go from one room.

To another and just find a person. Find a person or a thing and press X.

Yes.

That's it. That's the fucking game.

That's all it is. And then eventually, you come to the first mission of any sort of consequence, which is one of the bar patrons is a little too drunk and got a little too fresh with a stripper, and you beat him to death.

Yes. You kill him.

And then his friend's like, hey, you beat my friend to death. So then you beat him to death.

Sure.

And then you have to get rid of the body. So in an uninspired cutscene, you end up at the docks and you bribe a security guard with $100. Or you can beat him up.

Yeah, either one.

It doesn't it doesn't matter. And then through a comedy of errors, you and this other guy, who is your friend and also a low level member of the Soprano crime family, try and dispose of this body in, I guess, the ocean. It's weird because there's like a big cruise ship, like a big tanker. So it's not like a river.

No.

So I guess the ocean. I guess it's the ocean.

Yes.

And that's when you learn about the respect meter.

Oh, boy.

Now security guards come and find you in the act of trying to dump this guy's body because spoiler, he's not dead. He gets out of the rug he wrapped him in and runs about 12ft away. And then you find him again and kill him.

Yes.

And then the security guards are like, hey, what's going on here? And then they pull out their guns. And you can pull out your gun if you want and shoot them, or you can fight them because if you shoot them, you lose respect.

Lose respect because murder with a gun.

Murder with a gun, you lose respect. You cause too much noise.

That's right.

Causes too much of a scene. But now, after you beat these, these security guards asked for a minute. The security guard you paid off comes up and says, hey, those are Tony Soprano's guys. And the other security guard is like, oh, he didn't say anything. Which is odd that the security guard, knowing you are connected like that, would still attempt to shake you down. You dump the body and that's about it. And the story goes on and on like that throughout the entire game. You eventually get to a central story where AJ. Hires you to be security at a rave that he is throwing with an idiot friend. And then he gets carjacked and it's Tony's car that gets stolen by a Jamaican gangster.

Wow.

And then you have to try to get Tony's car back and you realize that this Jamaican gangster is connected to another cocaine dealer and it's a rival boss from Philly. And eventually you murder him and you get made and Tony into a watch or something. It's very silly, it's very goofy, and it doesn't make much sense and it's honestly not very fun.

No, it's not fun. It could have been fun, but it.

Does have some weird mechanics to it. The respect meter is very odd. If you go to zero respect, they whack you. You get whacked, whacked. And as your respect goes down, it does not regenerate. And the only thing you can do to regenerate is pay tribute to Pauly who is your direct captain.

He's your capo.

He's your capo though you will do missions with Christopher, you'll do missions with AJ, you'll do missions for Syl sure. You'll get veto a sandwich always and that's honestly the whole game.

Yeah.

Is this it's odd.

I feel like the respect meter. Whenever I was given a choice to do two things, the harder thing, the thing I didn't want to do, if it would just get me done with that part, I was like, well, I'm not going to get respect for that. So I got to do the thing I don't want to do, like shoot instead of fight.

Do you know what I mean?

Yeah and honestly as far as I can tell the only thing that makes you lose respect is using your gun around witnesses and talking tough with any member of the family that's like a maid man.

Yeah.

Above you.

Yeah that's the only thing to lose respect. And honestly if you don't use your gun all that much you can go through the whole game with basically not caring about the respect meter.

Correct.

Even though it seems to be a core like mechanic of the game or at least it was intended to be.

Right.

But it's honestly kind of not you.

Can but you can beat the game without having building the respect meter to.

Full like when you start out you start out at full.

Well yeah, yeah but if it's not full and you get to the final.

Mission it doesn't matter.

It's not like Tony's like maybe someday kid go out there like in a real game he would send you out. You'd have to do more missions, you'd have to pick up and then you have full respect and then you can beat the game. Not in this it doesn't really make a difference.

