As ridiculous as that headline sounds, think about it for a second. Yeah, there you go.

According to a report on VG247 developers 2K Czech, who released one of the prettiest but also one of the most boring open-world games of all time with Mafia II, are helping Rockstar on Grand Theft Auto V.

Remember, 2K are a Take-Two brand, and Take-Two is also Rockstar's publisher.

So just what areas do Rockstar need help? Or are getting it just for kicks? In "animations for cutscenes and general gameplay", it seems. What's more, the report claims it's a two-way street, with Rockstar "opening its secrets" to the Czech studio, with said secrets to hopefully make big improvements in the next Mafia game.

Which, the same report claims, is already in development, having been significantly retooled and rebuilt in the wake of Mafia II's mixed reception.

This kind of collaboration isn't as rare or as strange as it may sound, and with budgets increasing and expertise becoming more focused, it's only going to happen more and more often.

Rumour – 2K Czech on Grand Theft Auto V, Mafia III [VG247]

Iain Andrews' site Steam Postcards has long been my wallpaper supplier of choice. Why? Because he plays games and takes screenshots that aren't the kind of thing you'd find in a magazine or popular internet video game website.

He instead takes, well, postcards. Scenic shots of the background, or the walls, or the sky, or whatever, finding stuff that just looks good, instead of stuff that makes the game look good.

His current subject of choice is id's RAGE, but scroll down the Tumblr page and you'll see games like Deus Ex: Human Revolution, Mirror's Edge, Mafia II, Team Fortress 2, Red Orchestra and even Kane & Lynch.

The images maybe aren't nice enough to print out and frame, but like I said, they're perfect for wallpapers!

Steam Postcards [enwandrews]

In the runup to the game's release last year, Mafia II's development studio and publicity team tried, with limited success, to set reasonable expectations of the game. "It isn't Grand Theft Auto," I was told, more than once, in emails and in the game's review notes.

The talking point reflects the popular expectation, built over a decade of Grand Theft Auto releases and numerous imitators, that open-world games necessarily meant a sandbox. In popular expectation, they'd come to mean large maps littered with side quests and diversions, and key story missions that could be triggered out of order. This is especially true of crime thrillers, and absolutely true if they were major releases.

But it wasn't true of Mafia II, by a longshot, and it was beat up pretty bad for not being something it never said it was.

Mafia II was disappointing for other reasons, but I want to replay it now that I've spent a solid week playing and replaying L.A. Noire. Yes, both are crime thrillers set in postwar America, but that's not their chief similarity. They're open-world games that, in ways large and small, are both linear, sometimes rigidly. And if L.A. Noire splits, in the popular mind, the 10-year arranged marriage of open world to sandbox, then it should be acknowledged that Mafia II had the unhappy duty of taking a crack at it first.

I have to wonder how we'd feel about Mafia II had it released this year, and L.A. Noire last year. Mafia II may still have been a disappointment; both are story-driven enterprises and Mafia II's, while set up well in the game's first half, nosedives into a tremendously unsatisfying resolution. L.A. Noire holds up throughout, though chiefly by connecting you to your character through the interrogation minigames and your own offline analysis of the evidence he collects.

Yet the game still keeps him at a distance. Cole Phelps is available only when he's on the clock. You're not going to a bar with him; you're not going on a date with a secretary in records. You're not going to shoot pool with your partner or bet on a fight. Though, given how time consuming these diversions were in Red Dead Redemption and Grand Theft Auto IV, Team Bondi's choice to keep this focused on a compact narrative is certainly defensible.

What it ultimately means, is like Mafia II you are given a beautiful, vast landscape that the game allows you to explore only on strictly controlled terms, especially within the main story. And I'm trying to figure out why I find that acceptable in Los Angeles but not in Empire City. Especially when L.A.'s environment in Noire is double the size of Empire City's.

Mafia II may have built a world that fetishized trivial interactions-light switches, toilet flushes, buying gasoline-but there was, shockingly, more interaction on its map than there is in L.A. Noire's. In Mafia II, a clothing store, auto shop or payphone provided a means of losing police pursuit that was critical in some missions. A diner's food offered health recovery. In L.A. Noire, there's only the gamewell phone, which glows blue on your map, practically demanding that you use it to unlock the next location to investigate.

