Max Payne, Kane & Lynch, and the Meaning of Ugly Games

13 years ago Kane and Lynch dead men came out and then GameSpot reviewer Jeff Gerstmann gave it a 6 out of 10 the review opened with and I quote came and lunched mmm is an ugly of Hawaii game almost immediately after and explicitly because of this review Gerstmann was fired the world of gaming journalism is not the hotbed of corruption and sleaze many internet chud's make it out to be it is almost universally a job with low pay and long hours that people do out of the love of the medium that's why more than a decade later Gerstmann firing still stands out he wasn't a casualty of pivot to video or a vindictive billionaire but an honest-to-god sacking based on taking a bad game to task a game that's publisher have been pouring lots and lots of money into advertising on game spots website what's kind of remarkable about this event other than how colossal a stupid the whole thing is is that Kenan Lynch is an ugly game is about as incontrovertible a statement as I can think of Kane and Lynch is an ugly game here too hot is this game ugly [Music] look before we start I'll give Kane and Lynch the obvious excuse it's an old game now it all games in 2007 looked like this not quite but still it's unfair to judge it by today's standards Gerstmann wasn't judging it by 2020s metrics though he was right there with it and more importantly he wasn't talking exclusively about the graphics Kane and Lynch is an utterly unread M t'v game you play as a man named Kane an ex-mercenary X death row inmate extremely unpleasant piece of work though the game is theoretically based on cooperation Kame hates everyone he's working with almost as much as everyone he's shooting at every line of dialogue is snarled every bit of teamwork is grudging the story is short but is simultaneously an absolute slog this isn't a buddy cop story you're a fun outlaw tale there's no friendship or levity or companionship it's a game about terrible men who mess up continuously and then it ends your time with Kane and Lynch is time spent with cruel men doing cruel things for what feels like no reason Lynch your partner has the fun Hollywood kind of mental illness where he randomly kills civilians because he just can't control himself hey meanwhile somehow has a wife and daughter we know this because at the midpoint of the story these two women you've never seen before show up and then one gets shot in the head there's actually hilariously a choice at the end of the game you can choose to leave your squad in the jungle while you fly off with your daughter who hates you [ __ ] fritter or you can stay with your squad and they all either die or betray you and also your daughter gets shot there's no good ending there's no redemption it's just full of nihilism and poison all the way through the sounds as I describe it almost interesting it's fun to dip into the deprave to toy with this kind of meaninglessness I promise it's not the game it sucks every environment is boring every AI friend and enemy is an idiot all you do in the game is shoot people and yet your guns don't even shoot straight the most basic form of interaction and Kane and Lynch is infuriating I'd also viewer miss if I didn't mention that in a game that seems to hate everyone it somehow seems to despise women with extra venom there are three women present in the game and each one manages to grading Li nag you right up to the point that they're killed horribly I despised playing it it is an ugly ugly game my total hours played on Steam for Canon Lynch is three it's the length of the game an account I don't intend to change anytime soon for everything else that least that doesn't ask you to spend very long with it sitting a significantly higher hour count in my library is rockstar's Max Payne 3 while Kane and Lynch takes 3 hours to beat Max Payne takes closer to 10 I haven't played it for 10 hours though I've played it for 60 Max Payne 3 has this irresistible aura for me and I think one reason why is what a curio it is in gaming history it's the end of multiple eras it's likely the end of Max Payne the video game series started in 2001 by remedy it's a very likely the end of Max Payne the character sent off into a literal sunset before we dip 2 credits and it's almost definitely the last non open-world game Rockstar will ever make Max Payne 3 represented a victorious Rockstar Games post the Wildfire success of Grand Theft Auto 4 at what was then the height of its powers although remedy developed the first two games Rockstar took this one over and poured a hundred million dollars into it making it at the time one of the most expensive games ever made the studio even redirected its design ambitions and Grand Theft Auto they scaled out to an entire city with Max Payne they turned that scale into a laser beam of focus creating some of the most unbelievably realized locales I've ever shot my way through every warehouse alley Airport and Max Payne 3 feels like it could be a real place every one of Max's outfits wrinkles perfectly every bullet in the game is physically rendered and that's to say nothing of how good it feels to play 60 hours remember it's almost ironic that this level of production value is applied to a property so corrosive Max Payne the man is a self-loathing drunk with a body count in the thousands a walking bad attitude and a history littered with well a bunch of women killed to motivate him