Yeah or there would be some benefit to having more respect. I don't know. This game also has some very funny clearly this game is GTA inspired sort of it kind of controls in like a bad facsimile of GTA when you're in the bing you can talk to a stripper and she'll give you a lap dance that lasts 5 seconds and then she'll like you want to go again? And you click yes. Thinking like maybe something different will happen and then it just replays the repeat of that cutscene and I say cutscene loosely. It's all in game generated. Yeah it's not a cutscene and it's odd and weird and you're just beating people up. The combat is atrocious. Yeah, it's very bad sometimes what would happen to me a lot the most frustrated I got with this fucking game is when there's more than one person attacking you. Sometimes it is possible for them to basically stun lock you. Yes, stun lock and beat you down. And you cannot get back up because the game isn't fluid and kind of gets stuck in animations of you trying to get up and them swinging at you. There's also a delay. The number one weapon in this game is bottles of Jack Daniels and are forty s and bottles of Jack Daniels just about everywhere in the bathroom.

Including the bathroom?

Including the bathroom. And you can pick them up and you can dome someone with it clock. And they'll do it to you too. Sure will. And there's a delay in you getting hit. You'll get hit, your hand will go to your head and then you'll rat doll physics to the ground. It's nonsense. I died twice in my play through of this game and both were due to me getting into a corner with three guys. But there's also no real like the hit boxes are hard to determine and it's not enjoyable combat there's not really. Aside from hearing some of these voices, it's just not an enjoyable experience.

Yeah, I mean, they're the professional actors reprising their roles from the show is really the only reason you even consider playing this game. If it was sound alikes, if it was like scrub actors, it would be a pointless endeavor.

Yeah.

There's about five missions in this game that just repeat with different contexts, right?

Yes.

So you go to the gym with Christopher to shake down some guy who's selling steroids and not paying his cut. And the juice bar guy is like oh, jerk off. And Christopher is like, would you call me? And then he's like, Joey, take care of this guy for me. And that is honestly, 80% of the missions are someone saying hey Joey, take care of this guy for me. Oh yeah.

Oh, forget about it.

Oh, my own well molestie kids over here. It's also very funny. It's almost memeable, the Sopranos font with the gun as the R. Yeah. The game also has horrific loading. Like this game takes forever to load.

So fucking long.

And the loading screen is the revolver from the Sopranos logo or not? It's not a revolver. The gun from the Sopranos logo revolving in the corner and it gets stuck a lot. Busting my chops. What can I say? Wanted to love this game so much it fundamentally misunderstands its source material. And here's what the Godfather is a different game, of course. And then in a certain way it's not that different as far as what it's trying to do. The Godfather just actually pulls it off. Now in The Godfather, the Godfather game doesn't abandon the family and the family type story and the deeper story points of the film. It's a game of it's obviously different than the movie, but it doesn't abandon the themes of the movie at all. Sopranos is not really a show about the mafia. No, it's a show about family. David Chase said he wanted to make a live action Simpsons.

Right?

And honestly, Soprano is one of the funniest shows I've ever seen. And all the kind of nuance in The Sopranos. You don't expect that to be carried over to a game, but they abandon it completely to make a bad GTA rip off.

Exactly. With the best voice actors in any video.

Yes.

With incredible voice acting and even the setting, they put like zero care, really into making the bottom look like it does.

No.

Or they got the exterior of Saturday is fine, but even The Office is, like, poorly done. Yeah, it's not they kind of don't understand the characters and it makes it tough to, like, understatement right there. Whereas I had heard this game was bad, I came into this game hoping that I would love it because I'm such a huge fan of The Sopranos and unfortunately I just couldn't how could anyone?

That's the thing is like, okay, as a video game, you take off The Sopranos name, you've never seen The Sopranos, it's not good. And then if you're a Soprano superfan, it's not good in a different way. So this is a game that has no it just doesn't have anything to rely on. It just is pleasing no one.

In fact, I would say if this game didn't have The Sopranos name attached.

To it.

It would have gotten scrapped.

Yeah.

It would never been released.

Yeah.

