I rearranged my notes for this, and for once in two years, I’m glad I did

It’s been dog’s years since I rearranged my notes to get to topics I thought would take me longer to complete than normal. Work has had me begging for relief of some kind (more than I can get from a dakimakura or a viewing of my favorite anime):

Unsurprisingly, this is the only SFW version of this I could find.

And outside of The Saga of Lady Rias and Straw Hat Pirate Crusade, I’ve been busy playing a series of games I’ve played before for old time’s sake, and also for some analysis of gameplay and plot details. Additionally, this is going to be a series of posts spanning three weeks, so I’m going to cover the Max Payne series, this week; the 3D era Mortal Kombat games next week, (excluding Shaolin Monks having covered that before); and the HD Mortal Kombat games the week after that. I haven’t gotten through the HD games yet partly because MK9 doesn’t run as well on RPCS3, and it would take a while to grab my PS3 from back home and some of its corresponding games, but this was a quicker and less expensive process. Off topic: American Airlines upsets me greatly.

You may know this as my favorite video game series of all time from this post, but if you’re just joining us, Max Payne holds a special place in my heart. Although it was a culmination of gun-fu cinema that began in the early 1990s, it did wonders to popularize bullet time as a gameplay mechanic helped up by the likes of Hard Boiled and The Matrix. Narratively, the entire series is baked with the type of writing prose that would make The Bard even slightly jealous.

Conjured in a laboratory deep in the recesses of Remedy Entertainment with Sam Lake as its prime director, writer, and face model, the series contains three games all with contemporary settings: Max Payne released in July 2001 set in a brutal winter that may remind some New Yorkers of the city’s worst blizzards; Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne released in October 2003, focusing more on the psychological horror elements; Max Payne 3, doing something completely different by putting it’s titular character in São Paulo, but following some of the same narrative story beats that he’s been through before. So the more things changed, the more they stayed the same… at least on the surface.

This is going to be a spoiler heavy post, but considering I’ve played through the series at least four times before, it goes to show the replayability of the games while also adding in some criticism of the games that I omitted from the first time I wrote about the series.

They were all dead. The final gunshot was an exclamation mark to all that had led to this point. I released my finger from the trigger, and then it was over.

Following a trend that would define select games of the 2000s, Max Payne begins with establishing shot of then-current NYPD-colored vehicles answering to a distress call at the fictional Aesir Plaza. Shots fired/firearm discharges, malicious destruction of public property, numerous charges of manslaughter, and a man who became public enemy number 1 in a New York Minute. Beginning at the end, it works its way back through the narration told in a graphic novel style. NYPD Detective Max Payne in 1998 is offered an accession to the Drug Enforcement Administration by Agent Alex Balder. Max declines and puts away what he promises is his final cigarette for the sake of his infant daughter, Rose’s, health. The offer is still there as Max heads back to his New Jersey home where his family would be.

Unbeknownst to him, his wife, Michelle, and their newborn daughter would be victims of a disgusting drug experiment. The first thing to pop out at Max aside from the dead silence is a tag in the parlor of the house: a V with a syringe running through it like the sword in the Adventure Time logo: the central plot device behind the game, a designer drug known as Valkyr. Next to that, the phone rings and a raspy-voiced woman coldly asks Max to confirm that this is indeed the Payne residence, while he fails to convince her to phone the police. Now that she knows this is Max’s house, she hangs up and leaves him to discover the American Dream being torn to shreds in no time. His loved ones brutally slaughtered by junkies in his own home, Max avenges their deaths there and after the funeral expenses, transfers to the DEA under Balder’s supervision.

Three years of undercover work in the Punchinello family reveal them as the main suppliers of Valkyr by February of 2001. With fellow agent, B.B., Max and Balder are summoned to Roscoe Street Subway Station and are nearly gunned down by the same mobsters in an elaborate robbery through a web of tunnels connecting to a bank where Aesir Corporation bonds are being housed. Max pushes through, though, and stops the in-progress robbery, meeting Balder in the process. Unfortunately for Max, an assassin nails Balder in the head before he’s able to reveal a critical piece of evidence, and to make things worse for Max, with him as the last one to see Agent Balder alive, the NYPD finger him as the prime suspect, so he now has to evade the law while going on his next mission: taking the fight to underboss Jack Lupino himself.