he's got enough one-liners to fill several dime-store in Huaraz I had a hole in my second favorite drinking arm and the only way we were likely to get Fabiana back now with an installment throughout the mixed-up timeline of Max Payne 3 you'll have encounters with mass murder human trafficking and organ harvesting you'll confront corrupt cops kill Jersey mobsters and wage war through the streets of Sao Paulo and through all of that I have to ask what is Max Payne 3 about it's kind of about a man seeking sobriety in a world he's been warping for years max quitting drinking is one of the best directed scenes in the game and feels pretty colossal when it happens I mean he shaves his head but he still chugs pills without reservation and he still has a celebration beer at the end of the story so it's kind of about how Americans use the populations of poor other countries as disposable kind of about how futile it is for a broken man to think he can solve the problems of a foreign locale when he can barely hold himself together Max and Brazil feels about as out of touch as any character could be but those themes don't PO a lesson to anything particularly meaningful arguably they're just lamps shading for the many many many brown people you gunned down in this game it's kind of about Redemption or maybe it's making peace with the fact that sometimes you still have to do good even though you're way past Redemption but I'd be hard-pressed to tell you the actual things that have changed for max at the end of this game internal or external like I said before even as choice to get sober is undercut Max Payne 3 is a game I've been obsessed with for years it's trying to grapple with so many things and I'm not sure it's fully successful with any of them my fixation goes so far that beyond just this video it was also the impetus for a podcast series I did with writer reporter Blake Hester we've spent hours trying to sift through the many levels of this game we're gonna continue with others like it link in the doobly-doo but when all these themes coalesce into a 10 hour game it feels like the overwhelming take away is ugliness not in the same infuriating way as Kane and Lynch but in a general worldview sense wealth is ugly poverty is ugly violence is ugly and the people we do that violence against are uglier still the game even layers a heavy sort of corrosion over most of the cutscenes like the acidity of the events is actually burning away the film it somehow printed on the contrast here is when you start playing Max Payne 3 it's not ugly at all it's near balletic the film corrosion disappears the gruesome impact of the guns becomes wonderful gameplay feedback the precision with which you can fire in slow motion is transcendent this is where that Rockstar level of polish comes back in the studio just couldn't help itself playing Max Payne 3 is a sheer joy but while playing the game is a joy making it was by all accounts a meat grinder in the 8 years since Rockstar hasn't exactly become known for its work-life balance but even using its already low bar Max Payne 3 was a nightmare the game went through rewrite after rewrite delay after delay and during that time employees just kept crunching during this time spouses of developers at a sister Rockstar development studio in San Diego published a letter decrying the kinds of conditions they were working under a source working on max payne 3 said it mirrored their experience perfectly instead of valued employees a sentiment grows that they have lost not only the sense of being valued but turned into machines as they are slowly robbed of their humanity the managers at Rockstar San Diego continue in their dishonesty pushing their employees to the brink promising temporariness fully equipped with the knowledge of another deadline just around the corner what the [ __ ] is your problem man my problem my problem well know what my problem is you're turning humans into glue the game was slated to release in 2010 but wouldn't be published for another two years another rewrite another delay another deadline pushed into another late night it was a development cycle in which the studio continued to push its employees farther and farther into the glue factory Max Payne 3 is an ugly game [Music] heyno and Lynch two dog days has one of the most jarring in media res openings I've ever seen the first shot of the game is of a grimy bathroom buzzing fluorescent lights and incoherent screaming we have no establishing shot we have no backstory there is nothing in the first game that pointed towards this you press Start and you're in a torture scene it's also somehow exponentially voyeuristic not only are we seeing the men through the display of a video camera that video camera itself is also clearly being filmed by some unseen observer the screen shakes up and down like it's being held by a trembling documentarian light smudges across the dirty lens as one of the men screams the camera drops down like it's shielding us from whatever depravity is happening the framing shifts too claustrophobic ly tight the audio levels are peaking the violence is grotesque it's just cruel to you without context and then the game starts where Kanan Lynch one is ugly Haman Lynch to dog days is absolutely rotten but unlike the first this games ugliness is remarkable it's magnetic Punk days is one of the ugliest games I've ever played and I can't stop thinking about it [Music] consider