L.A. Noire's broader story - the career of a cop - is more undermined by that kind of linear structure than Mafia II's is by its. It takes until L.A. Noire's 12th chapter to find yourself investigating evidence in two different cases. Real-life detectives work multiple cases and the most sensational ones lead to an arrest after months. A sandbox format would allow multiple cases to be presented realistically, and not as discrete stories to be solved sequentially, but as a series of developments happening concurrently.

In this regard, the lack of a sandbox environment is more of a missed opportunity in L.A. Noire than it is in Mafia II.

That's not to say L.A. Noire is a better game only because of some double standard applied to Mafia II. L.A. Noire's characters are more believable, their emotions are more honest, their personalities more unique than Mafia II's, which started strong but descended into a color-by-numbers story of mob-movie stereotypes. L.A. Noire's investigation game is fascinating to me; Mafia II's action was often served up in derivative shoot-outs and courier missions. Its main continuity is shorter than L.A. Noire's. And Mafia II's downloadable content was abysmal, where prospects for L.A. Noire's are much stronger.

Structurally, though, they're much the same. I have no more map-memory in L.A. Noire than I do in Mafia II. They aren't places to me as much as they are stages. But I can tell you how to get from Washington Beach to Prawn Island; or from Ganton to Vinewood. Vice City, San Andreas, to me those are open worlds, with an emphasis on the latter.

There's a location in L.A. Noire that I found particularly ironic, the crumbling set of Intolerance, one of Hollywood's earliest box office flops. You visit it twice. L.A. Noire in 1947 is, like the set of Intolerance, very magnificent scenery, much of it unused.

Italian-Americans wanted Mafia II banned because they said it portrayed offensive ethnic stereotypes. A European Parliament member wants it banned because it trivializes mob murders. I have a better strategy: STFU about banning bad games, and they'll eventually fade away.

Sonia Alfano, the MP in question, also is president of Italy's association for the families of Mafia victims. "It really, really hurts," Alfano, recently said in an interview. "We can't allow this to happen, our wounds are still too fresh." Her father was murdered by the mob. It doesn't matter that it was 18 years ago, her wounds will always be fresh.

No offense to Alfano or anyone hurt by organized crime; this is still another one of those arguments where someone assumes their victim status gives them the authority to say what is and isn't appropriate for the rest of society. We deal with that a lot in video games. The fact Mafia II was released in August and this concerns a game most people have already rented or returned smacks of a publicity grab.

Bloomberg has a longer and more thorough story whose net effect is to intellectualize whining.

Mafia Victim Families Fight Increasing Violence, Brutality in Video Games [Bloomberg via GamePolitics]

Mafia II returns to Empire Bay with "Joe's Adventures," the game's second paid DLC extension. Can its 24 new missions carry the game forward, or do they dwell on what made Mafia II a good-but-not-great action game?

Mafia II: Joe's Adventures is a flashback to the 10-year period during which Vito Scaletta went to prison for selling stolen gas ration stamps. This time players will be Joe Barbaro, Vito's impulsive and violent sidekick from the original game. Two dozen missions are included with several new settings.

Ideal Player

Mafia II diehards with cash in their Sony wallet or Microsoft points to spare are the target as 2K slaps another $10 worth of paid content into a game that was disappointing at $60.

Why You Should Care

Not two weeks after its release, Mafia II had paid DLC ready to go, telegraphing 2K Games' intentions for this franchise. It was plainly content developed alongside the main game. Joe's Adventures seems to be the same. What were they holding back? Could or should this have been included with the full game, which many felt was too short?

This doesn't sound good. Because it isn't. Mafia II's strengths, comparatively speaking, were not in its mission design. They were quite tedious, in fact, but at least there was a story, some well composed cinematics, and strong acting to motivate you to complete the game. Here is 2K Games' third attempt to convince us that replacing cutscenes with loading screen text, offering up the same batch of templatized missions and calling all of it "arcade-style" is some sort of experience that is either fun or consistent with what the first game delivered. It isn't. It's a cop-out.

But doesn't this in fact add to the Mafia II canon? Barely. I was under the impression Joe's Adventures would reveal more about why Vito was sent to the big house. There's some indication he took the fall for the Clementes, but this is all about Joe, Joe and Joe, underlined by the fact he's working with a minor character from the main game, Tony Balls. Henry Tomasino, the best character of the original game, is wasted in a cameo at the beginning and never heard from again.

