Tag: max payne 2

The Games I’ve Played

TiberiusLeave a comment

Reviewing my play time

Down to the wire, the 11th hour and 2025 is drawing to a close and I have time for the last in this wrap up trio before I get to things I was aware of this year but didn’t or couldn’t cover. Some of these will be games that released this year, others will be old enough to legally drink in the U.S. Looking back on it, I played more games than I watched anime and the problem with anime I’ve had is one of the same ones I’ve had with television, standard or otherwise. The commitment to a series is more than a game that can last between 4 and 400 hours, not to mention as much as I loathe the binge watching method, one benefit it has is that I can clear out my watchlist sooner, but the drawback I see is not being able to fully absorb a show, nuances and all.

For the games I’ve played this year:

  1. Grand Theft Auto III (2001)
  2. God of War (2005)
  3. Silent Hill f (2025)
  4. Mafia: The Old Country (2025)
  5. Call of Duty: World at War (2008), Black Ops (2010), Black Ops II (2012)
  6. Ghost of Tsushima (2020)
  7. Max Payne (2001), Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne (2003), Max Payne 3 (2012)
  8. Spec Ops: The Line (2012)

This is neither an exhaustive nor ranked in order list. Just ones that I spent a lot of time on this year and yes, for those who know, Max Payne is up there again. It’s my favorite series after all. Actually, looking at this list, I have reverence for games as old as myself, beginning with:

  • You feelin’ lucky, punk?

Looking at the timeline, GTA 2 released in 1999 and III in 2001, October to be precise, and knowing what happened in real life a month prior, you’d think terrorism would at best lead to a delay, but loads of things were cut that would’ve made the game even darker and grittier than it already was, notably one such mission involving a fabricated aerial terrorist attack. Funny enough, anyone who was alive and old enough to remember 1990s U.S. politics would’ve suspected the decade to have something of a myriad of eye-catching headlines. Ruby Ridge, Waco, Oklahoma City, the World Trade Center parking lot in 1993, the East Africa Embassy bombings, and several others, not helped by President Bill Clinton promising repeatedly to get Osama bin Laden, only for that promise to be fulfilled a decade after he left office by the Obama administration, but I digress.

Of the cuts made to the game, the color scheme referencing the NYPD’s liveries was changed to black-and-white when it was originally sky blue-and-white. Those iconic police liveries would’ve been making daily trips to help clean up the area alongside FDNY and the National Guard, so the decision to change it would’ve been out of respect for the victims and the first responders, I take it. Also, if it wasn’t for 9/11, the NYPD police union might’ve brought them to court for copyright or plagiarism. Who knows? Several missions referencing terrorism were dropped because of course they were; unused characters and dialogue was found in the game’s files over the years; and the rest of what was found in the betas was also thought to be removed, but Rockstar/DMA Design was cutting bloated content in the months prior that year. Probably even before that.

Gameplay-wise, there’s loads of hints and minor details that make the game seem like a passion project/brainchild with so many celebrities whose voices and/or music was being featured in the game in some capacity. One that stands out to me would be the use of the background music for Scary Movies by Royce da 5’9″ and Eminem.

Something you’d have to find by delving into Wiki pages and whatnot

The music, the use of celebrities for voice acting roles (Frank Vincent, Robert Loggia, numerous rappers, etc.), the gangster movie aesthetic that was prominent in the late 1980s and 90s, and to top it all off, it was originally designed for the PS2 and original Xbox with a port to PC coming a couple years later. None of those devices had a lot of processing power at the time, and the games they housed were nothing short of extraordinary. The use of limited technology really drove creativity, and before I get accused of sounding like some boomer gamer longing for the “uncomplicated days,” as much trouble as I went through to emulate and play GTA III, I know damn well that between it and GTA V and later VI (set for release in 2032 or whatever), it aged poorly.
Even it’s 2002 asset flip in Vice City was a better showing in comparison.

