[BB]
You can't win this one, Max. [MAX]
No, but I can make damn
sure none of you do either… *action/tension music*
*Byzantine Power Game
from Max Payne's OST* *guitar music* [CIVVIE]
Max Payne is a fixed point
in the history of video games. Up there with Doom,
Half-Life, Super Mario Bros. and other games that
old people have heard of. I don't say this because I think Max Payne
is as good of a game as those others. I think Max Payne 2 is better actually. Max Payne came along
and basically defined how third person shooters were
gonna work for the next few years. A lot would have bullet time
because that was still cool. The Matrix hit like
an atomic bomb in 1999 and there were pastiches
and parodies of it for years. It was a lot of American audience's
first introductions to gun-fu, popularized overseas and here
by the movies of John Woo… Yeah, look Civvie's talking about
John Woo and Hard Boiled again, I know, someone out there
is screaming at their phone, "Talk about The Killer or
A Better Tomorrow" but like… nah, I'm still gonna go with
Hard Boiled, it's the best one and you're not gonna
convince me otherwise, anyway… People jumping around with two
pistols in slow motion was invented and many people recognized
how cool acrobatic gunplay was. Sure, you could stand in the middle
of a field and shoot a machine gun and then cut to another
shot of a guy falling down and maybe spice it up with some squibs. Or, you could do a one-take as your two
heroes pushed their way through a hospital, staging everything to happen
in front of the viewer's eyes, making the action itself more visceral, or, as I would say,
the correct way to shoot action. Keep your camera on the
actors who are doing things so you can visually
contextualize what's going on. The impacts need to have weight. Yeah, John Wick uses
CGI blood, which sucks, but also has these
knock-down, drag-out fights with incredibly
talented stunt performers that use the environment to their
advantage to do all this cool stuff. John Wick knows what's up. Eli Roth does not. Can I just take a minute to talk about how fucking bad the action
is in this Borderlands clip? *funky music* *Claptrap shitting bullets* [RANDY]
You can bring your family,
your loved ones, bring them to the movie. [CIVVIE]
It's pretty easy to make
a bad action movie, I think, in that you have to set out
to make an action movie and then you don't know how to do that. Like Eli Roth, director of hit
action movies Cabin Fever, Hostel… No wait, those are gore flicks, you hired Eli Roth, purveyor
of gore flicks and torture porn, to direct your… PG-13 action movie based on a famously violent franchise… [ELI ROTH]
I don't wanna say what we're filming but it's lots of blood, lots of guts, it's totally bonkers but
it's also very Borderlands. *Curb Your Enthusiasm's theme song* [RANDY]
You can bring your family,
your loved ones… It was like a seven, seven and a half. [CIVVIE]
If ever there were an opportunity
to dissect a bad action scene that I can contrast
with what good action is… hoooooooooooboy! This clip from Borderlands was recently
released and it looks like absolute shit. I don't say that to disrespect
the people working on it, except Randy, Eli Roth,
whoever wrote this, but especially whoever
fucking edited this: This clip was edited by either: A. An incredibly stupid person or B. Someone who didn't have time or good enough footage to cut
something good together. Because this is embarrassing. Using this to promote your action movie is like using Kevin Spacey
to promote the YMCA. You might be in the comments
saying that this clip isn't that bad, well, you're wrong. *Claptrap shitting bullets* *Tiny Tina laughing, and then
someone else laughing* [LILITH]
Keep it down! We don't wanna- [CIVVIE]
Okay right there, you see how they had someone
laughing in the background, a male voice that wasn't
Kevin Hart or Jack Black: *Tiny Tina laughing, and
then someone else laughing* Which means it's this guy playing Kreig, except the goddamn thing cuts
to him and he clearly isn't laughing. [GORDON RAMSAY]
Fucking raw. [CIVVIE]
But then he's suddenly
attacked from above, they kick this psycho into some boxes and then a bunch of psychos
run in from this hallway that we assume has to be behind
where Roland and Tannis were because it acts like a reverse shot, but it is absolutely not the same place, and then Lilith,
she brings out two pistols which you think man that's gonna
be cool because it should be and she flicks them towards the enemy in a very John Woo,
Hong Kong action kind of way where aiming the gun is secondary
to looking cool while firing it. I guess it's kinda cool though giving the gunslinging to
the Siren character seems… odd. Anyway, whoever was
directing or editing this forgot that these things need
to actually have an impact and so the gun fighting
in this is atrocious. It moves so fast and it's so muddy and dark that I had to pause to see that Lilith is firing her guns here
in two different directions: so the clip cuts to one guy falling
down at an angle we haven't seen so, spatially, this motherfucker
could be anywhere, but your cool setup doesn't matter
because she fired two shots and you showed one guy