The intricacies and complexities of Mafia hierarchy makes Lupino the second most untouchable man in the underworld, which was what Max expected. Fighting his way through several key figures at a mob-run brothel, Max picks up crucial evidence to clue him in to the wider plot at large. One of these pieces concerns a hooker named Candy Dawn selling sex tapes as blackmail material; the other is the office of Lupino’s lieutenant, Vinnie Gognitti.

An icy rooftop chase leads to Vinnie getting cornered and confessing under duress the location of his boss, who, to put it lightly, has gone mad. “Don’t get high on your own supply” exists for a reason and Lupino is patient zero for why you should never do that. One too many Valkyr injections and the entire Prose Edda sits where his brain should be. Notes collected prior to arriving at his club hint at the frustrations and concerns levied at him at all levels, but Lupino’s lunacy drowned it all out. Taking residence in an occult club, the Ragna Rock, Max explores the gothic revival building in search of the man he believes is responsible for his pain.

You can’t blame Max for pumping Lupino full of lead after their death-defying battle when he squawks at you like this:

Channel: Adddicteddd

Knowing damn well the dangers of Valkyr, Max did to him what law enforcement did to Bonnie and Clyde, the best replica of human Swiss cheese, until hitwoman Mona Sax waltzes in to reveal that Lupino wasn’t even in the right state of mind to try to frame Max for anything, let alone the death of Alex Balder. The real prize lies with the Punchinello family don, Angelo. Lupino was simply a [mad] middleman.

Max can’t refute her claims, but doesn’t. Instead, the only thing he can do is accept it as a lead to the truth. But before he can embark on the warpath to the don’s manor, Mona spikes his drink at the bar. The first of two run-ins with Valkyr puts him into a nightmare he was trying not to acknowledge. He was already living in one, so why put him in another. After that, he’s taken by the mob back to the same brothel he shot up and whacked several times in the head by Francesco “Frankie the Bat” Niagara.

Undefeated and undeterred, Max walks away from the slowest execution to exact revenge on the last of the Punchinello mob, picking up more evidence along the way of the rest of his enemies in the process. Once the Bat is broken in twain, Russian mobster, Vladimir Lem, appears with a deal he can’t refuse. He’s always wanted to say that!

Both men are after Punchinello, and Lem has the means to get him to the don if Max kills a turncoat at the harbor, Boris Dime. Accepting this offer before him, Max manages to anger Punchinello enough to set fire to his own restaurant in an elaborate way to get rid of Max, but the deficit wasn’t worth it when Lem circled back around to pick Max up and drop him off at the manor. Gun-kwon-do ensues and brings Max to the desk of Angelo Punchinello himself.

Crying and begging for a chance to explain himself before the installation of a new ventilation system, the evidence he’s searching for kills him in his own home under the command of the real villain of the game: Aesir Corp. President Nicole Horne. The ruthless, avaricious killer in the midst; the destroyer of Max’s life and livelihood; the one who arguably set the entire series off to begin with. Her lapdogs gun down the mob boss and torture Max with a worse dosage of Valkyr where things get too real for a moment.

Channel: YianKutHexy

The nightmare subsides and he gets his next lead: Cold Steel. A steel mill hiding an abandoned military bunker where the source of Valkyr was found. Stumbling upon Gulf War-era archives, Max makes the same discovery that got his wife and daughter killed three years ago. Following the first of many of Saddam’s Ls, US troops came home with a mysterious illness that today is known only as Gulf War syndrome. Seeing it as a lack of morale, the US government spearheaded a project based on Norse mythology in mid-1991 to invent a drug that would turn our warfighters into war machines.

Four years later, the project was halted due to observations of habit-forming properties and behavior, but being the main benefactor behind the project, Horne was dead set on getting her investment’s worth. Unauthorized, the project was rebooted through dark means and motives. Due to a data leak, Michelle discovered the ongoing project and was thus silenced in order to keep it secret. Horne hoped the junkies, the mob, and the rest of the city would put Max down for her, but proving tougher than a cockroach forced her hand.