Tommy was essentially Claude with a functioning voice box and actual reasoning, all things considered

I really like GTA III, but I’m not gonna lambaste anyone who hasn’t played it or implore people to bother. If they do, great. If not, nothing was gained or lost. That said, the powers that be, the unchangeable forces of nature, and the gaming landscape owe a lot to GTA III. Rockstar’s successful venture into 3D with both this and Max Payne earlier that year show that with some refinement, 3D can and does work in the gaming sphere with nearly every video game releasing a sequel, if not debuting, over the course of the 2000s and the remainder of the 6th console generation in 3D. The open-world and nonlinear gameplay allowed for speedrunning and multiple different approaches to achieve the same objective so players can get creative with the sandbox. And this being Rockstar, the 3D graphics and depictions of violence led to lawsuits and court settlements for years to come.

Presumably less so for Max Payne and more so for GTA due to it being accessible despite having a slightly less dark story for the time period, GTA alone would see Rockstar in the hot seat by overzealous attorneys and aspirants harping on the zombie adage that “Video games cause violence.” A peek at just this blog and other, more respectable, researchers shows that that’s not and never has been the case–each one is unique, but ignoring nuance in the face of outrage is a time-honored human tradition that keeps us from discovering the aliens… or rather keeps the aliens from discovering us. We disagree on what a wall outlet should look like and the little green men are able to build advanced spaceships in galaxies lightyears away.

S[bark!]t like this is why we haven’t had any abductions as of late

And of course, Rockstar being Rockstar, not only kept trucking on in the face of adversity, but saw fit to take the piss out of their critics by putting their face on the Statue of Happiness in GTA 4, release Bully in 2006, and ride the wave until Jack Thompson was permanently barred from practicing law for his frivolous lawsuits. Rockstar may get s[gunshots]t for releasing one game every 30 years these days, but in a time when they put all of their heads together in a circle, they can give us the same magic used to make King Arthur’s armaments and accoutrements. The dark and edgy era of the 2000s isn’t here anymore, but I’d live to see a piece of media try something like this or Manhunt again, especially with all the cry-bullying that happens on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, and parts of Reddit. Heads would roll and I argue that they need to.

Onto the next game:

  • Ares!!! Destroy my enemies, and my life is yours!!

We laud Kratos as the eponymous hero of the Norse saga these days, but I’ve learned ages ago that because of the Norse saga, few people realize he debuted in 2005 in the Greek saga. Now, fans who’d made the discovery, even if they picked up the 2018 soft-boot, have a bevy of a series to pick through, but for those who aren’t aware, the original Greek games were an homage to the old claymation, Greco-Roman movies of old like Clash of the Titans, The 300 Spartans, and the 1995 live-action Hercules series. David Jaffe and co. grew up with those and true to the meme, he turned 4, chose one of the several things little kids do at that age and based his entire personality on it.

In my case, it was medieval Japan and East Asia

Fast-forward to Sony Computer Entertainment crafting God of War the same way Hephaestus crafts weapons for Olympus, and it may be lost on those who haven’t or are unable to experience the Greek saga games, but God of War 2005 represents a shift in gaming that happened at the same time during its release. Quick-time events, which it helped to popularize in gaming years later for better or worse; hack-and-slash combat that would reach its zenith in this and other games; puzzles and intricate level design that would be a staple of the series and its several hundred thousand derivatives, and on that last point, several clones.

A stern critic could eye up the God of War trilogy and its PSP spinoffs and put them side-by-side with other games that tried to ape its formula, you’ll notice that several games attempt to rip it off in the years following to make a quick buck, but very few did so successfully or memorably. Something that happened to Mortal Kombat and Street Fighter in the 90s. No-name developers attempting to make a name for themselves by way of emulating a popular formula is a time-honored tradition in video games and sometimes movies. Sometimes you get a successful product like Bayonetta and other times you get a ripoff that deserves the “Like God of War But” stamp of disappointment.

Channel: The Escapist

A reasonable argument could made over imitation and video game clones, but the fact remains that if it was popular enough to sell, it’s also popular enough to steal. God of War wasn’t the only victim of widespread theft, but it was a very noticeable one. To this day, video games are getting cloned and nothing is really stopping the cloning process.

Numero Tres:

  • 化け物や！

Google Translate isn’t good for out of context translations…

My exposure to Silent Hill as a series was always through the grapevine. I didn’t know about it for years and by the time I showed interest in some of the better games, my financial situation and the trends of the time wouldn’t allow me to play them on obsolete hardware. Fast-forward to emulation and I have it saved on my PCSX2 emulator so when the time comes (probably in a few days or a week or so), I have Silent Hill 2 to look forward to.