the unprecedented number of crimes whose perverse gratuitousness is explained only by our powerlessness to take complete possession of life this quote comes not from Tyler Durden nor Joker's trick but from a 1930s French playwright named Antonin Artaud he wrote generally about people's disconnection from themselves and their spirits because of the asks of modern day society of course for him modern day was a century ago but his quotes are pretty relevant in our context too if our life lacks brimstone ie a constant magic it is because we choose to observe our acts and lose ourselves in considerations of their imagined instead of being impelled by their force if you'll allow me to sum up our toes writing all discarding almost all of his nuance it would be like this stop thinking so much your dumb thoughts your overanalyze a ssin your constant adherence to society's systems it is robbing you of the fear and excitement and life that humans are supposed to have our toe is a revolutionary but not in the organized marxist sense the change he wanted was more chaotic and internal he actually split with his pals the Surrealists because they went with communism and he went with his own vibes whatever it is he wanted he knew that he couldn't wake people up into social revolution simply by asking them instead he designed something which he called Theatre of cruelty Canaan lunch to is a nauseating game it's not just that it's viciously unrelentingly violent although it is that I mean that it's whole thing it's visual raison d'être is that it makes the third person in third person shooter actually feel like a physical presence in the world that you're not just looking through a camera but actually holding it actually staring through its viewfinder the third entity never speaks never influences the story reacts in self-preservation but there are constant inescapable reminders that they're present the glitchy shaky cam from Max Payne 3 that's amped up to 11:00 here and it doesn't confine itself to cutscenes when you take off sprinting the camera Sprint's after you rocking from side to side if you blow someone's head off with a shotgun the lens imperfectly attempts to pixelate it when the game makes you chase a naked woman through the streets pretty sensing a theme here it does the same our toast Theatre of cruelty is a tricky thing to figure out he wanted it basically to shock people into feeling the electricity they need to rise up and start being but perhaps because pinning a social revolution entirely on a theater movement is a bit intimidating Artaud's plays are kind of impossible to perform not entirely there are characters and lines there are even stage directions it's not like he's just throwing a piece of paper at you and saying feel something oh look all that happens in the spurt of blood is a young man and woman show up and there may be siblings and they talk about how they love each other easy and then on stage a hurricane separates the characters and then two stars crash into each other and then a bunch of living limbs fall out of the stars and then those limbs are followed by scalps and masks and temples and alembics and then a frog and a beetle and three scorpions seto on stage so you can see what I mean about it being impossible to perform but you can also feel the intention to make something completely overwhelming full of so much visual stimulus and gore and stuff they are forced to stop analyzing and to start feeling and to be clear what he wants you to feel is a mix of hallucination and fear which given those stage directions yeah that tracks or the problem with Theatre of cruelty is that its reach just seems to exceed its grasp it has been used for some pretty kick-ass applications a personal favorite is an activist group in the 60s who drew inspiration from it to exercise the Pentagon and nominate a pig for president but the fact that the Yippies haven't gone down in history is much more than the kooky group that wanted to levitate government buildings speaks to the difficulty of its implementation creating a complete stimulus overload especially on an experimental theater groups budget is a hard thing to do in dog days lights don't flare into the camera lens as much as they smear corrupting the entire image with reflections of reflections if you're shot in the game Lynch's blood smashes back onto the camera breaking the image into pixelated fragments taking too much damage can be literally blinding and when you die the invisible camera person topples over to seemingly unable to take the barrage any longer than the character every screen seems to peek the audios levels explosions blow out the cameras cheap speakers I divid Lee remember the first time I picked up the game's LMG it felt like my house was shaking hainan lunch - is nauseating to play not just because of its subject but because every aspect seems to be an assault on your senses and there for you to decide it's too much and shut it off there's no escape from it although the handheld perspective seems like it should function as a layer of separation between you and the action it paradoxically pulls you further into the world grounding it like a war documentary on some of the worst men who have ever lived our toes vision of theater of Cruelty takes place in almost a reverse Coliseum with the audience in the center while chaos breaks out all around them but even that is a compromise based on the realities of performance and it's a compromise that games don't have to obey unlike real life enactments of theater of Cruelty Dog Days isn't confined to a location it can make the entire world the same level of overwhelming forbid the player from ever taking a breath of fresh air the world is also where the game's ideological perspective becomes a little more clear the Shanghai you smear blood across is as jagged as the actions you take in it and there is throughout the whole campaign at the implication of a brighter cleaner City it's just beyond these empty lots promised by those gleaming towers you never encounter it though that part of the city is not for people like you the game knows that its players aren't people like Kane and Lynch they're people like me little soft gamers with soft chairs and soft world views but by so aggressively grounding you in the overwhelming aesthetics of the games camera it can pull you into a Shanghai that's all neglected corners and empty spaces every pile of CRPS further removes you from the world you're accustomed to every back alley full of shopping carts every gutter filled with the started styrofoam what is most important it seems to me is not so much to defend a culture whose existence has never kept a man from going hungry as to extract from what is called culture ideas whose compelling force is identical with that of hunger another quote from art oh but one that perfectly fits with Dog Days cruelty of aesthetics it's the hunger at the core of an ugly society the grime behind the facade ultimately the game does let you into the city proper takes you to the very top of those towers you've seen in the distance and yet the ugliness persists in a way you bring it with you you're only granted access to the bright side of the world after you blow it to bits from a helicopter what I love about the setting though is that although the blown out windows and walls riddled with bullet holes are undoubtedly your fault the rot was there before the slimy CEO is dealing the armies of PMC's he has available to him the straight-up inhumanity of living like this when there are people within walking distance dying in sweatshops the ugliness was always present there is no level unpainted by it you just bring it to the surface cane and lunch 2 has more than a few things in common with Max Payne 3 the games are both about men likely beyond redemption dragged back into old lives they both take place largely in non-western countries in an effort to push the presumptive audience out of their realm of experience they're both more than a little clumsy about it they both feature characters that in an effort to emphasize their age and fatigue level are often knocked to the ground and will lie there until the player picks them up they even both end with a shootout in an airport it's almost a weird but I think dog days makes full use of its ugliness or Max Payne can't for the simple reason that pain isn't willing to fully submerge itself in it sure it's themes are dark it's world as gritty but Max Payne 3 is still just too polished it goes down too easy Kane and Lynch - is like a pill that gets caught in your throat a drink that goes down the wrong pipe it is ballsy enough to be deliberately hard to play in almost every respect and critically it paid the price but unlike the first game in the series I find real value in its rawness an unexhausted papered over finally through a true embrace of ugliness I feel a little bit of that brimstone that our toe is so obsessed with it's not of course a full realization of it it would take a lot more than this to wake us all up into revolution but as a piece of art with the goal of unsettling as a mix of hallucination and fear I have to call it a success Kanan lunch - Dog Days is the ugliest game I've ever played I think I understand why [Music] here's a fun fact about this video I knew I wanted the film sections to have a weird and spontaneous feeling I knew I wanted them to look like they were shaky handheld footage I also knew I wanted to be wearing gym shorts to achieve two out of those three things I actually filmed the whole thing using my phone and this might not seem like a logical transition but it actually brings us to this video sponsor Skillshare C I wanted to make my video look kind of well ugly but I also wanted it to read clearly edit well and be as watchable as me and gym shorts can be and Skillshare among the thousands of classes it offers for basically anyone interested in learning a new skill actually has a course on shooting cinematic video with your phone everything from good environments to helpful gear to editing and post-production it is a really cool way to just start making stuff without investing a bunch of money or needing complex training and you knew this was coming the first a thousand people to sign up using the link in the description get to three months of Skillshare premium two months that's enough to film your own I don't know iPhone irishman or something after that skill share is less than ten bucks a month with an annual subscription what are you waiting for go film some cool ugly stuff or learn how to do watercolor or sculpt a mug or whatever it is you've been telling yourself you're gonna do ska sir probably has a class for it and you can try it out with two months free by just following that link right down in the description [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Jacob Geller

Views: 561,751

Keywords: max payne, jacob geller, kane and lynch, ugly games, analysis, essay, theater of cruelty

Id: W4TNu0oBtKs

Length: 27min 2sec (1622 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 13 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/Throw-A-Weigh69]

Kane & Lynch 2 had a really cool idea with the Hong Kong bootleg snuff film aesthetic. Would love to get another game that uses the same approach.

[u/Epople]

I loved kane and lynch 2s cheap YouTube aesthetic and jumpy story, and wish more games adopted the style.

[u/ThatGeek303]

Kane & Lynch 2 is sort of my guilty pleasure game. It's not particularly good, but it's far better than the original and it has an incredibly captivating, unique presentation that admittedly isn't for everyone. It also had a hell of a marketing campaign. I've always hoped Kane & Lynch could recieve a proper reboot. It's a good idea with interesting characters.

[u/CoyoteWhite305]

Very interesting but perfect label to describe these games as “ugly”

“Ugly” has always been my favorite sort of theme in video games because they cut all the fantasy bullshit out in exchange for cold harsh reality which I always felt way more immersed with and could relate to the most.

[u/FIGJAM17]

I loved Kane & Lynch game. Total blast to play from start till end. The co-op was also pretty good. Max Payne needs no more praise. It is a stellar series. Wish we got more of these games.

[u/[deleted]]

I enjoyed Kane and Lynch when it came out, as there wasn't really that many games that filled that hole for heists, and both characters grew on me, the voice actors did a tremendous job with it.

With that said I was and still am very disapointed with how kane and lynch 2 turned out, the story in the first one was far superior(even it got lost by the end)

If by some miracle they end up making a third entry I would be all for it, even if just to hear the banter between these 2 ugly characters.

[u/colekern]

Jacob Geller is defintiely a guy that lands a hit more often than not. This is, in my opinion, one of his better videos. Being able to look at games as more than just the surface level mechanical gameplay and story operation is a very valuable and interesting perspective

[u/lamancha]

As someone who has written at length about Kane & Lynch before, I can't say I am satisfied by this video. I mean I agree with a lot of it but there is something that irks me and it's how he glosses over the first game because it's bad while not even mentioning the second one's quality, which is an even worse game than the first, all the while praising the ugliness of the second without even touching it on the first's beyond some random commentary on the ending being self aware.

The first one is just as violent and ugly as the second, just not having the shaky cam gimmick (which, unlike what I believe he said, is never intended to separate the player from the action. I have no idea how he got there, it's pretty obvious it's meant to drop the player into the action as a good piece of late 00's sensationalism) and instead commenting on two unlikable criminals murdering throngs of people including some really raw despictions of executions, questionable actions and terrible morals. It's an study on videogame personas that establishes a raison d'tre of the game's personality and existence, and Dog Days just does not work without Dead Men.

I think the creator just wanted to find a way to talk about Dog Days and couldn't find a way to put it without perspective via comparison, which I always find weak.

Also the Artaud commentary doesn't really add much except comparisons, and comes off as distracting.

Still, an entertaining video.

[u/[deleted]]

Jacob is just, so, so good at what he does. The way he looks at games is so unique... it's like he is looking past them, or through them like a lens, to analyse culture as a whole and what it says about the human condition. This video is no exception. That he lands so often on the topics of violence, darkness, brutality/brutalism and violence is fascinating, too, not only because it aligns with my own interest, but because he manages to talk about these things so artistically, giving them the sense that they possess a sort of inherent beauty.

Now that I type it out, I get why he is tweeting so much about the show Hannibal lately. It does the same thing, in many ways.