falling, bloodlessly. Because PG-13. This guy gets shot and looks like
he slipped on a banana peel. This is Uwe Boll tier shit. Suddenly, Lilith gets tackled
into a box by a big guy and nevermind he doesn't exist anymore because she pops out of the box
to fire her guns at nothing. This is actually a smart
film nerd reference to The Great Train Robbery
like in Goodfellas. No I'm kidding, it just sucks. And then more guys come in from
that hallway that is now different, again, like it was originally, and characters fucking
teleport between shots. The two biggest problems
with this are the editing and the staging of the scene itself, where your heroes are, almost exclusively,
shooting blindly at off-screen stuff that responds more lifelessly
than the game enemies. The only passable fighting
is Kreig doing melee because it's the only place where
you see a character doing a thing and then the thing has
a believable physical response. I would say, without a doubt, that either Eli Roth doesn't know
how to shoot action, doesn't care, or they sanitized it so much to get
a PG-13 so that all the kids could go see it… you know, all the Gen Alphas
who are so into Borderlands and going to the theater to see movies. So let's say you take out the middleman
of the characters or the editing and transport your action
to an interactive medium where your character is always visible and there's been literal years
of work put into making sure that the all of the player's actions have definitive audiovisual
feedback on the environment. Where everything violently
explodes into debris. You can still do that in PG-13, you know, props don't bleed. [RANDY]
You can bring your family,
your loved ones, bring them to the movie. [CIVVIE]
FUCK YOU, RANDY. *somber music*
*A Cold Day in Hell from Max Payne's OST* In 1996, Finnish game company Remedy
had just finished a game called Death Rally, which was published by our
old friends at Apogee Software. They needed dialogue for their game
so you know what they did? You know what they did? THEY HIRED A FUCKING WRITER, which I cannot recommend enough
for games that wanna have stories in them. Hire a writer. The writer in question was a student at
the University of Helsinki named Sam Lake. Yeah, are you starting
to put it together yet? So Remedy starts pitching
ideas to Apogee's Scott Miller, who claims they pitched him
an isometric shooter and he talked them into making a true
third person action game like Tomb Raider. Remember - this is like 1997 - Max Payne, or whatever working
title they were using, Max Heat or Dick Justice or Blake Stone, and Sam Lake is now responsible
for the story and screenplay, later becoming
Creative Director at Remedy. Sam Lake wants to write
a dark, noir-influenced story and Remedy lead Petri Jarvilehto
envisioned an action game that had slow motion gunplay
like in Hong Kong action movies. It would be a couple of years before
The Matrix popularized Bullet Time, which wasn't really a gameplay
mechanic at the beginning, but it was so cool in the tech
demonstrations that they added it in later so that the player could use it
at the push of a button. Yes, it's entirely possible that
Max Payne beat The Matrix to introducing Hong Kong
style slow-mo to us, but the game took forever to come out. 3D Realms publishes Max Payne in 2001 to critical and commercial success. Max Payne defined third person shooters until about the time Resident Evil 4 hit. And finally, finally, I can talk
about a classic game made by a talented studio
and you know what? They didn't get shut down. Remedy went on to
produce banger after banger, although I haven't played
Quantum Break or Alan Wake 2 yet, I know I really need to get
around to playing Alan Wake 2… Their major success started here, and for better or worse,
Max Payne has all the elements that would make Remedy
successful going forward. Good writing, a real grasp
on mixing disparate tones, having serious moments while not taking the
whole thing too seriously because the story of a fugitive cop that's hopelessly
addicted to painkillers who can't get over the death
of his family is a little grim, so throw in some Twin Peaks references and a stellar performance
from the late James McCaffrey that sells the shit out of the role in spite of Sam Lake's constipation face stretched over Max's mostly square mug… *honk honk* Katie, please… And you've got a recipe for
an evergreen gaming classic. *somber music*
*A Cold Day in Hell from Max Payne's OST* Max Payne opens up "cinematically". The cutscenes show us
the snowy New York setting that we'll be going through
for the rest of the game, a deliciously atmospheric and
gritty hellhole full of corruption. [MAX]
They were all dead. The final gunshot was an exclamation mark
to everything that had led to this point. I released my finger from the trigger. And then it was over. [CIVVIE]
The cutscenes are mostly not
told in-game, but with comic panels. This is the end of our story,
and it looks awesome, right? There's no context to it yet,
so it spoils nothing. Not that the final boss
is anything to spoil. Max is an NYPD detective
with a decent life. He's got a house in the suburbs, in Jersey,
so I guess things could be better. This game has a tutorial level
that doesn't register as that at first because it kills your wife and baby. Like right there, and McCaffrey
gives one of the all-time best: [MAX]
Nooooooooooo! [CIVVIE]
Outstanding. And the game is like go
pick up that phone, dumbass, this is how the story is gonna be told
during gameplay for the most part. [MAX]
Listen, someone's broken
into my house. Call 911. [HORNE]
Is this the Payne residence? [MAX]
Yes, someone's broken into my house. They are still here, you have to… [HORNE]
Good. I am afraid I cannot help you. ♫ No, there's no one in my House of Pain ♫ [CIVVIE]
The people who broke into Max's house are junkies addicted
to the designer drug Valkyr, which, unlike in the movie,
does not give you superpowers, it instead turns you
into a jabbering maniac. You get one gun, then two guns, then, oh god your baby is dead,
and then so is your wife and… man, this is brutal. Who opens a game like this? So you can kind of
understand why Max is such a dead-eyed death-seeker
throughout this game and maybe sometimes
he makes some bad decisions. After finding out that
the junkies were on Valkyr, Max gets a transfer to the DEA and three years later
he's undercover in the mob, which leads us to the events of the game, which starts with Max in a subway
stumbling into a robbery in progress. After a long period of downloading
patches and fixes to get this game to play nice and run
properly under Windows 10 in 4K, I begin the journey into
the night that is Max Payne. Max sees a dead transit cop
and pulls out his gun. [MAX]
Death was in the air at Roscoe Street. I'd have to find Alex fast. [CIVVIE]
Alex being his partner at the DEA. We'll find him later, for now I have to look in
every one of these cabinets and grab ammo and painkillers. [MAX]
The pills would hold
the pain back for a while. [CIVVIE]
Max's health isn't a number, it's an icon that fills up with red
the more damage he takes, giving you some back
if it's above his neck, regenerating to the point where he… you know what, he still wouldn't survive
more than one more shot anyway, this game has never been merciful. [GOON 1]
Wasn't Jake supposed to take care of this? [GOON 2]
He and Mickey are having too much
fun taking care of the cop up- [GOON 1]
(alerted) YO! [CIVVIE]
Oh, shit, he saw my arm. Time to make the donuts. It's cool that I got a Desert Eagle
but I had to take a hit because I had the auto-equip
new weapon option on. Still, this is a good demonstration of
the structure of a Max Payne gunfight. Goons are hanging around, talking,
and you interrupt them with bullets. It makes their existence
in the world feel organic. When the last one dies,
it goes into slow motion. You get the Desert Eagle
immediately, which is great, because it's gonna be your best
long range weapon for a while. You can't dual wield them until
Max Payne 2, unfortunately. Then you get a shotgun, which
you'll always have plenty of ammo for and which I feel is better
outside of bullet time because of how long it takes
to cock the thing in between shots. You find another transit cop and
he's got something to teach you too, which is don't stand in front
of the doors you open. What follows is the first
real fight of the game where you've got four of these
goombahs, these crooks… these… I'm sorry, I'm actually saving all
my mob jokes for the Fallen Aces video. Max Payne is not an easy game,
even on this skill, Fugitive, which, once completed,
will unlock the other modes, like Hard Boiled and New York Minute. I didn't beat this game on those because I always felt
the game was hard enough. That's right, I deprived the
audience of the Pro Payne pun, because I am a monster. And the reason for that is
a thing I only found out while researching this video which
is that the difficulty is fucking broken. *dark ominous music*
*Archetype by Anno Domini Beats* So Max Payne for some goddamn
reason has dynamic difficulty. Depending on how often
you die in a set period of time, the game can lower or
raise the difficulty on you, except this is broken. There are mods to disable it
but I'm not using one. This is how I've always known Max Payne… as being ball-crushingly
unfair after like level 3. The game will not tolerate failure. Enemy attacks start to really
fuck you up after a while, with shotgun enemies insta-killing you and everyone else sapping half
your health every time they hit you. You're supposed to be able to use
shoot-dodge mechanics to stop this but then there's enemies
that lead their shots because this game doesn't have hitscans, all the bullets exist in real time
and have travel time however short. Not to mention your crosshair
is this tiny-ass dot… that's… not very forgiving. So this guy here hitting me with
a shotgun now isn't a problem, but a few levels from now it will be. Max nonchalantly crashes a train
and ices some more goons before… [GOON]
But also, it's like
the failure count is rising! [CIVVIE]
It's not much sewer. The level is mostly about
these criminals robbing a bank… but the whole place
is full of rats anyway. That's New York for you. But I'm a hard boiled NYPD detective. Rats don't scare me! Now, back to brooding and crime fighting. So I've got some detonators- [CANCER MICE]
Oh, hey Civvie! *Cancer Mice chaotically
talking over each other* [CIVVIE]
WHAT THE FUCK. All right, I'm bringing out the sawed-off. I underestimated this gun originally, but it's actually really good at
killing one or two enemies at a time and slow mo can be
abused to reload it quick. They're still hard as hell to hit. So I stole some detonators
to blow open this door in a spectacular display of destruction
from a game in 2001… and then… [ALEX]
Max! Jesus! You almost gave me a heart attack! I nearly shot you! [CIVVIE]
Your partner, Alex Balder, says
that these are Jack Lupino's men, but before he can say
any more, he gets killed, and for some reason the
murder is blamed on Max despite the fact that
New York in this game has more murder in it
than New York in the 70's. Okay, now begins our journey into the night
as a man with nothing to lose. The cops are after us, the mob is
after us, the goddamned rats are after us. But we're heavily armed and
we've got a full supply of opioids so it's time for a drug-fueled
rampage through the city! Starting with the Finito Brothers, who I guess didn't hear about Max
killing dozens of mobsters in the subway. They trap themselves in a room with him. I kinda understand, Max can take
only four of five bullets to bring down… but not this time! There's plenty of plot
going on in this hotel, hookers using videotaped sex acts
to blackmail powerful people, a thing that's gonna come up again, drug deals, and all sorts
of unsavory characters. Guys, there was a fire
extinguisher right there! This includes Rico Muerte, who may
have a sillier name than Max Payne. We meet him in the bar downstairs where he's really casually being
blown, like, really not noticing, so I'm forced to believe that this hooker
sucks worse than the Borderlands movie. *Claptrap shitting bullets* You know, until the fight
is over and I see this: Jesus, that guy was a walking sperm bank! He had more cum in him than
a dorm room shower drain! This is probably the first fight in the
game that really tests my patience. You've got four goons,
plus this prostitute, who takes Desert Eagle rounds to
the chest really well for a living thing. Though I suspect
I'm hitting mostly silicone. Her boss has his pants down
the whole fight, it's terrific. It's such a beautiful, stupid detail. Once he's dead, we're introduced to my favorite degenerate goombah
in the Max Payne universe, the capo of cringe,
the whiny wiseguy, Vinnie Gognitti! *action/tension music*
*Byzantine Power Game
from Max Payne's OST* [MAX]
Gognitti was a high-
strung whiner on the verge of breaking apart like an
overamped energizer bunny. [GOGNITTI]
Are you friggin' kiddin' me?
He's just one lousy cop! Ya better be freakin' kidding me! Whack 'im! What's the freakin' problem? [CIVVIE]
I wish we could meet him right away but instead we have to
meet my second favorite mobster in the Max Payne universe, Vladimir Lem, and man I hope nothing
happens in Max Payne 2 to make me wish I'd never
met either of these characters! Vlad is a… uh…
competitor to the Italian Mob. He shows up again later. We run through another
horrible slum full of junkies. I don't generally shoot
the Valkyr addicts because I can't stand
the sounds they make. The cops are closing in on us anyway. There's a mysterious man named
Alfred Woden who calls us on a pay phone. He'll be important later too. We recruit one of the junkies
to get us into a safe house here… [JUNKIE]
It's me, open up! Let me in, quick! [GOON]
Not so fast. The password! John who? [JUNKIE]
C'mon… okay, John Woo. [GOON]
All right, come right in. [JUNKIE]
It's a trap ! [GOON]
It's Payne! [CIVVIE]
Oh, yeah, that's the stuff! One of the reasons that
Max Payne doesn't disappear up its own ass in the
despair of its protagonist is that the game
is actually pretty funny. These two idiots blow themselves up, which is funny by itself, but then this Buster Keaton-ass
visual gag to top it off? Beautiful. Back to Vinnie… [MAX]
Vinnie Gognitti, just the man
I've been killing to see. [VINNIE]
Payne! Freakin' fed! I knew from day one there was
something screwy about you! Whaddaya think yer doin'? Yer a freakin' cop, ya ain't got squat on us. Ya can't just come in here wavin'
yer piece like it meant somethin'! Ah! Oh my god, oh god, ya shot me, ahhh! [CIVVIE, impersonating Vinnie]
Oh, ya shot me, I got a bullet in my gut and I'm about to run across the city, jump on a speedin' train, slap a couple of underage hookers and then yer dead, Payne! [normal]
This is the next fight
that really tests you and your ability to take
out the dual ingrams and spray bullets everywhere
because you absolutely need to. And, you guessed it,
they are absolutely MAC-11's. Vinnie somehow survives this. [MAX]
Where's Lupino? [VINNIE]
Screw you! [MAX]
Bad start, Vinnie. [VINNIE]
Argh! Police brutality! [MAX]
I rate pretty high on that. [CIVVIE]
Yeah, even for a New York cop! [VINNIE]
Ya can't just hurt me in cold blood! [MAX]
Uh-huh, just keep telling yourself that. The good and the just were
like gold dust in this city. I had no illusions.
I was not one of them. I was no hero. Just me and the gun and the crook. My options had decreased
to a singular course. [CIVVIE]
I do actually really like
the writing in this game. It's perfectly pulpy. [VINNIE]
I'll tell ya, I'll tell ya,
just don't hurt me no more! Lupino's at Ragna Rock! The nightclub! [CIVVIE]
Oh, yeah, and it thematically weaves a lot of references to Norse
mythology into the plot: valkyr, ragnarok, æsir. Ragnarok is the end of the world,
where titans face off, which is kick-started
by the death of Baldr, you know, like Alex Balder. It's all over the place. This is not a level of writing
I remember seeing much of in video games. Good for Sam Lake. So now it's off to have
a chat with Jack Lupino. I'm sure there's nothing
behind that name either. *dark twisted music*
*Just Forget About It from Max Payne's OST* In a rogue's gallery of
psychotic mobsters, Jack Lupino somehow
makes the rest of them look warm and cuddly by comparison. [LUPINO]
Diiiieeee! You'll die!
You'll! Die! Now! All die! *wolf howling* The wolf! [CIVVIE]
Yeah, Howlin' Mad Jack here has
been getting high off his own supply and maybe got a little lost
in his mythological references because despite the club
being called Ragna Rock, Jack's gotten really
interested in Satanic stuff. That's fine, bullets work on anybody
no matter how crazy they are, but a bunch of his
henchmen are a lot stronger, and like a lot of high school kids
who get into a satanism phase, they wear big black
trench coats all the time. We are now at the point in the game where the difficulty
is ramped up all the way and shotgun blasts
will kill you instantly. I'm trying not to hold it against the game because sometimes I look down at
that health meter at the end of a fight and I say to myself, "You know
what, Civvie? You can do better." So I reload a quicksave… I just… I wanna look cool in Max Payne, okay? The game wants you to want to look cool. That being said,
the further the game goes on the less I give a shit about looking cool and it's like "hey Civvie you've
saved all this ingram ammo, maybe it's time to let loose
and spray the whole place with bullets so you can make some progress." Jack Lupino is getting threats
from Don Punchinello so he's probably not long
for this world anyway. The Don sends the trio after me later and they could probably deal with Lupino, though they might end up
a solo act by the end. [CIVVIE]
You guys remember that… [LUPINO]
Diiiieeee! You'll die!
You'll! Die! Now! All die! *wolf howling* The wolf! [CIVVIE]
Get ready to hear that a lot. Thanks to Max taking what seems like
forever to get to his feet after diving, things like getting plugged
while getting up or getting a Molotov thrown
at my face while getting up, I get to hear that line a lot. No longer will I be underestimating
the sawed-off shotgun, because it ends up being able to
reliably stun this junkie and punch his ticket. [MAX]
When Lupino finally went down,
I wanted to make real sure he'd stay that way. V was a bad monster, turned them into freaking zombie
demons from outer space. [MONA]
I think he's dead already. [MAX]
Huh? And that's when it happened. [MONA]
But dead or not, you've got the wrong guy. [CIVVIE]
Nah, I think I got the right guy. He might not have framed me
but he was a crazy devil worshipping V-fiend who
threw a Molotov cocktail, and I can't stress this enough:
right at my fucking face. It clipped through
but the damage was done. If the mob family stuff
wasn't complicated enough, here's Mona Sax, twin sister of
the Don's wife, Lisa Punchinello. Mona happens to be a professional killer and Max is so down bad for this girl that he accepts a drink from her, but not before she tells him that
Lupino couldn't have arranged his frame-up since he was busy being crazy. It's a good alibi I guess
but that doesn't excuse the drugging and the
level that comes after it. [MAX]
Somewhere, the baby was crying. *dark tension music*
*Ms Valkyr from Max Payne's OST* I hate it. I loathe it. I despise it. What was an interesting novelty in 2001 has become a tedious maze where I have to platform
across narrow ledges like they had Sandy Petersen
on as a special guest level designer. I know Max feels guilty because
he couldn't save his family but who moved them to New Jersey
in the first place, Max? Okay, fine, Michelle and the baby died because she was getting
too close to the Valkyr conspiracy, but still. I hate this level. It does lead to one of my favorite
lines in the whole game, so : [FRANKIE]
Pleased to meet you. I'm Frankie "the Bat" Niagara. [MAX]
Niagara as in you cry a lot? He had a baseball bat,
and I was tied to a chair. Pissing him off was the smart thing to do. [CIVVIE]
That's what I'm talking about
with James McCaffrey's delivery. His pitch perfect sarcasm when dealing with these ridiculous mafia
guys is always fantastic. But yeah, then Frankie "The Bat"
beats the shit out of him with a bat. That's okay, we break the
chair and kill everybody. We're in a new chapter so Max loses all of his weapons
and has to use this bat… briefly… Do I barely survive alerting
every mobster on the block? Sure. Barely. But that's Max Payne. I've read that the dynamic
difficulty will go down if you die a bunch of times and
let the animations finish but… I ain't got the patience for that so
I'm gonna keep pushing through. We've been here before, a couple hours ago, and the police have come and gone since. I'm about to re-crime scene it though. This bar isn't any easier the second time. Frankie Niagara mostly
kills me but it's fine. Max drives away but
is being tailed by Vlad. [VLAD]
Bang! You're dead, Max Payne. [CIVVIE]
I'm amazed the fucking
finger guns didn't kill me with how difficult this game gets. *action/tension music*
*Byzantine Power Game
from Max Payne's OST* [VLAD]
I'm going to make you
an offer you can't refuse… ha ha! I've always wanted to say that. [CIVVIE]
Max Payne is like
a hard boiled detective, albeit with an exponentially
higher body count, as he just kinda wanders through
the story and shit happens to him. Like we do this side quest for Vlad where he wants me, Max Payne, one guy, to go to the docks and
reclaim a cargo ship for him. And he'll help me out later on
with his connections. [MAX]
Vladimir was one of those old-time
bad guys with honor and morals, which made him almost
one of the good guys. None of us was a saint. [CIVVIE]
Max, please, I'm begging you,
stop trusting everyone. This docks level,
occasionally, kinda sucks. This could be a case of
Valve-style blue-balling though because I notice it puts a lot
of guys in hard to reach areas that I have to hit with the Desert Eagle, since that's my best
option for long range… and then it gives you the sniper rifle. Remember, the big thick coats
are basically bulletproof so it'll take two blasts from the
sawed-off to down one of these guys. I think this is where the game
becomes a war of attrition. There's a lot of tight corners here where
guys with shotguns will just fuck you up. It might be the hardest part
of the game but it's hard to judge because really from this point
forward you're in hell. Ha ha, get it? Because Charon was the
ferryman to the underworld? Hah! Yeah! Yeah… [CHARON]
Charon. Drachma. [CIVVIE]
The captain goes down fairly easy… …and I'm rewarded with a
shitload of guns and ammo. And now that I think about it, so is Vlad… I'm sure killing all of Vlad's competition and outfitting him with a ton of weapons isn't gonna come back to haunt me later. MAX. MAX, YOU DIPSHIT! We get the Colt Commando here,
the best weapon in the game, by far, but the game isn't gonna tell us that yet because Don Punchinello
invites us to his restaurant and is so desperate to deal with Max that he torches the place with Max inside. And it looks like a nice restaurant. While this seems like a low-key
filler mission nowadays, back in 2001, the fire effects
were mind blowing and lauded among game critics. Anyway, the Colt Commando: This gun surpasses
anything else in the game simply because it's high
damage, high accuracy, and later on, ammo for it is
basically falling from the sky. [MAX]
The mobsters had been
guarding the real treasure: the way out of this disco inferno. [CIVVIE]
Vlad picks me up and gives me a ride to the Punchinello manor because
he's a nice guy like that. We get to kill the Trio,
his previously mentioned enforcers that were gonna take care of Jack Lupino. No, that's fine, I'll deal with them! The way doors work in this
game fucking pisses me off. I have to somehow avoid getting
blasted through the door after opening it which means I have to move to the side, but then the door automatically
closes because this is a video game. And I'm not just gonna go into that
room because that's gonna get me killed. The first guy is softened up by a grenade. [MAX]
One down, two to go. Two down, one to go. [CIVVIE]
All right but I want
the next one to feel special. [GOON 1]
No stopping him! [GOON 2]
This will! This will
stop anything! Take cover! [MAX]
Punchinello's trio was done for. [CIVVIE]
All right, looks like we've
destroyed an entire mob family. [MAX]
Punchinello was a pushover. The moment I stepped into the room, he folded like a deuce
before a royal flush. [PUNCHINELLO]
No, wait! I was just doing what I was told.
I couldn't refuse! She's someone high up,
government maybe, I don't know… [KILLER SUITS]
Drop it! Don't move! [HORNE]
Game over, Max Payne! [CIVVIE]
We're up to two femme fatales in this game. I hope Max doesn't accept
a drink from this one too. [MAX]
I could tell when I was outgunned. It was time to take another beating. *Super Mario Bros. 3
Sky Land Theme* [PUNCHINELLO]
No, I told him nothing! [MAX]
The mystery witch was a real barracuda, trouble on dagger-heels,
a smoking assault rifle in her hand- [CIVVIE]
Um, excuse me, Max, but
I'm pretty sure that is a submachine gun, an Uzi to be precise, and to be more precise, oh, yeah,
you know it, a MAC-11! While she hasn't introduced herself yet, this is Nicole Horne,
head of the Æsir Corporation, continuing to profit off of
a military-devised super-drug that was supposed to be
good for blah blah blah, she injects Max with Valkyr
and you know what happens? He doesn't become
a superhuman angel of death, he has another awful dream sequence. [MAX]
The witch had got me just as sure as if
she's put a gun to my head and pulled the trigger. [CIVVIE]
Or so you'd think. While I don't hate this one
as much as the last one, mostly because of this gem: [MAX]
There was something disturbingly
familiar about the letter before me. The handwriting was all pretty curves. [MICHELLE]
You're in a computer game, Max. [MAX]
The truth was a burning
green crack through my brain. Weapon statistics hanging in the air,
glimpsed out of the corner of my eye. Endless repetition of the act of shooting,
time slowing down to show off my moves. The paranoid feel of someone
controlling my every step. [CIVVIE]
Yeah, I'm sorry, Max,
I'll do a better job in the next game. [MAX]
I was in a computer game. Funny as hell, it was the most
horrible thing I can think of. [CIVVIE]
This dream sequence at least has things like Max trying to snap himself
out of it, which is good. And then it has another section with
really weird, floaty slow motion platforming that makes the last one look
like a thing I'd play voluntarily. Max's wife's lines don't sound
good and repeat over and over… [MICHELLE]
NOOOO! PLEASE, MAX, NO! I'M SORRY! PLEASE, DON'T, MAX, NO! [CIVVIE]
Valkyr, on top of being a terrible drug that seems to send you on the worst trips, also takes all my weapons away, so when I follow Horne to the steel plant, because she said that's
where they were going, because she didn't think that Max Payne, a man who single-handedly wiped out
most of the Punchinello crime family, give or take a Gognitti, might survive a bad trip, since I suspect that his tolerance
for controlled substances is pretty high since he is, after all, in his own domestic and
socially acceptable way, also a drug addict. Katie, no, you can't fix hi- *action/tension music*
*Byzantine Power Game
from Max Payne's OST* So Max, after grabbing a bunch of guns from his buddy Vlad
in the previous chapter, doesn't think to do that again, and we start with a single Beretta. Not that it takes long
to acquire better guns because that awesome
rifle we had before? Well, most of Horne's
mercenaries have them. As far as I'm concerned,
the next few levels of Max Payne are filled with… uh… filler. These goons have better
weaponry plus grenades, which, I may not have mentioned this, but grenades in this game
are a one-way ticket to Valhalla if you're within 10 feet of them and they'll get you halfway
there if you're within 20. I wish they killed
the enemies as reliably. DON'T YOU GET IT,
WITH ALL THE HOT STEEL, IT'S LIKE I'M DESCENDING INTO HELL! The sniper rifle kills are cool and all until you realize that the game
is still going on this whole time and you're still gonna die while
the bullet is traveling to its target. Who is putting all these
laser trip mines around? For fuck's sake! [HECU GRUNT]
You got nothing! [CIVVIE]
The lab where they
invented Valkyr is under the steel mill so the goons set the self destruct, and also place mines everywhere, and we find out that Valkyr
junkies murdered Max's family and so we go and have a chat with BB because we need
another level of padding which is the parking garage,
which is just fucking misery. A lot of these areas
are copied and pasted, whole hallways, rooms, so it gets a little- …and it's like why even go into
bullet time, I'm just gonna die slower! Why am I not rolling? Because I wanna shoot, and because I didn't know that rolling
made you temporarily invincible. Because I only read the fucking manual
and didn't think to look it up. Because that's insane. Why would - why? Why not shoot-dodge? The shooting, dodge? I hate this. So much. I hate myself. I hate the world. This must be how Max Payne
feels all the time. You see, the parking garage,
in Norse mythology, symbolizes a descent
into the underworld. The sniper rifle doesn't do
its fancy little animation where you can't move
while firing if you no-scope! And there are goons who
will just appear from thin air. And BB is here, and he tells you
that he killed your partner, so there aren't really any more mysteries
left for Max Payne to uncover, and yet there are two more
levels of this game after this, and they are exactly as punishing. You go to talk to Alfred Woden, who Horne has been
blackmailing with sex tapes because obviously this guy
is going into gang-controlled slums in New York City to bang prostitutes, he really seems like the type, but you're his bitch now,
you're his pawn to take Horne down, because she continued
with Valkyr production even after the government shut it down. And he says he can pull strings so that
if I go and waste her, I'll be in the clear. Which is a lot of strings to pull. …so then Horne's mercenaries attack and this is basically the steel
mill fights inside of this mansion. We don't need it. I don't
really need to talk about it. This video is long enough. We get to the Æsir
Corporation's headquarters and recognize it as the
building from the beginning, and let me tell you, you're not
getting to the top of this place without a fight and enough
painkillers for Max's liver to crawl out of his asshole in protest. It's all fun and games
until Æsir mercs are lining the walls shooting fucking M79s at you. This, this part, right here, has been
burned into my brain for 23 years. It was the first time, I thought, "you know what,
the game is just fucking with me now". The parts of Max Payne that I enjoy: with the goon-shooting
and the snappy writing and the drive to push on and
uncover the mystery, it's gone by now. I wanna get through this and I wanna make Nicole Horne pay for
her malicious game design. Now, kids, is the time you're supposed
to go into the comments and say, "Civvie, you're wrong, this notoriously
difficult game is actually very easy "and you should be playing it
properly on the PlayStation 2." Even an automatic shotgun
doesn't make things easier. And I'm not mentioning the part
where Mona Sax absolutely did not die. Horne sends a helicopter after me
which doesn't really do much. I get to her office,
take the secret exit to the roof- OH YOU BITCH! Really showing off your skills from
the Æsir softball league, ain't you? This leads to a pretty underwhelming
boss fight, if you can call it that. This isn't like any of the other fights
in this game because it's not a fight. It's a puzzle. Kinda. You have to shoot
the supports to this tower and then shoot the tower
so it falls onto her helicopter. The ending cutscene is cool,
don't get me wrong, and it's very cathartic to know
that she is absolutely not coming back. And we're back to where the game started. It's weird to say that
this game ends abruptly when it probably should
have ended two levels ago. Max gets arrested, but… [MAX]
It wouldn't be over till the man
with the patch would say so. He'd say the right words. I knew he would. He'd better. Woden grinned smugly. It was the grin of a winner… that made two of us. [CIVVIE]
Yes, Max, your family was murdered and you've been passed around as a pawn between different mobsters
and shady organizations throughout the entire game
but hey, you've won! And no one can take that away from you. Except Rockstar. Max Payne is still a legendary game. It was the coolest thing
anyone had ever seen in 2001. Maybe one day I'll play with that fix
for the difficulty scaling… [H4MM3R]
No, you won't. [CIVVIE]
Really? [H4MM3R]
Nah. [CIVVIE]
What if it's not for a video? [H4MM3R]
You're never playing Max Payne again. You'll play 2 eventually,
and then probably 3. You don't get to play
video games for fun anymore. [CIVVIE]
That's kinda depressing. I guess we'll always have Ragna Rock. And chasing after Vinnie Gognitti. And the baseball bat. Oh, and you know what? That fight at the end of Woden's
chapter was actually pretty fun too. And the part where you finally catch up- *end credits*