I’ve been told many times that 2 is the peak of quality and the series gradually fell with 2007’s Origins, the following year’s Homecoming, the 2009 Shattered Memories remake, and 2012’s Downpour falling short of prior entries. A sycophantic Silent Hill fan may have more details on each, but the one game that got me genuinely interested in the series is one that can no longer be accessed by normal means thanks to Konami’s boneheadedness in the last 11 or 12 years.

Veterans got flashbacks and bad memories of a game that never was

From the viewer side of things, this was unsettling enough to simply watch–if I had a PS4 at the time, and I was made aware of the cancellation of Silent Hills, I would treasure P.T. like it was the crown jewel in my empire. Legendary horror writers and programmers in Guillermo del Toro, Hideo Kojima, and Junji Ito were, at some point, approached by Konami to work on, or at the very least contribute to the game’s development, but inheriting the same problems that Sega has — that being incredibly difficult to work with — Konami s[pig squeals]t so hard through the bed, the stool broke through the floor at Mach 7 and made a sinkhole that ate the house.

To make it worse, in 2015 during the Game Awards, a Konami-hired attorney barred Kojima from physically accepting awards for Metal Gear Solid V under threat of legal hell. My criticism of Konami is merely surface level, but I know there’s people out there who will die never letting Konami forget what they let slip through their fingers all those years ago by focusing mainly on profit over playability. Kojima’s expulsion was especially felt when Metal Gear Survive was crapped out, showing how much heavy-lifting Kojima was doing at Konami. To date, Metal Gear hasn’t had a release in over seven years and probably won’t unless we get something of a spiritual successor.

The whole point of detailing all of that was a reminder that even when a bad actor does good once in a while, a single move in the right direction isn’t enough to erase the past sins. I normally don’t like to bludgeon the point home like this, but in the case of recidivist behavior, the symptoms are still showing and a higher dosage is required. Having said that, Silent Hill f appears to return to form of sorts as a proper horror game in the same vein as the earlier entries from over 20 years ago. Coupling the psychological with the physical, the sense of foreboding and tension as you choose what part of fight or flight you want to emphasize really adds to the game. The use of a regenerating stamina bar and a regenerating sanity bar add to the experience too. You’re not some superpowered gorilla capable of smashing through everything from the grass going up like it’s Rampage; you’re a teenage schoolgirl in 1960s rural Japan where constant intrusions into your neighbor’s personal lives are how you get the news.

彼女の名前は深水雛子や。

AFAIK, prior Silent Hill games were always set in the titular Silent Hill or a surrounding suburb, but the decision to return it to Japan was to fully reset the series and remind everyone that it began with Japanese horror tropes, not western ones. Now my limited knowledge on East Asian, and specifically Japanese, horror boils down to Ju-On: The Grudge, One Missed Call, Ringu, and most recently Taiwan’s The Tag-Along, so I’m not an expert on East Asian mythological horror tropes outside of Japanese kami and various yokai. Still, there were several noticeable Japanese horror tropes that did tie into Shintoism and Mahayana Buddhism. I suspect that yokai are an influential part of the monsters in this entry, but it’s merely a gut feeling based on what I’ve seen and roughly two hours of gameplay ain’t enough to speak with certainty. I’ll be back for a full review of the game probably in February or something.

Quattro:

  • Il Regno delle Due Sicilie

I’ve talked about the Mafia series before because I like it, but not nearly as much as God of War or Max Payne, both of which I talk about and play at least once a year. For the Mafia series, it’s been a bit tougher with the original games descending into abandonware status and necessitating remakes, which are more accessible than the originals that they’d fixed, though they’re all long as hell, with Mafia III being one of the longer entries in the series for all the side content available in just the base game.

Mafia: The City of Lost Heaven takes place in the 1930s in the Midwest at the end of Prohibition, so you can still make a few pennies from rumrunning. Mafia II takes place between 1945 and ’51 on the East Coast and makes mention of the war effort and the lifestyle of the early 1950s. Mafia III takes place in 1968 in the Deep South during the civil rights movement, a pivotal time for the U.S. foreign and domestic policy concerning race relations and the Vietnam War effort seeing record anti-war protests and draft dodging. The Old Country is a prequel set in 1900s Sicily, at a time when Italy was whole but Italians as a national people were only just being made.