Still, it's got like 24 missions. That sounds like good value for $10. Fair point. Looking back I think I logged about 7 or 8 hours in this. But the missions are in many cases trivially easy and in others, bewildering as to what the designer intended for you to do. The best example was "Smuggler's Luck," an early mission in which you're tasked with commandeering a van loaded with stolen goods. The van has two gunmen aboard and an escort with the same firepower, all of it automatic weapons. Car combat in Mafia II is impossible - you can't shoot from your vehicle. Trying to run this thing off the road got me shot to death every time. Tailing it to a hideout wasn't the objective, it just drove forever. I finally just parked an obstacle (a big truck) across its known driving path, got out and machine-gunned everyone while the escort car stupidly waited behind. (I then grenaded it for laughs.) Another mission, I'm advised by my NPC partner to infiltrate a train yard quietly. The game then tells me to equip a grenade. I just said the hell with it and started shooting, suffering no consequences for that choice. A later mission, selling firearms to gun stores, puts you in an unwieldy boat of a pickup truck and sics a car full of machine gun-toting goons on you. Trying to lose it in a chase, what one would think was the purpose of such a mission, was impossible. The answer is to get out immediately and gun it down on foot. The mission design is just careless to the point of seeming spiteful.

Is there anything new in this? There's a new car, some new Playboy collectibles (including an out-of-place Jo Garcia, who neither posed during this era nor became a Playmate) and several new settings - a yacht club, a train yard, a subway station a supermarket, a cathouse and a building under construction. All of these except the subway station are the scene of untimed, non-arcade style missions that culminate in a big cutscene. These are little more than big shootouts, the most ridiculous being in the supermarket. Apparently the straight-up armed robbery of a civilian-owned grocery store is something organized crime figures commonly undertake.

Mafia II: Joe's Adventures In Action

The Bottom Line

Don't bother. Mafia II: Joe's Adventures is a transparent cash grab stuffed with missions that a skilled and interested modder could put to shame. While deeper and, comparatively, better than "Jimmy's Vendetta," it again forsakes the main game's strengths while serving up 24 more chores and again making you drive all over the map to complete them. Mafia II was a forgivably ambitious disappointment; its DLC, culminated by Joe's Adventures, makes it into an irredeemable flop.

Mafia II: Joe's Adventures was developed by 2K Czech and published by 2K Games for the PlayStation 3, PC and Xbox 360, released on Nov. 23, 2010. Retails for $9.99 USD/800 Microsoft Points. A copy of the game was given to us by the publisher for reviewing purposes. Completed singleplayer campaign on PS3.

In the Western version of crime game Mafia II, there are vintage copies of Playboy as collectible items. The game even tracks how long players stare at the centerfolds. Cut that time in half for Japan.

The first image is from the Western version of Mafia II and is free of nudity. Other centerfolds, however, do depict the Playmates sans clothes. However, the Japanese version of the game features heavily censored versions of the centerfolds. Ugly black bars block out nudity.

The game is rated "Mature" (18-years-old-and-up) in the U.S., while the game is also rated "Z" (18-and-up) in The Land of the Rising Sun.

Oddly, the Japanese version of the magazine - which ceased publication in 2009 - featured nudity, but was not typically stocked in the "adult" section of bookstores. This is because, like many Japanese men's magazines, it featured nudity, but not enough to be dubbed straight-up pornography. Perhaps people actually read the articles?

This censoring seems to be an issue with the Japan's strict game rating board. Kotaku is following up with the game's publisher for clarification.

日本版『Mafia II』の乳首規制やっつけすぎワロタ [はちま起稿]

Ultimately, Mafia II suffered from too much imagination and not enough substance; "Jimmy's Vendetta," its first paid DLC extension, lacked both. But this trailer for its second, Joe's Adventures, due Nov. 23, actually looks promising.

Jimmy's Vendetta (like the PS3-only Betrayal of Jimmy) threw us into the persona of an entirely new mob character and sent us running errands all over Empire Bay in a bland casserole of rote mission design. Joe's Adventures actually looks like it has some depth and inspiration, especially that car chase on the frozen bay. It has a better story peg to work with, too, as it covers the time during Vito Scaletta's incarceration in the federal pen.

That half of the Mafia II story was easily the best part of the game, and the fact we're going to hear more out of Henry, a character who had so much potential in the original, gives me hope. I'll be reviewing "Joe's Adventures" when it hits, but I warn you, Joe, don't disappoint me again.