Very few imitators

You wanna know something interesting about games in the mid 1990s to around 2011 or so? The most popular properties were cloned and imitated ad nauseum. Google the most cloned video games and the search results will pull up some of the obvious examples because of how influential they were at release and still are. Doom, GTA III, Minecraft, Flappy Bird, and to add onto that, God of War, Mortal Kombat (especially in the 90s when it first debuted), Devil May Cry, and so many others as seen in this screenshot:

Even WatchMojo made a list of heavily cloned video games… multiple times. >_<

And credit where it’s due. No one will deny how influential these games are, so I can understand why John Q. Video Game Developer thought Kratos was just ashen pecs, a skirt, and chained weapons and ran with that. Not fast enough though because the Ghost of Sparta be going full Spartan 〒▽〒

I’ve used this screenshot before (￣y▽,￣)╭

But eyeing up the clones of old, there’s something I notice hasn’t had clones in the hard video game sense of copy-paste a successful formula. Lineage and evolution certainly, but nothing that stands out as a recognizable clone of the game I’m talking about. If the title wasn’t a giveaway, this is:

“They were all dead. The final gunsh–” blah blah blah.

You know the spiel, I know the spiel, I hear it yearly when I benchmark the game’s performance on modern hardware… from start to finish.

The NYPD’s most hard-boiled detective pays homage to the Hong Kong action cinematic set-pieces brought to us by the likes of John “Gunfire” Woo and the bullet time dodge mechanics brought forth by the Wachowskis in The Matrix, but it also has more than just double gun ballistic ballet with gunfire playing in the role of the opera to the gritty rendition of Dies Irae. A man whose brain is a mirror to the schematic layout of Sam Lake’s could produce a true-to-form Max Payne-like, replete with mythos, lore, and a writing style that seems as though Lake taught the class to the writer with John Woo’s assistance. So far, the only one who has passed is Xalavier Nelson and his game, El Paso, Elsewhere.

Perhaps by the time of the Holiday round up, I can provide a brief synopsis and impression of this game. It looks like it has accomplished a lot, especially with a sequel geared up for 2027. >_>

Not to mention the 2007 video game Stranglehold, which exists in a bizarre state. John Woo’s movies before 1992 and The Matrix helped build what Max Payne would become and Max Payne’s lineage followed heavily into Stranglehold, though with a level of restraint that admittedly hurts the game combat-wise by restricting the weapon variety to four regulars and a few specialties. Understandable for a Hong Kong setting, not so much when you recall that the vast majority of enemy types are Triads engaged in black market arms dealing among other things. Criminals know what laws they’re ignoring. Fake movie mythos or not, real-world organized crime is not something to sneeze at, even if it’s heavily parodied.

Moj je tata zločinac iz rata

And here’s what’s interesting: so many games have been copied or parodied, loads of others are ripe for parody, and when someone lampoons the visuals, they either miss the subtle layer beneath it, or they see it and opt to satirize something else. Which brings me to Max Payne.

Max Payne is an extensively layered game. It comes with mythology, Norse mythology plastered over Winter NYC with factions playing the assigned roles of the Aesir-Vanir War with the notable tweaks that require a fine toothed comb to look over again. It ain’t just gritty story with gritty cop doing gritty things in slow motion, and that description applies to a lot of John Woo films and The Matrix. Bullet dodging, shoot-dodging, operatic bullet time, Max Payne is a tragedy by way of Greco-Roman terms. He didn’t bring the tragedy to life by his own hands, but from start to finish of just the first game, he perpetuated it by gunning his way to the top. Rico Muerte, Vinnie Gognitti, Jack Lupino >_<, Angelo Punchinello; and in this instance, the Punchinello Family was also a victim of Nicole Horne’s ruthless machinations.