Much of my knowledge on Italian history came from the latter third of middle school, tenth grade, and my Italian language community college courses. So I know the generic stuff about the peculiar boot-shaped country, but not enough about specific regions at specific periods in time to criticize the historical angle, so learning that some families sold their sons to work in sulfur mines to pay off debts was interesting. The weapons in the games do reflect the era of combat, and in this case, the weapons used by the mafiosi would’ve been in use during Italy’s pathetic attempts to colonize East Africa.

The Mongols had better deserts to exploit, just saying

As such, rolling blocks, trapdoor rifles, and bolt-action rifles are a feature in the game. The machine guns and submachine guns of later mobster media obviously comes decades after all this. I’m not as far in this game as I am with some of the others on this list, but graphically Hangar 13 found their bread and butter back in Mafia III and have been using that with Mafia: Definitive Edition and this game, but left Mafia II untouched. But Mafia II: Definitive Edition has the appropriate promo art.

The tech also reflects the time period. Telephones, automobiles, entertainment; it all feels appropriate for the mid-1900s, which is to say primitive compared to Tommy Angelo’s definition of entertainment, and Vito Scaletta’s and Lincoln Clay’s, and the latter two had television. As a matter of fact, what I’ve seen of The Old Country so far reminds me of some mobster media about the earliest Italian-American organized crime groups. Less Commission and Lucky Luciano and more John Dillinger, Bugs Moran, and adolescent Al Capone.

Before he was dressing like this, though he might’ve always dressed like this

More needs to be explored before I share my thoughts, but for immersion, I’ve set the language output to Sicilian because English language courses as a part of the national Italian curriculum would be a century away.

五番目:

  • Seelow Heights 1945, Vietnam 1968, and Downtown L.A. 2025

I’ve played the Black Ops games before multiple times, but this year was the first time I got to World at War and playing through it, it has the hallmarks of a horror game. Enemies can pop up at you from nothing, notorious adversaries who famously courted death on the battlefield (Imperial Japanese and Nazi German fanaticism is still studied to this day), scarce ammunition, dark atmosphere in contrast to how this era is typically depicted especially in film; I shudder to think how many U.S. soldiers, sailors, and Marines were caught by surprise by the Japanese as well as the rest of the Pacific Allies. Same goes for everyone caught in the Eastern Front against Germany, to include collaborators and partisans.

I didn’t expect a war game to unnerve me while I was playing and here we are. Goes to show how far war games have fallen over the years. War has and always will be unpleasant. One thing to highlight though are a slew of historical inaccuracies design-wise. Of course, true historical accuracy is a concern for the reenactors and cosplayers, but to get to at least 90% accuracy requires a couple of mods. Some that reflect the ethnic diversity of the Soviet Union so we get more than Russian names; some that replace the Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS with the Volkssturm, the last ditch militia propped up by Hitler at the 11th hour; some for the U.S. Marines’ gear in the Pacific so they look appropriate for the era; and some for the Japanese Army, presumably some variance in voice lines to denote Japan’s historical use of Korean, Taiwanese and Manchu conscripts, as well as ideologically-minded partisans. But that’s not my strict desire, that would be the desire of YouTube channel: The Frosty 1.

Treyarch really had platinum with these games. It was still there come Black Ops III time, but after IV, it wasn’t worth it’s weight anymore. Cold War and Black Ops 6 were up there, but the most recent entry necessitates a reboot yesterday.

The mighty have fallen and they can’t get up

Fortunately for me, I included a handful of those accuracy mods, so the next time I boot the game up, they should impact the experience for me next time.

Sechste:

  • 我が名は境井仁だ！

I briefly touched on shog我が名は酒井人だ！unate foreign policy when I was reviewing The Elusive Samurai manga for the first time, but to further elaborate on that, the Mongols didn’t realize that the emperor of Japan was a figurehead for the Hojo clan regents (shikken) at the time until they launched a naval invasion in 1274, which is what Tsushima is about. Contrary to popular belief, only the second attempt was deemed a failure by way of monsoons. The first one was enough to shake the foundations in Kamakura and Kyoto because the samurai had all put up a stiff and adamant resistance to Mongol absorption. Thus, the Mongols hyper-invaded the Middle East to make up for the shortfall of failing in Japan while Japan itself held onto its seat of power in Kamakura until Ashikaga Takauji double-crossed the Hojo and eventually the emperor himself to consolidate power.