So fun little side note about this. HBO actually made a making of documentary for this game.

It did.

That aired in 2006 and it includes previews of the game and footage of the actors recording their parts. Do you think they knew? Do you think the actors knew?

Yeah, they saw the script as bullshit.

Yeah, they knew.

This is a fucking ass.

But that's how good they are. They're still like, fuck it, I still want to. It's still Tony, you know what I mean?

Or it's just like, oh, fuck it. This is one day's worth of work for $50,000.

Fuck yeah.

Sweetest plum right there.

Oh my God. Oh, this is a fun fact. This is a fun little trivia tidbit about this game. Christian Malin, who voiced Joey Laroka was reportedly David Chase's second choice to play Christopher Maltesanti in the show.

Okay, that's a super fun fact.

Yeah.

Which, I mean, obviously, Michael imperiali as Christopher is a legendary pantheon performance. I'm glad he got relegated to Joey Laroka and Sopranos road.

Due respect, I finally made it in The Sopranos.

Ma, look it. Your boy made it.

I'm a soprano now.

Oh, Marrone.

Marrone. You killed him, you stupid shit.

So let's get into the reception of this game. So this game received generally unfavorable reviews according to Metacritic.

No shock there.

It received poor reviews from GameSpot and IGN and they complained about the overly simplistic gameplay, a small and linear game world with little ability to explore blocky and unappealing graphics, marginal game mechanics and various clipping and collision detection bugs.

All accurate.

The voice acting contributed by The Sopranos cast received praise as well it should. So it has a 42 out of 100 on Metacritic.

That's drubbing.

GameSpot gave it a 4.2 out of ten. IGN gave it a 4.5 out of ten in the US and even worse, a three out of ten in the UK.

Wow.

Xplay gave it a two out of five stars. Yeah. Just critically panned. And I honestly have never met a person who was like, yeah, I fucking love that sprang up game.

No, there could be no one in the world who enjoyed this game.

In fact, I would hesitate to say I don't know many people who even knew this was a fucking game.

That's actually a fair point. I don't know. Came out with 2006. I was both in The Sopranos and into video games, PlayStation Two at the time. I have no memory of even hearing this was a thing.

Yeah, so was I. I mean, 2006, that's the year The Sopranos ended, right?

I think it was seven.

So we're right around the end of The Sopranos. 2006 was when the first half of the final season aired then.

Yeah.

And yet I'd never heard of it. And I was deep into the sopranos. That was my year of high school. I was deep into the sopranos.

Absolutely. So I don't know how I missed this. I'm glad I did, but it did not fucking catch fire, that's for sure.

Yeah.

Hey, Joey, how long are we going to wait?

So what would you rank this game? How would you rate it? We saw how all the professionals rated it. What would you give it?

I am sorry, but I feel like Igen GameSpot, all these are coming in a little high. I'm going to go with one for this game.

I'm going to agree with you and I'm going to give it one dropped on the floor piece of Guy Babagul.

That's controversial. Gabba Ghoul should never be on the floor. Yeah, it's just bad. I mean, it's just bad for every reason that we said there's no fun to it. It's like Tediously watching fan fiction of.

The Sopranos, but written by a child.

A complete child who doesn't, like you said, doesn't understand The Sopranos. I just heard about there's a gangster show and was for some reason it's like a school play put on with fucking the best actors in the business. Somehow it had to be a contract thing that these actors involved and it's both the only redeeming quality and a real fucking shame that they had to lend their voices to it.

Yeah. This was clearly written by someone who saw Good Fellas and thought that there was a good guy in that movie.

Yeah, exactly. Like Henry Hill is a good guy. Is that right? Well, that was Soprano's road to respect. Oh, forget about it.

Well, if you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe. We come out with a new episode every PS Tuesday and if you'd like more content, you can follow us on our socials. We are on Instagram instagram at discrete Air Pod and you can find me at funeral casual games.

I'm at Ian Golden games and we.

Will see you next week.

Have a good one.

Kabaku baraboo bing.