Max had seen enough, he had more than enough motive to avenge Michelle and Rose, but there was another loose end to tie up: B.B. Putting the pieces all together, there was a reason he hadn’t seen B.B. since the Roscoe Street Station robbery. Another turncoat, he was also on Horne’s payroll and had been trying to get him killed on her dime. Max realized it late, but better late than never seeing as B.B.’s confirmation as a bent cop had grown irrelevant over the course of the game.

With him gone, Max was contacted by a secret society with deep ties to Horne, the Inner Circle, and its leader, Alfred Woden. The very man Candy Dawn was making sex tapes of for Horne to use as blackmail in revenge and to stop him from pursuing her further.

The amount of influence she had over him as well as the rest of NYC was impossible to measure or imagine, but seeing as she was able to cut the mob itself in on a deal and keep the Inner Circle from going public for years, leveraging their own sins against them, it was a dead ringer for why Max was the only candidate capable of stopping her. Which he does.

Max escapes the attempts on the Inner Circle’s life and heads straight to the Aesir Plaza where the final showdown commences. Numerous obstacles fail to stop Max from getting the revenge he was entitled to, and the fiery send off couldn’t feel any more appropriate, short of hand-delivering Horne to the devil personally.

Channel: KLB TV

His revenge complete, Max willingly surrenders to the NYPD confident that Woden would be a man of his word and bury the charges deep into the hole where his adversaries were sent. But this was merely the beginning of a cacophony of pain.

And we keep driving into the night
It’s a late goodbye, such a late goodbye
And we keep driving into the night, it’s a late goodbye

— Poets of the Fall

After the revenge fantasy of the last game, the conspiracies that were supposed to remain buried reemerged, this time with new faces. The complicated web Max found himself entangled in started to unravel.

This game takes place in medias res, in the aftermath of a mess Max had made for himself, but right before it resolves itself. Woden kept his word and put Max back at his old job, where a new case involving a series of contract killings, reveals an old face once thought dead before: Mona Sax.

The new love interest, she was last seen taking a bullet to the face at the end of the previous game, only for her “corpse” to vanish after a quick exchange of gunfire. She reappears, revealing her connection to the killings, and due to the conflict of interest, Max’s new partner, Valerie Winterson, takes him off the case and apprehends Mona for further questioning. Max is behaving unethically by choosing her over his job, but unbeknownst to him, Valerie herself is another conflict of interest. Being a lover of and enforcer for Vladimir Lem, he and Mona have both started up a feud, one that ties a third series of people Max has faced before: the Punchinellos.

Old enemies return, loyalties are challenged, and the cobweb breaks apart under intense scrutiny. This game, honestly, suffers under the weight of its own conspiracies, but makes up for it in small increments with more weapon variety and the changing of protagonist perspectives from Max to Mona in a couple of chapters. Mona doesn’t play any differently from Max, but is more long distance combat focused almost always seen with a sniper rifle than the armory Max keeps in his pants.

There may be one too many connecting elements in the second game, but the course of events shows its unraveling. No real friends this time around, seeing as you go from gunning after old enemies to helping them help you uncover the series of killings. And it all circles back to Vlad, his bratva connections, Valerie being his personal mole and mistress, and his pursuit of power in the Inner Circle.

Speaking of which, Alfred Woden’s still the leader of the Inner Circle and a sitting US Senator for New York, but a cancer diagnosis is what emboldens Vlad’s hostile takeover this time around, seeing as the old man would be physically unable to challenge Vlad, even personally. Well, thanks to Max’s tenacity in the face of it all, he puts a permanent end to Vladimir Lem once and for all.

Channel: iPhantom3D

The ending credits are supposed to be the original song Late Goodbye by Poets of the Fall, but they’re not included in the linked video. Here’s a separate link.

So I guess I became what they wanted me to be, a killer. Some rent-a-clown with a gun who puts holes in other bad guys. Well that’s what they had paid for, so in the end that’s what they got. Say what you want about Americans but we understand capitalism. You buy yourself a product and you get what you pay for, and these chumps had paid for some angry gringo without the sensibilities to know right from wrong. Here I was about to execute this poor bastard like some dime store angel of death and I realized they were correct, I wouldn’t know right from wrong if one of them was helping the poor and the other was banging my sister…

Cop work is no longer Max’s forte, but even in the final installment, his detective skills come as naturally as a footballer’s natural instincts to kick or block an incoming soccer ball. From playing it Bogart to letting the depression catch up to being done with the world, Max Payne 3 puts our favorite pill-popping, alcoholic in São Paulo, working a private security detail for a quasi-aristocratic entrepreneur family, the Brancos, who are routinely targeted by the local favela hoodlums among other honorable enemies.