For a traitor, Matsui really made him easy on the eyes

Although developed by American studio Sucker Punch, Ghost of Tsushima and its sequel Yotei are a love letter to Akira Kurosawa films. I’d lambaste the strict adherence to samurai blades if the time period was wrong. But it’s not bad at all. Portuguese missionaries didn’t bring guns with them to Japan until 1543, and it took another couple of decades for the Japanese to reverse engineer them domestically. It’s a technical marvel in its own right with the language also being appropriate for the time and archaic for modern Japanophones.

As for critique, it gets points docked for the Mongols being unanimously Mongolian speaking when the Mongol-led Yuan dynasty included Jurchens, Han Chinese and Koreans, and standardizing speech and vocal patterns would be an afterthought in this time period since nationalism is a more recent thing. A militant Mongol Empire could enforce a national tongue, but if what I’ve been taught about Mongol culture is true, then their territory would’ve been smaller and subject to further internal divisions after Kublai Khan. Then again, this video below explains why the devs did what they did:

Channel: Cool History Bros

Accurate or not, the cross-cultural pollination of east and west was a significant factor for this game seeing as the Japanese audience absolutely loved this game, same as how numerous western fans coined the adage “Git Gud” as a response when a novice Souls player asks for help with a boss, the Souls devs being Japanese themselves. One thing to note about recent titles like these is the wider variety of language options and seeing as I’m playing Sekiro and watching Japanese live-action shows in the original language, I believe I’ve become something of a purist in regard to gaming. I can’t really criticize voice acting and direction when I’m not a voice actor myself. The choice behind this is related to setting. Fantasy worlds are a free-for-all, but feudal Japan, rural 1960s Japan (possibly a stand-in for Shizuoka based on the kanji 「静岡」), and Sicily are all real places with their own respective languages and dialects. Doesn’t make a lot of sense that Sakai Jin, Hinako-san, and The Old Country protagonist, Enzo Favara, would know English. Also, I want the Kurosawa experience for Ghost of Tsushima.

The only great shame I can express for Ghost of Tsushima was the practice by Sony to limit exclusivity to sell consoles. Accessibility for more players who don’t have the necessary hardware to play the games is one thing to praise, or I wouldn’t have been able to see God of War 4 for myself personally…

…but if the player already has a Sony product on one platform, what’s the motivation to shell out for the console itself? Especially with cross-play becoming a thing in recent years? I can play Dead by Daylight on PC while my National Guard buddies boot up an Xbox or PS4 and load in with 2% of the issues that this brings. As for console gaming itself, though I emulate old titles, use ROMs for select PC releases, and game largely on PC when able, I’m not completely opposed to console gaming for good. Unfortunately, the pandemic unleashed the flood gates for a myriad of scalpers to buy and resell the 9th gen consoles at obscene prices. Not to mention, neither of them are making confident moves with their respective products. You can find numerous videos expressing confusion at Microsoft’s direction with the Xbox while Sony has been putting one too many eggs in the future of gaming while seemingly forgetting their roots. Crash Bandicoot may be awkward to look at today, but expecting perfection at the first hurdle is how you get imperfections. Did no one ever teach that to Sony?

Sétimo:

  • The Flesh of Fallen Angels

See this post for more details.

Okay, I’ll elaborate. My well-known love for the series goes without saying. The decision to replay it once again is something of a yearly tradition. The gunplay, bullet-time, story beats, writing, game mechanics; the series is a masterpiece of third-person shooting and the fact that it hasn’t inspired more clones over the years is striking. The only ones I can point to are 2007’s Stranglehold by John Woo, starring Chow Yun-fat reprising his role as Inspector Tequila and 2023’s El Paso, Elsewhere by Xalavier Nelson Jr.

One day, I shall judge Mr. Nelson’s work of art

I don’t really have to worry too much about the state of the third game, but the first two being as old as they are are subject to age. Not that they’re aging poorly, but that the tech is evolving without a means to reliably support them without issue. I can run the first game on one of my laptops, but I struggle on the big rig, yet the same big rig is able to run the second and third games issue-free. So the yearly gameplays are something of a quality test of sorts.