Max Payne 2 is even worse about this with every trusted individual from the first game presenting a conflict of interest. I wrote about that thing last year when I had concluded why Max Payne 3 was criminally underrated. In the second game, Woden reveals that the Inner Circle wasn’t wholly innocent. It does consist of powerful people in New York’s seats of power, but raking up the muck like a Teddy Roosevelt reveals the dirt they pulled up. Going back to the post-Gulf War era when the U.S. government and military funded a research project to heighten the morale of combat troops, that damn designer drug Valkyr provided unsavory results and funding for the project ceased in 1995. Then the witch marches through the sleek glass doors in her daggered stilettos as they stab and puncture the veins of New York, injecting the brew into every step.

The witch with carte-blanche, she reinvigorated the project and put as much funding into it as she could. Playing the rest of the series back, and looking for clues in multiple run throughs, you see things that you might’ve passed over the first go ’round and realize it wasn’t just a red herring the second go ’round. The Aesir Corporation bonds, the raspy-voiced woman calling Max’s house, BB gunning down Alex Balder; and this pattern continued even when Sam Lake wasn’t writing the third game.

The end of that game is proof of the assertion that most victims know the perpetrator and vice versa. And if you speak Brazilian Portuguese, aside from most Brazilian residents ridiculing the bizarre blend of regional and Peninsular Portuguese accents T_T, there’s a few clues that unveil the depth of the conspiracy. The beginning of the game oughta ring some alarm bells for you criminology degree havers reading this. How does a bummy gang from deep in the favelas get so close to Brazilian high society? How do they know to target the trophy wife, Fabiana? And going back to the first game, Nicole Horne used her resources to track down the source of the leak and where it wound up, using druggies to storm Max’s house and erase the evidence in horrible fashion. The danger to her is that she barricaded herself between walls of plausible deniability. Drug trafficking got uglier than a Sopranos episode beat down or inner city policing in The Wire.

They’re both gritty HBO productions, so you’ve got your pick for what’s more appropriate >_>.

Just this summary of the series shows why copying it beat for beat for beat is so difficult. Stranglehold didn’t so much as copy it as coincidentally got the same answers on the exam that Max Payne did, which is fitting because Max Payne actually did the homework, and Stranglehold received private tutoring from John Woo himself. Then Xalavier Nelson studied Max Payne and injected a different kind of mythology to pay tribute with his 2023 game El Paso, Elsewhere. Max planted the seed and Nelson picked the fruit from a tree that matured, acknowledging the root and splicing the branch onto something new… almost like a certain appraiser from a quiet mountain town in not-Sendai…

I haven’t forgotten about JoJo, just haven’t been able to read it as extensively as I wish T^T.

But the small selection of games that pay homage to Max Payne show not just difficulty in understanding the game’s plot and meaning. You can’t just copy what everyone sees and produce the same result. You’re probably not gonna get anything meaningful out of it anyway. But a close-up of Max Payne did well can be enough to fuel another spiritual successor that graduates at the top of the class from the Noir School of Tragic Storytelling. And my documented affection for the series shows up so much, that this post may be a renewal of the wedding vows… ╰(￣ω￣ｏ)

As well as an admission of ideas of my own. Where else the Max Payne formula can follow through. Britain? Russia? China? Japan? Germany? Mexico? All things considered, the story is neo-noir incarnate. Pulp fiction, Norse mythology, ancient tragicomedy; every culture has its own answer to the base foundation. I don’t wanna butter anyone up by saying, I’ve been secretly crafting a noir story set in Quezon City where Rosalind Reyes and Edwin Emiliano uncover a conspiracy carnapping ring connecting to a Senator from Cebu.

I haven’t even started my teleserye binge… the hunt still continues.

I do want to craft a few experiments with the tools at my disposal to see just how hard it is to craft a Max Payne successor. Stranglehold and El Paso, Elsewhere both show that it can be done, but those being some of the only examples that one can pull show that the difficulty is real. Do I have a real timeline for this? Not exactly. It’ll be something to explore in the background. The foundation has been laid, the house has a schematic; the next step is to start building.

No big bad wolf to come huff and puff and blow this house down (* ￣︿￣).

Maybe the project will follow Edison da Sousa and Jose Manafort Pereira as beat cops in Recife, or Lucio Massimo in Bologna. The inner machinations of my mind are an utter enigma.

Magkita tayo sa susunod na linggo, Ricardo.