Starting at a party for some of SP’s best and brightest, it’s quickly hijacked where Max and new partner, Raul Passos, spring into action to save their boss and his family from impending doom.

Targeted attacks against their boss, Rodrigo, and his trophy wife, Fabiana, were nothing new. The game and the wiki and some marketing material are evidence that they’ve been targeted many times before. This time, it gets worse, and clues in the game point to it being an inside job.

Fabiana was taken by the Comando Sombra gang during a party and the CS send a ransom demanding three million reais for the safe return of Fabiana at a football club after hours. Things go wrong when a rightwing paramilitary known as Crachá Preto ambush the two parties. Max and Passos fight their way out of the football stadium, tooth and nail, but no closer to getting Fabiana back home. In between the leads directing them to Fabiana and the Comando Sombra, the next chapter of the game shows what brought Max to Brazil and why.

It’s shown that Passos found him in a dive bar in Hoboken with the offer of a better paying job that would be a step above simple law enforcement, but the two are ambushed by New Jersey mob brats led by Tony DeMarco. In a crime of passion, Max guns the boy down and has to get through this dollar store posse of Jersey Shore rejects. Away from that, Max hears more about the private security sales pitch but is ambushed by real mobsters in the form of Tony’s father, Anthony Sr.

Back to the present, the impromptu investigation puts them on a boat on the Tiete River where the CS operate a large scale trafficking ring. Fabiana is confirmed to be alive, though suffering under their malice. The two try to close in on the CS and their leader, Serrano, but were outsmarted and outmatched, unable to recover Rodrigo’s wife.

A ruthless favela gang leader, Serrano was marketed as the top boss, but in later game production, and based on the clues, he’s one of several puppets in yet another grand conspiracy, the likes of which would rival any LATAM telenovela. It certainly has the drama of one and was definitely inspired by movies like Tropa de Elite and Cidade de Deus, in case you wanted to see what true police brutality, militarization, and corruption looked like. Incidentally, those two films are the main inspiration for Max Payne 3’s plot.

Back to it, the Crachá Preto make another appearance in this chapter, serving as the distraction to the main event: killing Rodrigo and bombing his office with the survivors inside. Crachá isn’t necessarily responsible for the flames, as their main grudge centers around Max. As for Fabiana’s fate, she was taken by Serrano’s ilk up to Nova Esperança favela, presumably to wring more money out of the remaining Brancos.

Max goes up once again to risk his life for this family he swore to protect, only to fail them once again. Fabiana gets killed shortly before the corrupt 55th Battalion of the Unidade de Forças Especiais conduct a regularly scheduled raid on the favela in search of some fresh meat. The death of the trophy wife reminds Max of another pair of women he failed to protect in the past. Flashback to a late and final goodbye at the Hoboken cemetery before darting off to protecting the rich from the filthy poors, and the mob miss their own opportunity to be rid of Max once and for all, though that wouldn’t matter seeing as how he’d be far and away from the mess to follow.

In the present, Max learns first hand that the brutality and corruption of São Paulo law enforcement firsthand, with the appearance of a PMC and the military discipline of an even more broken junta. Call it a hunch, but I wonder how much of the junta days still haunt Brazil to this day, same with other countries who’ve suffered under such circumstances. In any case, Max is witness once again to the cutthroat gangland violence, as the Brancos lose another son in Marcelo.

Max immediately kills Marcelo’s killer on the spot with his own machete. Fabiana’s sister, Giovanna, is all that remains and Max does succeed in getting her out of Dodge whilst avoiding the Crachá Preto, but is left behind by Passos who picks up Giovanna, pregnant with his child, and helicopters away. Meanwhile, Max is approached by a character we meet earlier in the game, Officer Wilson da Silva, an incorruptible cop and one of a handful in Brazil, all things considered. Da Silva was the one to give Max the names of most of the villains we’ve been introduced to.

He returns to question one of Max’s and Passos’ failures, a job in Panama, ferrying a rich New York divorcée, Daphne Bernstein. Remember when I mentioned that the plot is suggested to be an inside job? Funny enough, it’s not the first instance of one. The Panama job was a set up to get Bernstein and her peers maimed and robbed and use Max as a scapegoat for a botch job, but things go south when Max makes an attempt to be a good man and rescue his client from a rightwing Colombian death squad called the AUP. All in all, Max is only a stone’s throw away from deception.

The mother of all nightmares comes when it’s discovered that the UFE and Crachá Preto have a hand in an organ smuggling operation based out of an abandoned condemned hotel. The corruption runs deep and playing up the themes of corruption and loose ends, Max, for the third time in his life, finds himself at the forefront of a great scandal involving people he’s either supposed to protect or get protection from. This time, it’s wearing a green-yellow-navy blue flag, speaks Portuguese and is the third worst offender of police and military corruption and brutality, as well as being the home of several ratline users after the fall of the Nazi regime.

Serrano, gets a slight redemption, in that Max lets him kill the main surgeon responsible for the organ theft while he deals with the bigger fish, the Crachá Preto leader Álvaro Neves.

The penultimate arc puts him deep in the heart of the 55th Battalion of the UFE, their leaders, Armando Becker and Bachmeyer, and the main benefactor, Victor Branco, the middle child and rightwing politician using tragedy and scandalous donations to fund his struggling mayoral campaign. With Da Silva’s help, the villains behind this wicked plot are put to bed and Max lives out the rest of his retirement as a Brazilian resident of Bahia (or Americana if we wanna get creative), with his voice actor James McCaffrey losing the fight to cancer in December 2023.

James McCaffrey (1958-2023)

All an exciting plot, right? Well, there are criticisms especially of the second and third games to be addressed. Mechanically, an attempt to play the older games on modern hardware runs into problems that will leave Max stuck fighting the physics engine one too many times to count. I’ve gotten stuck on staircases and such trying to get through the first game. As for the second, no such problems, with even the bosses becoming more manageable than simply being tougher to kill in this instance; however, as I’ve said, there seems to be too much intrigue-ception going on. Makes Game of Thrones look like a Roald Dahl storybook due to the complexities–I retreated to the wiki pages to play catch ups.

Two cops in the same department on opposing sides have fugitive/criminal lovers who are getting each other’s way, one attempting to get to the bottom of the Cleaners’ case with the other feigning indifference to let her lover get away and finance his front companies off the corpse of the Mafia, facing an unkillable painkiller addicted cop. Is that a good summary? Do fish piss where they eat?

In my research, I heard that Max Payne 2 was a flop, which contradicts to the praise it gets nowadays with most considering it to be better than the final installment. For what it’s worth, I say that the themes don’t change even if the language does. To defend Max Payne 3, it was a technical marvel, a RockStar Games brainchild featuring many of the minor details and aspects that would bring the following year’s Grand Theft Auto V to its lofty heights for the next decade. Weapons that flow from gameplay to cutscene and vice versa; different exiting messages when you click/press the Exit Game button; some avoidable fire fights; an added focus on bullet camera; an added cover system; and a more realistic arsenal that the player can pick and choose from over the course of the game as opposed to merely picking from an invisible weapon statistic to choose from the numerous weapons you run into in the game. This video linked below shows this in action:

Channel: o Knightz o

2012 in video games was stacked with heavy hitters like Halo 4, Borderlands, Diablo and others overshadowing the game’s release with the previous years’ series still dominating the landscape while the succeeding year’s game release window made for incredible hype, and I was not immune to this. GTA 5 being around the corner and my at-the-time lack of then-current gen hardware meant that I would have to experience the Max Payne series later than normal, but like all those who discovered Avatar: The Last Airbender due to Netflix acquiring the series for streaming in 2020, better late than never. Now we can all enjoy things at our own pace.

If you stuck it out for this long and drawn-out plot summary of a whole series, this is a full-on recommendation of the series as are most of the entries in this blog. Apologies if it was too long or there weren’t enough (or somehow too many) paragraph breaks. For the next series of games to cover, I’m gonna shorten as much as possible.

These days, you can only play these by way of an emulator, but based on my experience, it’s worth the effort and unlike an emulator of a 7th generation console, these all run as smoothly as possible so long as you don’t nitpick too hard.