As far as gameplay goes, the first game remains a steady ass-kicker. It’s a game that has me quick saving every time I clear a room full of bad guys. It’s also the one with admittedly s[boots]t physics. It ranges from mildly annoying in regard platforming to downright nightmarish in the appropriate nightmare sections. Combine this with a few minor but noticeable glitches that initially had me clipping through the wall or getting stuck in a wall in pitched moments, and I have to risk exiting out to look for a hotfix and go through the bulls[urgh!]t all over again.

Enemy AI has almost always been strong ever since the first game, so from the frozen NY maze of brownstones and brickwork to the sheet metal, ramshackle Hoovervilles of Sao Paulo, I find myself planning my next moves even further beyond what I can immediately see. Typically, I tend to play it by ear and leave the door open for any type of surprise to come my way. It can be done in this series too, even after playing it as many times as I have, though not to a large extent. Max being a cop would be collecting evidence as he goes, and some parts of the games require more than gunning everything in sight.

The third installment is the black sheep of the series noted by the lack of involvement from Sam Lake and Remedy Entertainment, the first clue being the cynical, nonanalytical writing, but in defense of the third game, it’s a nine-year gap between it and the second game and a strong painkiller/opioid addiction would leave anyone in a dour mood, especially if you were still mulling over the death of your family by outside forces.

Just ask this guy.

Granted, Max didn’t turn New York inside out, but the destruction of Olympus was literally the last thing Kratos was trying to do

Yes, this is another recommendation for Max Payne, and yes I’m eagerly awaiting the remakes coming out in or after 2026.

Lastly:

  • Leopold II and the Congo, 1899; Col. Kurtz and South Vietnam, 1970s; and Lt. Col. Konrad and the UAE, 2012.

Personally, I feel that this game’s commentary and stark chastisement of gaming is one that aged terribly. It had a case in criticism of modern warfare games and U.S. foreign policy, like other media, but it wasn’t really meant to be rebooted. Suffice to say, it at least went out on a whimper than with a bang. The modern warfare military shooter was revolutionary when CoD did it in 2007, followed by Battlefield soon after, though both were starting to feel that there wasn’t any evolution and some critics were getting tired of the formula by 2011, absent of the individual plots of MW3 and BF3.

2012 would see the long dormant shovelware shooter series Spec Ops belch its profound words at the time in criticism of the modern warfare shooter. “You’re not a hero, you’re a gamer.” “You wanted to feel like something you’re not.” All well and good, Yager Development, but I don’t play CoD for the sole purpose of saving the world, I like campaign of select games and when I wanna turn my brain off I retreat to the zombies mode. Sometimes multiplayer if I can spare a couple minutes to an hour these days.

Admittedly, Spec Ops was asking familiar questions regarding the purpose of Iraq if the WMD scare was cattle manure and why we were still in Afghanistan with it being revealed that nation-building in a place like that hasn’t worked out well for anyone who tried. Not the Soviets, not the Brits, not the Persians, not even Alexander the Great, and we call him “the Great.”

Well, it asked what it wanted to ask at the time and knowing how the War in Afghanistan ended with the Taliban unseated and subsequently reseated in Kabul, if Spec Ops did spawn a sequel or a successor, it might’ve been even harsher on U.S. foreign policy. And I won’t be nice, I know that the U.S. hadn’t built a stable nation since South Korea and calling South Korea stable is putting their modern history very nicely. Vietnam proved to be more prophetic than we originally thought.

But on the whole Spec Ops: The Line’s commentary is critically kneecapped by the decision to make the gameplay so cumbersome. I default to medium difficulty because I’m not so stunted that I need someone to hold and shake my penis every time I have to piss, but I’m also not a badass who can eat Dark Souls for breakfast, lunch, and dinner and still feel starved for tougher games. Functionally, Spec Ops: The Line is not fun to play and maneuver around and that’s on purpose. Bad controls are bad controls, but I don’t know if it’s made worse when it’s accidental or intentional.

To be fair to Yager, I wouldn’t call this an act of malice or villainy; I take it that they didn’t like the direction war games were going at the time. Unfortunately, there seem to be efforts to de-list and bury the game for some reason. It was difficult for me to find it for emulation on RPCS3 and despite its graphical glitches, it was the best way to play it on short notice. I still don’t recommend it, even for its story. Just watch an analysis on YouTube or play the Modern Warfare Remastered games like I did.

Heroes don’t exist…

The last post for 2025 will go up next week and while I’ll be on leave for the holidays, I’ll try to push it out sometime on December 26. The one after that, the first post of 2026 may have to be delayed so that I can make my flight. So it may be out over the weekend on Saturday.

Happy Holidays and Happy New Year, dear readers. Don’t stop consuming your favorite entertainment products.

Revisiting Max Payne

TiberiusLeave a comment

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.

My Real Favorite Video Game

Tiberius2 Comments

It’s about time I got to something more personal

Since this blog’s inception, its mission has been to provide interesting opinions, takes, predictions, and whatnot on different parts of entertainment. I think it’s safe to say that as of September 1, 2023, I’ve achieved that and then some, but most of the opinions expressed have ironically not been as personal as advertised. So to address that, I’m going to help expand the shortlist of video games I enjoy by bringing you all to a game that I can return to 100% of the time without fault.

Yes, unquestionably, the game that ropes me in like a pest in a snare is that of the hard-boiled ex-NYPD detective Max Payne. In a bit of a contrast to the video games I’ve talked about before, my introduction to MP was late. Very late, and at the end of the series’ ropes. It was an advert for the third game in Spring 2012 that caught my eye and a local brick and mortar game store near me had a sale on the other two video games.

I pulled a genius move and began with a first-time experience with the PS2 version of MP1, and interesting features of the game make it many times more memorable than anything put out by RockStar, Midway/NetherRealm, or any other developer from the era. I popped the disc into the console and got to playing the tutorial. Games these days have a nasty habit of holding your hand very tightly, so something like MP1 giving this much slack on the choke chain was a breath of fresh air for a start. If the tutorial is necessary, I say they adopt this model, or since we’re fast moving away from that era, we should bring it back.

The titular protagonist is as I described before, an ex-detective who accepts a transfer to the DEA after a tragedy breaks into his house and murders his family. That’s how the first game starts actually. There’s a part of me that simultaneously wants to recount the plot of the games, and avoid all spoilers and instead direct you to your online marketplace of choice so you can wish list it for a sale or pirate it if that’s not applicable, so to compromise we’ll summarize the main points of the games, introduce some of the characters, and layout some features that I’ve yet to see repeated anywhere else.

Credit: u/postalesgames, https://www.reddit.com/r/maxpayne/comments/fuslxa/sam_lake_playing_max_payne_the_year_is_2001/

The first game begins with titular Max Payne talking to a colleague about a transfer to the DEA, which Max declines to stay close and safe with his family. Unfortunately, a tragedy barges in, murders his family, and purely for vengeance, he accepts the transfer into the DEA. It takes a few years but by the early winter of 2001, Max reaches the source of his pain. Buried deep within the wall of mobsters and junkies is a complicated plot spearheaded by a secret conspiracy that on reflection stands on par with something along the lines of 9/11, JFK, and moon landing conspiracies.

Set two years after the first game’s events, Max returns to the NYPD cleared of anything he did the last time with connections to powerful people. In this game, it’s learned that despite all their work and collaborating, the secret society that gets him out of dodge in this game isn’t the most loyal. They serve themselves first and the collaboration between themselves and Max was pure happenstance. The stars wouldn’t align that way again. Not to mention, another man who aided Max the first time was serving his own ends separate from the society.

Based on the characters you meet the first time around, you could probably take a bet or two on who would stick around and who would put a bullet in your head. Well, get ready to go broke because the circumstances flip like an overactive light switch. At times, it makes The Romance of the Three Kingdoms look like a schoolyard brawl, and Three Kingdoms is an appropriate comparison since most of the same enemies and then some come back for round two.

Now for something completely different. After almost a decade in hibernation, Max Payne 3 came to the shelves in 2012 and we’re far divorced from the setting of the first two games. Closing off the trilogy, MP3 gives us a protagonist with a severe drinking and painkiller dependency deep in Sao Paulo as a private contractor for an aristocratic family. Disaster follows Max like a wet dog and brings harm to the family he’s meant to protect.

A trophy wife gets abducted and Max has to fight tooth and nail to bring her back safe and sound. Following a bullet ridden trail through a river, Max investigates a favela, or Brazilian slum, for answers and finds out firsthand how cutthroat and unpredictable the arms trade can get. In the end, he learns that the family he’d been working for had been sold out by one of their own to corrupt officers and a militia involved in the human trafficking trade.

Yeah, the tone grew darker and darker with this final installment. Makes for some neat action, though.

The action tends to take a bigger focus than the story, as with most games. For the Max Payne series, the perfection lies in the shootdodging/bullet time mechanic.

Based on the video above, the way the mechanic works is that when Max dodges a hail of bullets, time slows down allowing the player to aim the weapon precisely at the enemies. Time stops when everyone is down or when the player lands on the other side of the room, whichever comes first.

Alternatively, there’s a manual slow-down that functions the same as the shootdodge, but without the dodging. Time just slows down and allows Max the freedom of movement to gun down everything from the dandelions on upwards. Yahtzee Croshaw of Zero Punctuation fame makes a point as well for the mechanic being a double-edged sword. It’s mostly effective when every enemy is down. If any are missed, just pop back up, finish the job, and to the next area you go.

The manual slowing of time is marginally better since you can toggle it on command and execute a plan to eradicate everyone in sight. One flaw with this would be the weapons in the enemy’s arsenal. Generally, the enemy’s are armed with pistols, machine pistols, and shotguns, but occasionally the one special enemy has something like a rifle or a grenade launcher that can send you into orbit in three seconds flat. Without clairvoyance, you’re left with trial and error to solve this problem and you’d better hope you’re allotted enough time to grab enemy weapons and ammo because the bosses can take hits like Senator Armstrong in Metal Gear Rising.

Across the games, there’s been a healthy cast of characters. I’ve already explained the man whose name is on the box art and newspapers, but there’s more. Such as the female counterpart to, and potential love interest of Max Payne: Mona Sax.

Mona Sax is a gun for hire, found to be chasing many of the same enemies that are also after Max. What also sets her apart is that unlike the typical assassin seen in media like, for example, Agent 47, Mona is shown to have a sly personality. As for her contracts, for the most part, it’s all business. If the target is competing for the devil’s position in hell, then she’s guaranteed to set her sights on you, especially for the money. But if the target is someone she happens to like or tolerate, then I can bet money myself that she can fake the target’s death.

The love angle comes into swing in the second game, but the circumstances going on in the background complicate things tremendously. They still have a lot of the same enemies, but not all of them. Sometimes Max’s enemies are Mona’s convenient allies and vice versa.

A head of the Russian mob, Vladimir Lem is a convenient ally in the first game. When he’s first introduced, he can be seen from afar eyeing Max’s exploits undercover within the mob, so his actual introduction is a long-time coming. When he finally shows his face, he lives up to many of the mobster movie stereotypes of old.

His first lines are a Corleone-style proposal to help Max get to the truth while Max solves a problem for him. Fast-forward two years, and there was more to Vlad than he was willing let on. Just goes to show that this isn’t business where people trust easily.

Alfred Woden is the mysterious one-eyed man drip feeding Max information on those who caused his pain years ago. You’d think he’d give it to him within first contact, but the details of the game keep him in his position of trickle down note-taking. But once everything is revealed in full, it’s go time.

This all goes well until the second game where the whole concept of trust experiences another Ring of Fire tremor.

The only supporting character to appear in the third game, Raul Passos fits the role of helping to isolate both Max and the player from a familiar environment, even though the lore explains that the two were coworkers in the NYPD before. Passos was the one who helped Max relocate to Brazil to start working as a contractor for the family, but even with a helping hand, things go terribly wrong.

Unlike the others, Passos doesn’t have anything else under the hood that royally screws Max over. Well, there is (minor spoiler), but it’s handily resolved rather quickly. Passos doesn’t betray Max and makes it long enough to escape without any scratches. If you’re looking for more details on the games, the Wikipedia, associated wiki pages, and reviews from back then are all available. And of course if you can afford to do so, Steam or similar online game stores are at your disposal and to my knowledge, RockStar hasn’t delisted the game from Steam. But on the off chance they choose to do so in their infinite wisdom, there’s another way to experience the series for yourself: