SAD MAX: A Max Payne Trilogy Retrospective

[Music] ooh [Music] in 2001 videogames had a reputation for not being especially sophisticated in their storytelling the straightforwardness of the plots usually involving some evil corporation or another we're a throwback to a simpler time of one-liner driven dialogue and spectacle driven plotting the first max pain by remedy games uses the ancient predictable hard-boiled detective archetype to provide a kind of resonance with the players actual mechanical journey through the world you are living a fatalistic story all the levels are already programmed all the twists laid out all waiting for pain to go through the living of it step by step so the game begins with a flash-forward to the very end this isn't a game about choice it isn't a game about freedom it's a game about an angry wronged man and all the bullets that stand in the way of the vengeance he craves from act 1 scene 1 The Hardball detective is been a cliche since not long after they were introduced in the 1930s fast-talkin hard drinkin men who view the world through a thick lens of cynicism and dark irony they live in a world where whisky is measured in fingers lives are measured in seconds and women are almost always some kind of trouble that you ain't looking for more movies added an element of artistic depth to the presentation but for decades the many knockoffs of the Sam Spade archetype slumped deeper and deeper into predictability and irrelevance during the 70s 80s and 90s the Coen Brothers Big Lebowski movie illustrates the difficulty of updating the old archetype to work in the modern age in many ways The Dude's story is structured like a traditional hard-boiled mystery but the dude himself is a decidedly soft-boiled detective utterly unprepared tucking random strings on an incomprehensible not of human chaos take the scene at jackie treehorn Sparty the dude sees him take a note during a suspicious phone call and then uses a pencil to retrace the note like any good Pinkerton but it's not a clue it's a goofy doodle of a guy with a three-foot erection the hard-boiled detective with a just the facts man attitude and a gritty metaphor for every trivial interaction is ultimately more outmatched by the kaleidoscope of human failure and greed in the cellphone era than they would be outgunned by some two-bit Jersey mobsters that's where Max Payne comes into the equation if you put a character with a straightforwardness of the old hard-boiled detective is in the modern era where basic truths are rarely agreed on and often obscured they seem hopelessly anachronistic and slightly useless taking the world more serious you end up with something like The Big Lebowski something that constantly paints its protagonist like a fool taking the main character more seriously than the world you come down on the side of Max Payne where it's the world that's outrageous and foolish and it's down to max to smash the world's falsehoods to pieces and put the pieces back together into something that makes sense everything about Max Payne's game world is a wild exaggeration in gesture in speech in a plot and didn't play against this backdrop of absurd excess Max Payne feels more like a real person than he ought to that counterintuitive humanity carries max through three games from his wife's death and his quest for revenge in the first game through Max's sad messy midlife breakdown in the third no matter how ridiculous the world the dialogue or the action gets max is always a steady constant it might take him four or five metaphors and three additional gritty one-liners to get there but Max Payne always shows himself to be a well-intentioned man in a foul cruel world this gets him shot at constantly it's the shooting in Max Payne that's more famous than the man himself anyway Max Payne was one of the earliest games to use bullet time mechanics all of the Matrix movies where everything slows to a crawl to show the impossible acrobatics of combat and the dramatic trajectories of bullets on their way to a target my first encounter with bullet time driven action in a game was first person shooter fear which came out in 2005 back in 2001 max pains third-person leaping and dodging does give a slightly different flavor to it but I was surprised how the rhythm of combat in each game revolves around the bullet time mechanic is not only an indispensable tool but maybe more as an anchor for how difficulty in pacing and the combat encounters plays out experiencial II it's effectively a superpower and incredibly unfair advantage for the player to have it's only balance is in making combat dangerously lethal in a way that even a game like half-life isn't on higher difficulties max is convincingly mortal bullets aren't good for them and most are fatal even uneasy a shotgun blast or a fuel Uzi rounds in a row are enough to do max in although progression is quicker on an easier difficulty you are losing out on some of the core tension of the game which is equally thematic as it is mechanical that core tension is that the hired goons he's up against actually do have max powerfully outmatched outgunned the harder the difficulty the more tangible the feeling of being the underdog in the situation by actually putting the player in a constant position of being weaker than the enemy's constantly and truly outgunned by them bullet time becomes less of an obvious superpower without it your bullet away from death with it same deal but you see the bullets coming and you can dive away inches from being snuffed out one close call after another this is another area where the repetitive Lachey's of hard-boiled fiction work in the game's favor it's that moment where the detective crouches behind the bar frantically reloading his revolvers bottles shatter above him the moment where the hero rolls away from the explosion only to come up shooting and reverse the ambush those moments and a hundred more boiled down into set pieces and repeatable animations like popcorn of the imagination it's a reduction of what's in these old hard-boiled stories broken down into the smallest divisible elements of excitement in action and then arranged across relatively bare linear levels the momentum created by the combat slit allottee though is tremendous a single gunfight is over in seconds for better max dodges a spray of shotgun pellets and hits the ground firing clearing out some goons and immediately getting up to face the next ones for worse and you're reloading the combat again and again to figure out a choreography that works max pains level and encounter design work in tandem to create little linear gun puzzles more often than an emergent AI driven combat a kind of rhythm that indie shooters superhot made its sole naked focus here in 2001 though it's a more awkward and a more deliberately hidden thing a sensation humming underneath the grid of the city and the fireworks of the combat that awkwardness of Maximas movement coupled with the unforgiving lethality of gunplay can lead to some unfair moments where Max is simply too clumsy to live and it's not much the players fault in a modern game that might be a negative because almost all of Max Payne's essential mechanics are well-worn cliches of their own nowadays usually so smoothly implemented is to be hardly noticeable but as the grandfather of shoot dodging bullet time action that awkwardness becomes part of the charm back here in the original game as goofy and likeable as Max Payne scrunched frustrated face the face belongs to Sam lake one of the founders of remedy entertainment and the main writer from Max Payne 1 & 2 this is the other major source of Max Payne one's charm the do-it-yourself amateur spirit the protagonists face is a series of shifting photograph close-ups of the graters face wrapped around a 3d model Lakes words are Max's words it's rare to have a developer write direct and star in their own production but not only did Lake pull it off he did it with such style that he achieved a kind of Bruce Campbell esque b-movie fame out of it other members of Remedies staff their friends the family lend their faces and photos to the game to populate its world the result is a dark gritty world of drugs sex murder and lies whose cast list got mixed up with the IT Crowd but damned if they won't do the job now that they're here Max Payne has the nerdiest [ __ ] mobsters to ever appear in anything and I love it Max Payne was a true blockbuster video game it had sharper action and more cinematic storytelling than a lot of what was on the market at the time in the world of video games this is a very serious mob story of vengeance and when he read user reviews on Steam a lot of player nostalgia is driven by having played this game young and taken it entirely seriously to some Max Payne 1 is truly a deeply felt story of conspiracy and vengers if this had been a movie instead none of it would fly it'll be a movie you turned in for a final project to be graded not one you'd seen a theater near you the friends-and-family casting the earnest overwrought excess of Max's narration the smarm a broadly comic way max teases the mobsters who want to kill him the mobsters themselves a vast army of goons who are most certainly walking here in movies it would come off as either satirical or amateurish probably both when a Max Payne movie finally did come out it was incomprehensible unsatisfying to fans of hard-boiled detective stories unsatisfying to fans of the video game or people rooting for Mark Wahlberg's career to succeed there is nothing about Max Payne the videogame that works cinematically even if the game steals a ton of creative flourishes and visual language from movies yet it's charming as hell as a video game it's worth looking closely at why that might be 2001 is still part of the era where games were trying to gain legitimacy as an art form and as an entertainment medium to be compared to movies was seen as a good thing and derisive accusation and a lot of game reviews Max Payne has a huge ambition towards the cinematic feel but because of the technological limitations of 2001 the hardware limits of the PlayStation 2 era it can never really hit that goal it can only approximate it a puppet theater version of griten sleaze yes max is beset by underworld hard cases but they're all boys and their fathers two large suits yes max navigates a red light warren of seedy hotel brothels but the best the game can do is throw in some vibrating beds and some and the same grainy shot of someone anonymous woman's ass plastered on every other wall to remind you that this is a sex place and not the warehouse and not the docks Max's internal narration never really questions this although he eventually acknowledges some of the fundamental absurdity he says it's only cliche up until the moment you started living it and you know the man's entirely right this situation is serious lethal the mechanical way of the world engages with you proves this with every turn of the corridor Max Payne has no choice but to take himself seriously his wife is dead and he's wanted man this is the image he sees we see the same things but perceived them to be made out of construction paper and glitter the word bang spilling from the barrel of Max's pistol the contrast is beautifully counter-intuitively complimentary during a drug-induced dream sequence max realizes that he's in a video game quote the truth was burning green crack through my brain weapon statistics hanging in the air just 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 I was in a computer game funny as hell it was the most horrible thing I could think of in a quote max hits the nail on the head it's all absurd all ridiculous all truly truly horrible for the poor sack of [ __ ] who wound up protagonist in this mean little vengeance narrative he's barely a cartoon of a real person a photo of a face wrapped around an imaginary frame programmed to fight goon after goon until the story ends and that sounds like a sad-ass life max is sympathetic because of his unrealistic excess not in spite of it so is the army of goons for the that matter there's an art to making a common enemy engaging and fun to fight on a consistent basis and a lot of it has to do with player feedback in 1997 half-life soldiers seemed especially fearsome and clever because in another instance of counterintuitive design they announced their intentions to the player directly via radio chatter the idea is that you're overhearing the chatter but it's all for the players benefit it gives the impression of thought and strategy when what you're experiencing is more algorithm in line of sight instead of trying to make the thugs sound fearsome max payne uses a similar kind of chatter to make them sound smug and stupid the mechanical strategic reality is that we got him outnumbered boss he's just one man how hard could this be etc etc and without the bowtie mechanic you probably would just be utterly screwed so you hear them on the other side of the door talking [ __ ] about you in a preposterously bad Jersey accent and you know that their shotguns can cash and he checks their mouths right you also know they won't have time to use them as you dive through the door hit the ground and kill every one of the room because before they barely have time to Gale its pain every time you hear them planning something you're seconds away from ruining it every time you uh they have you cornered and start shouting their victory speeches one of Max's bullets shuts them up their AI is poor and awkward compared to something like half-life but Max himself is a little awkward so the match is still even the bullet time also shows off Maxo skills in bombastic player flattering ways the effect is supposed to mimic legendary director John Woo but the action choreography is entirely in the players hands a well-played encounter ends up being surprisingly cinematic and its abrupt twists turns dives and near misses a fumbled encounter is a comic outtake before trying again max tripping all over himself and falling right on top of an exploding grenade the goons are like Pringles once you pop you just can't stop they're all [ __ ] they're all dangerous and they scatter and fall before you and unpredictably spectacular displays of violence at power their role is to die and to be dislikable and holy [ __ ] are they talented at it this is amplified by the geeky youth of the remedy staffers who lent their faces to the game it adds an element of almost playful Mick believed he's unusually regular everyday looking bad guys who scrunch up their faces and fall as if they were going to actually yell oh oh you got me Coppa before laying politely on the ground until the next round another thing that's noticeable is someone who'd play fear before playing Max Payne is how tightly connected slow-motion combat action is with the destructible elements in the environment and how this creates a unique tone of combat in Max Payne Electrical things spark can explode paper and cardboard shred in ragged puffs of debris bottle shattered wood splinters every bullet causes some kind of damage even further underlining what a lucky thing it is when none of those bullets hit you but more than that the spectacle they had especially in slow motion gives a sense of breathless chaos to the firefight that ends up being the glue that holds the gritty parts of the game in the goofy parts of the game together Max Payne is silly over-the-top absurd and simultaneously earnest in its treatment of Max and the violent cruelties of his world to experience that contradictory tension as an art as a movie as a story it's too much and it feels as unbalanced as a washer-dryer with a brick inside to experience it in a moment and a single gunfight full of danger and debris and in those moments the elements find harmony the combat vignettes of the core gameplay loop reorient the player towards having fun and a self-aware way establishing distance from the overwrought darkness of Max's narration while also emphasizing the dead seriousness of what all this gunfire means to max its Sam lakes face Max Payne story but the tension and the thrill of it is all given entirely to the player Max Payne 1 is a product of its time more than its sequels not just for the shoestring budget in the small production team behind it but because of some of the more peculiar twists and turns of the narrative modern games often are slightly embarrassed of their cartoonish roots Lara Croft now has depth an agency almost in spite of herself Kratos has to consider what legacy he leaves his son and even Max Payne himself goes to war with his own addictive despondency in Rockstar Games franchise finale Max Payne 1 though differentiates itself from the kind of action movies at wants to emulate the gritty hard-boiled streets of a noir York by deeply from the well of wild and crazy' video game storytelling cliches circa 2001 there's a conspiracy to flood the streets with drugs in glowing green vials called Valkyr which was just the tip of the iceberg for a constant treadmill of references to Norse mythology the evil green goop was shocker originally a government program that took place right here underneath the city and the only one willing to help max is a member of something like the Illuminati and the evil green group was at the root of the plot to kill Max's family so his revenge is to kill the CEO of an evil corporation that profits from the goop there's even a mob boss who has a psychotic break and decorates his nightclub ragnerok with blood and occult symbols what is this 90s cheese doing in a story that by its own admission is trying to be as cinematically gritty as possible for the budget and for the era it's hard to say but its presence helped cement Max Payne as being something that only makes sense in the medium of video games evil corporations and green goop are old hat for games remedy could have brought in Commander Keen and he probably solved the case as well as max if that was all there is to it but it's not the green goop is fully secondary to all the sincerely written angst in the parade of strange sour analogies and metaphor that make up Max's in her life Max Payne is a half step from the old Duke Nukem days on their way to the days where even BJ blaskowitz feels worry and doubt it's these weird fantasy elements that derail the Max Payne movies so badly a Hollywood adaptation can't even figure out how the hell to make them work because on an aesthetic and thematic level they really just don't the only work as part of a lineage of game design cliches that would have felt familiar to players at the time in 2001 it wasn't such a dumb question to ask of gamers would find a pure cop story too boring the market was used was used to excess so excess it would have it's a lot like how Max's arsenal stretches all the way back to 1996 is Tomb Raider the dual pistols the shotgun and view Z's have you played any of those games you instantly understand the specific mechanical purpose of that weapon Lara had auto lock on though and Max does it himself well you do you it for him either way though its borrowing old familiar phrases from the language of video game design not knocking it for doing this mind it's fascinating to me how certain specific things become shorthand for whole systems of engagement Max's weapon escalation perfectly mirrors Tomb Raider - but it's fine because the emphasis of the broader game is reversed from 80% platforming and 20% combat to 80% combat in 20% platforming there are different games with different intentions and viley different executions except for the shared elements of useful cliche what exactly did the Uzi go out of fashion in action games it's hard to put a finger on but for a while there anytime you saw one you instantly knew its characteristics and its strategic purpose in the game Max Payne ones evil corporations in the mythological drugs service a similar purpose a shorthand for a certain kind of black and white conflict a simplicity of storytelling that max can appear like a nuanced character standing next to Max Payne 1 is a game on the brink of a new era feet still firmly planted in the old it's the elements that date the game that end up holding the most appeal for me going back I love it for its awkwardness it's a mature Ness and the tremendous enthusiasm that carries both along I don't love it for being clever and sharp and it's writing and plotting and really isn't much of either but I do love it because the language of design it speaks is an old odd one that I haven't really heard for a long time and I find myself absolutely borne away by the nostalgia of it it's one of those rare games whose production circumstances and cultural timing make it impossible to imitate that's a difficulty that its sequels tried to tackle in two very different ways on a surface level Max Payne 2 is an industry-standard more of the same sequel making some improvements and tweaks while also introducing some stuff that pushes the first games formula so far that it does falter on a deeper level Max Payne 2 is one of Remedies weirdest titles more meaningfully connected to the Alan Wake games yet to come then the Max Payne came already in the studio's tail lights in one reading on the surface it's a story of Max's obsessive streak in love and war a story where the hard-boiled detective gets too mixed up with a dame he should have known to stay away from in another reading it's a deconstruction of the fatalistic predestination that most all videogame protagonists are doomed to fall into a deconstruction of the very game design cliches that powered the first game like a kind of Knights of the Old Republic tube for third-person linear action games the thing is it's hard to tell which direction Max Payne 2 is leaning at any given moment are we meant to be taking max seriously or are we meant to be considering him abstractly as a prisoner of the game is mechanical construction both either what I'm saying is fundamentally Max Payne 2 is a kaleidoscope one angle you see a boring by the numbers sequel missing all the folks of the original another angle you see a game that's bold enough to make meta commentary the primary narrative thread third angle it's a discordant mess both I'm not able to unite these into some cohesive unified theory of Max Payne 2 I think any given person's experience in the game is going to be wildly subjective in terms of which game or which interpretation of the game resonates strongest I ask myself can I boil it down to the question should you play max payne 2 the fall of max payne when my answer is a resident I don't know maybe and I guess I just can't resolve that it's a weird one stem to stern to introduce the game properly I think you have to start with a TV show that plays in the background of a dark dingy room and Max Payne 1 called address unknown it begins with the lines the Flamingo speaks it can speak here and then only gets weirder and darker the Flamingo the evil wise flamingo says mirrors are more fun than television backwards and then also the flesh of fallen angels a green green goop related phrase that follows max around from place to place and character to character in Max Payne 1 address unknown was a throwaway bit something to unnerve the player and under if max in Max Payne to address unknown is the central anchor of the gaming world you visit a funhouse themed after the show three times over the course of the game Max's love interest literally lives there and the game features six new episodes of address unknown sprinkled throughout the levels it goes deeper now that remedy has a serious budget to work with after the first game success they scrapped the photo wrapped faces for fully 3d ones based on actual actors Timothy Gibbs lends his face to max this time around yet in address unknown Sam Lake is still the protagonist a man hunting his double through New York City a thing max had come up with with a bit of narration in the original game as Max Payne 2 goes on max hallucinates bits and pieces of address unknown waking up to it and the first in the first of the games three dream sequences and then revisiting images from the funhouse with max explicitly replacing John Mira the address unknown character this isn't just a fun series of coincidences a massive amount of development effort went into setting up these parallels address unknown is the narrative that matters in Max Payne 2 and that makes for a goddamn peculiar experience Max Payne 2 begins with a flash-forward like the original game and just about the first thing that max asks is did I love her did I have a choice like the original game everything that happens is a funnel narrowing to the point where max reaches this climactic moment where Mona sax dies and he finds himself all alone and covered in blood again it's a fatalistic certainty that the story will get here max at one point says quote there are no choices nothing but a straight line the illusion comes afterwards when he asked why me and what if when you look back and see the branches like a pruned bonsai tree or forked lightning if you had done something differently it wouldn't be you it would be someone else looking back asking a different set of questions Max Payne is not a role-playing game neither you nor he have input on who he is everybody chooses it was always going to be these exact choices the choices that Sam Lake wrote for him Alan Wake remedies next big hit centers a lot of itself around these questions of free will in a creative work to the extent that the climax of Alan Wake is literally the main character attempting to write himself out of the consequences of his own story all that's left in a linear game like that is to walk the path besides the main character which is exactly what the funhouse level in Max Payne 2 is meant to draw attention to and satirize the level is actually called no joke a linear sequence of scares there's no enemies the first time you go through just cardboard cutouts and menacing tableaus max says quote a funhouse is a linear sequence of scares take it or leave it is the only choice given makes you think about free will have our choices been made for us because of who we are at the end of Alan Wake Alan realizes he cannot write himself a happy ending because he's in a horror story and it would break genre conventions end of the Magic Max Payne is equally trapped by the cliches of his genre the hard-boiled detective is always a tragic figure they never get a happily ever after for the player at the game is absolutely a funhouse a linear sequence of scares and the only choice given is play or don't play you know what's in store for poor Max Payne nothing you do will change or alter it it's the destiny of his archetype and he is every inch of the archetype this kind of satirical meta commentary is supported by the more regular surface level plotting and is in some ways the only way to square it all together back up on the surface level the game feels like a surprisingly uninspired sequel we're using pretty much all of the characters left alive at the end of the first game and very few others even reusing locations like the Ragnarok club where you were visit twice more during Max Payne 2 the budget for this game was so much more than the original and yet its diversity of locations is much smaller it's cast in its conflicts largely recycled from the first game let's assume that this was not a cost-saving measure let's assume that this is creatively deliberate in some way Mac says quote you can't run from your past you'll end up running in circles until you fall back down to the same hole you're trying to escape from only the holes groan deeper he says your past has a way of sneaking up on you you'll hear your broken echoes of it everywhere like a bad replay he'll get mad at everyone for reminding you about it even if it's all in your head and quote it all comes together to paint a bleak portrait of a man doomed from the start the state of the world at the end of ex Payne 1 wasn't a triumph it was just the shape of the trouble to come Vlad would always betray max at some point Alfred Woden was always a bad guy when Mona and Max would always have a flirtatious attraction to each other put all those pieces on the board at the same time and it's checkmate every time to take the game at face value though you're looking at a game eager to repeat locations repeat enemies and repeat motifs with only a paper-thin romantic subplot to tie that all together motor sax is the game's fracture point she's either a straightforward femme fatale type with no personality and no meaningful reason to risk it all for max or else she's a satirical mirror image of Max is doomed to be the tough woman who dies tragically as Max is doomed to be the tough man who has to stoically live with the guilt there's a bit of graffiti in a dream sequence where Mona Sachs's name is written blood and Max is capitalized inside it there are long segments where you play as Mona and nothing about the mechanical experience changes Mona and max use bullet time the same they carry the same kind of weapons and dodge in the same sort of way there isn't any functional difference between them there isn't even much difference in personality they're both rice are cast akin deadly when Max meets Mona back in the first game she says it's her sister Lisa get it who's the damsel in distress not her but when she dies here in the second game Mona realizes with a bitter laugh that she ended up being a damsel in distress anyway it's not like this is an accident remedy is deliberately drawing attention to the trope to the cliche of her being one more woman who dies so that max can have some sort of personal epiphany why does she die and max live especially if they're basically interchangeable characters just because and explicitly because it's the genre convention it's what's expected of such a story Mona doesn't have agency not because the writers didn't think she deserved any but because the whole point of Max Payne 2 is that no one in this game has agency . the inevitabilities of their cliches are like shackles around their ankles if on some new cold new york night in 1998 it was Mona's husband screaming an alarm if it was her having that iconic moment as the camera pans up and around the story would go the same she'd kill him all she'd get a revenge it's who she is as much as it's who Max's the format though the format of the story is the prison and the roles they've been given the prison sentences 2/3 through the story catches up to one of the flash-forwards and a genuinely well-done moment where Max's police partner a woman named Winterson betrays max in the way she'd been telegraphing for hours Winterson pulls her pistol to shoot Mona Mona starts to draw hers and defend max doesn't have time to think and it doesn't need any time he guns down Winterson before she can fire max is a wanted criminal again for love but what does love even mean in the context of Max Payne - these characters spend tops 48 hours with each other they've got a connection they'll buy that because the voice actors are good at selling it but love even max wonders about that in the very first bit of dialog in the game in terms of what's in the game they flirt mounish hours for max and presumably the players benefit and Maksim Ouma Mona have one moment of pretty serious making out this is a paper-thin basis for love on the surface level what max has with Mona helps him accept himself the last line of the game is quote I had a dream about my wife she was dead but it was alright is that because max let go of the weight of her memory now that he's found a new guilt or is it because kicking things back down to the meta commentary he's finally realized that he had no choice and no hope when it came to saving either of them that's her role the catalytic corpse it was as scripted and immutable as his role as a vengeful cop on the edge Mona dies and max feels release that's odd he's either an [ __ ] or having a fatalistic epiphany and I actually leaned toward the latter on this settling on an interpretation whether the game is earnestly shallow or winking lis deep is made harder by the changes in the moment-to-moment gameplay that muddy the first games tight engaging rhythm of play primarily the difficulty has been readjusted in a strange way that I just can't quite put my finger on on higher difficulties Max's as fragile as ever but on the lower ones he's a bit of a tank and his durability saps a lot of the tension out on the other hand the combat encounters are much longer larger and more populated than Max Payne 1 there's a lot more people to kill and the difficulty readjustment seems to be a reaction to this giving extra breathing room for making mistakes during marathon gun battles the thing is though that the first Max Payne and Alan Wake to come for that matter used small groups of enemies and strategically premeditated positions and load outs with small exceptions like the Ragnarok boss battle Max Payne 2 throws goons at and plumps and waves both sometimes with what seems like a plan but more often just in groups that are simply dangerous for the size of them it's like the parking garage level from the first game but it never ends Max's new face in the goons new faces look more polished for the era anyway but they've lost all their distinctiveness and charmed the generic thugs here truly are generic where before they had a goofy charm to them that was a major source of my feeling of fun in the combat and Max himself just seems slightly off Timothy Gibbs is a perfectly fine looking dude but his DirectX 8 approximation looks like a melancholy frog and it's hard not to long for Sam Lakes excessive expressive old-school max all the time also gives you a longer duration to play around with another thing that helps balance out the larger scope of the combat encounter design wall sapping tension the end result feels shockingly devoid of the big personality on display in Max Payne 1 in terms of features and essential structure they do play the same way but the specifics of balance and the engagement are just different enough to deeply alter the feel of the whole thing and here there is no aah but I'm doing ironically you see defense the John Woo isms in the animation Department I also start to go a little off the rails most iconic Li the weird and totally unnecessary pirouette Max does when reloading in bullet time there were a lot of instances of the game wanting to look badass and impress with its badassery wear what I really wanted was for max to focus and not dodge roll off the balcony and the blandness of the combat draws out the blandness of the environments as well Max Payne has always been about gray undecorated industrial spaces as a matter of cost-saving game design but Max Payne 2 suffers much more without having quite as much to latch on to as far as the charming Department is concerned the conspiracy in Max Payne 1 was fast moving lots of ups downs new characters in Max Payne 2 it's the same old characters having hidden motivations teased out over the course of a couple dozen levels so while you're in those levels it's not about what you will or won't find it's really just about getting through to the next which is just as concrete and lifeless as the last thing it creates a mood of exhaustion and anxiety which is probably what they were going for actually but it also sheds the community theater spirit that kept the whole thing flowing along swiftly and evenly the first time out and it's hardly an evenly weighted creative exchange these mechanical flaws are earnest choices that didn't pan out too well so am I reading too much into it to think that the games being so arched and self-critical in the narrative Department couldn't it be that those things are also just earnest choices that didn't pan out too well absolutely like I said the game is a kaleidoscope turn it and a different pattern appears every time in 2003 the alterations in the graphics and technical presentation might have shown an ambition towards more consistent and forward-looking 3d aesthetic but here in 2018 it feels like they've polished off the most memorable facets of the first game on a moment-to-moment basis I don't enjoy Max Payne 2 very much even in mechanical situation similar to the original game something about it is just fundamentally bland and strange much like the studio would do with Alan wakes peculiar half sequel American Nightmare I never did much understand that game either but if I had played Max Payne 2 before I played American nightmare a lot of things would have clicked into place for example in address unknown John Muir is double John Mira as a serial killer on the loose doing terrible things for which the protagonist will be blamed he has two protagonists girlfriend who favors the killer Mira over the original Mira that's almost the exact plot of American Nightmare where wicks double mr. scratch goes around killing in Allen's name and threatening Alan's wife so it's up to Alan to navigate a darker dreamworld to stop it scratch talk Stalin through you guessed it the television there is a tangle of threads running through many remedy remedy games themes of madness and fatalistic tragedy and Max Payne 2 was essentially the foundational work for the weirdest most experimental elements of that thematic line of thinking Max Payne 1 would have been fine without Max Payne 2 even Max Payne 3 kind of hand waves the second game's plot elements with a single line of dialogue but Alan Wake I'm coming to would not have been nearly so tight or so good if remedy hadn't taken this opportunity to fly their freak flag as high as they did the dream sequences the self-aware genre criticism the uneasy sense that what you're seeing is not exactly what's going on it's all a little awkward and strange here in Max Payne 2 but with a new protagonist and Alan Wake it all ends up landing a lot better Max Payne 1 address unknown was just a nod to twin peaks in the David Lynch school of storytelling and Max Payne 2 it's the one thing about the game that seems to serve a unifying purpose the one thing that makes sense as a lens to view the game through I know a lot of people take this game straightforwardly and seriously and critics at the time praised the love story with Moana in a really earnest way I'm genuinely confused by this you'll find deeper more sensible relationships on Hill Street Blues than you'll find at Max Payne 2 if you play the game a couple more times over and then beating the highest difficulty the last scene changes to one where Moana lives and Max comments on how he doesn't really deserve that if you didn't know it was there then you'd have to play through his story you thought was immutable and fixed twice before finding that it isn't quite immutable but the secret ending undermines not only the abstract reading but the straightforward one as well essentially invalidating 60% or so of Max's internal dialogue is it meant to show that nothing is completely predestined if you try hard enough or is it meant to show favor to the player for having put so much effort into the game the plot elements outside the romantic elements is just mob war with like two small complications and double crosses why exactly is Max Payne 2 so well remembered when it's such a fact rude and strange experience to actually play I looked at the surface level and the game felt like it came across as a flat warm soda I looked deeper and I found a game that isn't about an NYPD cop learning to love again but a game about a fictional character realizing the words of his story were written in advance that sure seems like a stretch at first glance but it's also the actual serious plot of Alan Wake so it's not like remedy writers weren't thinking on these themes Sam lake was lead writer or on Alan Wake as well otherwise you've got a sequel like any sequel Maura what you loved lesson what surprised you the first time around Max Payne is more archetype than man in Max Payne 1 he lives out the archetypal cliches fulfills his hard-boiled destiny in Max Payne 2 a more abstract and melancholy max recognises what happened as destiny and not choice and finds solace in it his wife is dead but it was alright and that could be it for max if not for Rockstar Games equally peculiar sequel which losses his self directly from the shoulders of this game you see for a man whose whole life is a mission as a messy cliche to which he has fully resigned himself the hardest and most frightening thing is in the blood or the bullets or the booze the hardest thing Max Payne could ever do at this point in the series is change welcome to Max's midlife crisis Max Payne 3 is my favorite of the three but only because of what came before and the myriad of genuinely clever ways this bizarre high budget high gloss sequel interacts with both the strengths of the previous games it leverages the Ernest metaphor Factory maximum first game and consciously forces him into conflict with his own cliche all of the second Max Payne the game opens with another flash-forward but a meaner grittier one than before it's not about conspiracy or a tragic emotion it's about Max being the man he's expected to be nothing more than a gun who does what he's told it opens long after max left New York City altogether beating him in Sao Paulo Brazil where he works as a security contractor for a very rich man with a very dangerous enemies I don't want to start there though I want to begin where Max does after the end of the second game floating at the bottom of a bottle in some anonymous Jersey dive bar Max had fulfilled almost all of his cliche except for the last part where he must drink himself to death in a lonely and dirty apartment it's this process that gets interrupted by a man with a job offer max doesn't want it initially but he kills a mob boss's son over a matter of respect so there is not a lot of other options for him except to leave in Max Payne 2 max said referencing both plot and game design quote firing gun is a binary choice you either pull the trigger or you don't it's the fate as fatalistic cliche of his character that max was always gonna pull the trigger here too in this bar where he was trying to fade away quietly what's really interesting about this is that the rest of the game's plot is spent piecing together the conspiracy that began at this moment the assumptions about Max's simplicity and gullibility that get proved her right over and over again the villains of this game guests that Max is exactly the washed-up old loser he comes across as they guess that there's not enough spark left in him to deviate from the choices they give him the guess he's given up on the idea of their even being a right thing to do let alone doing it max is down to the simple things binary choices pull the trigger or don't and it works for Max's new employers all the way up until it doesn't when max finally realizes this whole awful mess has been rigged from the start to pivot on his own shortsightedness and incompetence the only way to bring the bad guys down is to defy their expectations and in so doing defy his own archetype his own prescribed role in the story max doesn't get better at killing people over the course of the game he starts good at it and he isn't even sober the arc he follows is one where he gets better at seeing seeing himself for the joke he's become seeing the gossamer chains that bind to those around him seeing the cruelty he's helped to perpetuate and then choosing to do something about it swapping Studios is a dicey thing for most game franchises and there's a good portion of fans of the original two games will tell you that Max Payne 3 is a bad Max Payne of sequel or just a bad game in general because of how unpredictably and strangely it plays with the iconography and presentation of previous max pains at swaps New York for Sao Paulo it swaps graphic novel panels for fully rendered cutscenes it swaps a fatalistic Lee a heroic Max for a miserable self defeating one there's so much about the game that's different and yet the character himself and the connections the previous games are tremendously faithful and strong time has passed for Max and for the player both Max Payne 3 came out in 2012 nine years is a long gap between games to think nothing would change and so long a gap is ridiculous a decade is enough time for the whole world to change and it did just think for a moment how culturally and emotionally distant the last few months of pre 9/11 America seemed now those were the months that the original Max Payne was released in it's exhausting to even think about all the life that's happened since then max is confused and lost in the world of 2012 if his mid-century archetype was an anachronism in 2001 it is antediluvian in the smartphone era in this though we come a full circle where the earnest top that no one had faith in finds himself pitted against a lying chaotic world that makes no sense to him just like the original game like the original game max is bound to his cliche like an iron ball around his ankle but this time it'll pull him down into the water and drown him at last if he can't get it off max was in a violent video game again funny as hell it was the worst thing he could think of Rockstar stamp as a developer is certainly present but not as much as I was led to believe about this game I had heard from people that it was some kind of cynical cash grab that gets everything wrong my experience though is that in almost every way that counts Max Payne 3 is thoughtfully faithful to the original vision of Max Payne 1 the most notable change is the introduction of rockstars studio standard cover mechanics where instead of relying completely on bullet time and fast reactions like the original to max panes this new Max is completely content to hunker down behind a desk and occasionally pop off a few rounds all the previous mechanics are largely intact the bullet time the shoot dodging the lethality of the bullets but the remedy style is best suited to small clumps of enemies look at Alan Wake it's largely the same as Max Payne in terms of encounter sizing spacing and rhythm Grand Theft Auto 4 is much different and it's that combat design that Rockstar draws from the Rockstar style of populating whole city blocks with a dozens of enemies requires a mechanic that allows a player to be safe while figuring out where the fire is even coming from Max Payne 1 and 2 are corridor shooters despite the third-person frame Max Payne 3 is more of a neighbourhood shooter it's reliant on massive high production set pieces in a way that the original games were not very much allowing max time to breathe and to assess was not part of the original design but largely because assessment was quick one hallway two doors four dudes assessment done it's all over in a matter of seconds one way or another Max Payne 3 is more familiar in its action movies scale Here Come a dozen armed mercenaries at once from three directions and a giant fie a think about rockstars own GTA series for a tommy vercetti and Vice City there's no cover system and the combat as a result feels awkwardly hectic and often unfair and the more enemies you add the less fun the game becomes then Niko Bellic gets a cover system in GTA 4 and all of a sudden shootouts are more active because you're not literally running behind a corridor to break the line of sight and more fair because being exposed to fire becomes a personal tactical choice and not an immutable fact of combat Niko Bellic takes out waves of enemies because Niko's old friend the concrete pillar it can absorb a lot of their fury it preserves the suspension of disbelief as the scale of conflict cartoonishly escalates higher and higher and higher could Rockstar have kept remedies rhythm of combat sure but doing it this way plays to their individual strengths as a developer they get to take what they already knew how to do in the microcosm of the combat loop and then utterly d-cup lit from the wide open worlds that they're known for Max Payne 3 despite the scale of the levels is still a linear sequence of scares focusing on just one story just one escalation of events to be played in a linear order is unusual for Rockstar even bully their one off the experimental game involves more player freedom than Max Payne 3 freedom though is not the matically appropriate for Max Max is about seeing the end coming turning left turning right and still meeting it head-on no matter what you do and being faithful to that element of backs pain Rockstar was able to make a game that feels not only like a natural extension of remedies work but like a strange experimental deviation from their own it's obviously a rockstar title in the moment-to-moment feel of the game but it's the design inverse of most of its studio siblings in the aggregate experience these changes seem to pop even brighter among the lights and graffiti of digital sal paulo the game's most iconic little moment is one where max is accompanying some much younger partygoers as they arrive at a nightclub by helicopter max hates every single thing about it the people the wealth the vanity the utter lack of purpose or meaning in his life or there's Max's word says what do you know about life Max and Max answers look at me I'm standing in a nightclub listening to music I can't stand and 5,000 miles from home I'm armed and I'm drinking you don't want life advice from me as frivolous and off-putting as the club kids are Max's life is an order of meaningless below even that to have ended up being there drunk armed chaperone not only that but the conversation is cyclical months ago revealed in late-game flashback max into him were on a yacht in the Panama Canal having a similar conversation though Max was less gracious and more plastered that time around max drifted off into a nap and woke up still drunk to find that nearly everyone on board was pulled off the boat and murdered as he slept off the booze max has to be reminded of this by another character because he was so deep in his funk but he barely registered it as being something that actually happened playing through the level everything does seem unsure and strange as max struggles to string Clues together and piece together the plot threads that he had earlier balled up and threw away in the previous games the hard drinkin cop act was a big part of the cliche the game has made a mechanic of Max's painkiller addiction having him pop pills his way to make his health bar regenerate here in the third game all those pills are taken more seriously Max's and Hayes for much of the game he forgets things he doesn't see things in the first place the Max Payne who had warned Sam Lakes face and only recently lost his wife might have seen through all the violence in the [ __ ] but that max is lost to time and lost to regret he's crossed an ocean of whisky since then and can no longer see the shore any shore when max shows up he is barely functional and that makes him the perfect fall guy more is that in between all the early missions max ceases to function completely all alone in this apartment getting blackout and living in filth his consumption is no longer glamorous it is naked Lee an attempt it's self annihilation all max has is his job and his job is to stand of that expensive nightclubs bar high above the slums and pretend he can't remember being the kind of person who would be disgusted at himself for being there it's actually a remarkably adult take for a rockstar game when it comes to that sort of excessive consumption you usually they play it for laughs or do it as a function of some character archetype or cliche here max isn't a hard-drinking gumshoe acting like he just stepped out of the Maltese Falcon here max couldn't even get served at the bar the way is most of the time now the drinking is sad to see and is itself a function of sadness he's not a cop not even close the game serves as a portrait not of a hero but of a henchman max is working for the bad guys the whole time he's just in too deep a hole to notice or care in the early game even as the dirt rains down on him by the shovel poles how did he fall so far to be this thing this hired gun with no morals from the opening flash-forward well we know this is the third game we know he tried to be normal and that was taken away we know he tried to break free from his cliche and live passionately and that was taken away too we know that he gave up after that and we know that that was a long time ago now the differences between Max and the goons with guns who have stood in his way has been reduced to pretty much nothing this more than any element of violence or sleaze is what makes the story genuinely gritty max doesn't much deserve to win but he is much too stubborn to die seeing all of that play out is a fantastic elevating frame for a game that might have otherwise been at by-the-numbers action sequel the flipside of all the attention paid to theme and characterization is that at the heart of the games has always been an attention to spectacle and the use of spectacle to keep the plot moving and the player immersed that's Payne's marketing material has always emphasized the action over the brooding meta commentary and the action has always been strong enough to support the weight of that emphasis bullet time mechanics and the explosive particles of wood paper and concrete that fluff up and down predictable clouds in slow motion were genuinely groundbreaking in 2001 and Max Payne 3 pays a lot of homage to that by being much more detailed on the destructibility of a dis environments than any Max Payne that came before many of the levels seem specifically themed around different types of architecture and materials that can shatter into form in the especially exciting ways it's taking what was already an important part of the game's visual characterization and dialing it up higher than ever before in a way the cover system keeps even more emphasis on these particle effects because the gun fights are more sprawling and protracted than before making it so you spend more time creating and experiencing the create the chaotic frenzy of the moment add to this the stucked shots where max perform some kind of feat of athleticism while puffing off wild Creek shots it's a participatory cutscene essentially and while some may complain about the on Rails nature of the scenes and how it removes the players control over their own fight choreography the spectacle is undeniably stylish it better serves the first game's ambition towards a cinematic feel more than anything in that original work Max Payne 3 gets made fun of a lot for having cutscene after cutscene after cutscene some just one hallway away from the last one but looking back you'll find that the original game's comic panel has occurred at a similar frequency they were just more low-key obviously passive here the line between passive and active cutscene is constantly blurred and that can be both frustrating and exhilarating the thing to keep in mind though is that even if there's rhythm of scripted highly linear play isn't something you'd want in every game Max Payne 3 is not every game it's a surprisingly experimental title it's ok with being divisive that way there are other games that focus much more on player freedom and a player participation many of them in rockstars own catalog Max Payne 3 is a strange what if wears traditional sensible ratios of gameplay to cutscene are completely discarded in favor of something more obviously passive where the player is more watching max than being max this actually interacts really well with the already present themes of predestination and fatalism take it or leave it is the only choice given should every game be like Max Payne 3 hell no is it okay for Max Payne 3 to be playful with accepted wisdom about how to present two games narrative as an individual artistic work hell yes Max's personal history also gives context to the game's portrayal of Sao Paulo is a sweat-drenched city of extreme wealth and extreme poverty where sex and drugs and lies around every corner and no one can be trusted the thing is this was else so max Payne's portrayal of New York City the original game said its levels among bars and brothels to create an image of a city at the mercy of its own cruelty and device max wants things to be a fresh start by going to Brazil but it isn't and it can't be instead it's the same [ __ ] different hemisphere thematically this is extremely important and Max's character arc and then Moorish construction of the world yes the scene where max goes to the favelas brothel and walks down a lot of hallways with a lot of sad exploitative sex going on before getting to the plot point is deliberately gross and condemned natori but I have a feeling that they would have included the scene if it had been set in Hoboken and not the favela it would serve the same purpose of illustrating the world and cynical hostel colors there are good people in the city genuinely good ones and not just broken anti heroes like max there's a cop wilson de silva who's one of the few uncorruptible serious cops in the city he's working on the same mystery as max and is much farther ahead with it max in the very first game wasn't too different well-decorated compassionate effective and then the night his family gets murdered in Max Payne 3 before he leaves Jersey max makes a detour to see his family's graves he thinks about how they've been dead and in the ground for longer than they were ever married by this point that life that person is distant there's so little of him now that the 1990s max would recognize or like in that scene three mobsters step out to fan around the grave and then a shootout begins the life that max wanted lying dead and rotten under the life he's got Wilson is a reminder of who he used to be and the interesting thing about their dialogue together is how impatient Wilson is with Max how Wilson conveys a kind of quiet passive contempt for what a blind idiot max has been being and yet the person Max is now not a cop but just a killer is able to do what Wilson can't the system is too corrupt to allow for justice to work the way it's intended so Wilson seeks out max gives him just enough information to point him in a new direction and then waits to follow the trail of carnage that max leaves behind him once max burns away the corruption Wilson can do his own job there are two sides of the same cliche of a hero cop and the Fallen cop and they rub off on each other in interesting ways Wilson gets a little dirtier max gets a little cleaner and by the time the story is over neither are stuck in their limbo more it's also notable how in the previous games it was a conspiratorial force that got max off the hook for citywide violence and that followed him around here max is busting the heads of the main conspirators and it's a sympathetic everyday kind of person who chooses to help him so he reached the end and the moment of the flash-forward comes around again at first we thought it reflected poorly on max that he was a man who had lost himself completely the twist is that in this moment he's more himself than he's been in years in the lead up to the end max fully expects to die he doesn't much care if he does or doesn't it's a genuine sacrifice he's making everything he has he's giving to right the wrongs that he's been Grunk 'only complicit in when they hired max they told him they wanted them to protect the innocent they were lying about who the innocent were but max was paid and he'll do the job until the guilty are dead Max's self annihilation with the drinking was without meaning or purpose dying here doing this would mean something but it doesn't die which leaves him instead with a new beginning he doesn't want to be who he was he doesn't have to be anymore he's free from his demons his cliche his destiny what max does now is his own damn business to escape that fatalistic cycle is the true climax of his whole character arc and to see him simply walk off into the sunset feels like a kinder ending than I'd ever envisioned for him but all the rest of his life would be like boring probably maybe I'll get a boat whatever it is it won't be good material for a video game and what's too boring for a Max Payne video game is just about as good as it gets for Max Payne the character that fundamental tension between the players entertainment and Max's misery is the secret to the game success at the end of the trilogy all that tension dissipates the story is over let the man live in peace thanks for watching I'd like to take a moment to thank by name the people who are currently donating $10 a month or more through the crowdfunding website patreon without you guys these videos wouldn't be possible at all so I'd like to thank people like dirt warm roll lowly under Brandon boat Matthew Mason gelec Josh Dueck Brian Puckerman Chris hey on David Carlson Sean Jacob siegelman NK jemisin Bobby Sims Morton scanning David Betancourt Josh Farkas Ashley rains nobody Leoni Oh Chris larkey to noon Dylan balls Michael Coonan Jereme Sanders te Keene Eric Jepsen Tyler Dow Z Roman Alexei crowd Gleeson las olas Darion Desa tell Fergus folate aurelion Noah Kent relates Tom Robert your local MooMoo Tom Vickers Danny Kilpatrick Collin booty Connor MacLeod cybot be Daniel panic Nate Williamson Alexander soon did Ethan closet Tim Marsh abdul-rahman a love seat radium a coy and drew tap Mark Phillips Adrian come away Schuyler restless Colby Howard Nathan Janzen argos swift sorcerer dave use an bug bootie hairy eyeball free morpheme rich store David Oren Christensen Hazra Fidel Safari Matthew Cassidy David harp straight I cannot fly Sharif Kazemi wesley am greg rucka matt bargain cost q r ax edward small zach be Eric Amundsen Cohen Basnet Jordan Klein Jessie Denton Simon nearfall Tyler rush faith fakie macmaine scorpion strike Cassie Jared or Cassie Derrida BOSU ski Elie Wiesel Colin Alex be theater pass person Andrew folds Byron Kallen McHale Aristotle Daniel mower Myron's Brad Smith my cash alone kesselmann Martin Lutz nd Mitchell Derrick Joyner Ryan Van Dyke the soul James Pascal amore Michael at well Ian Boudreaux Nicola Lucas Bernard Brennan Ritchie lupus younger boy Alex Nikifor Oh Cameron Keith Gordon Graham Steven hi max Penn doja Sam Bell Meyer Trivium art history flimsy unscrew theory Devin Fitzpatrick Hakeem Coleman Stephen Pato Andrew voice oh no Ivan gonntchev anxiety cat play Harrington Philip coffee Erik Robinson pals a nerd alex is a lot oh oh Clark Steven McGarrett Big John Philly I'm aluminum Halloween will Edwards Robert Glover Jeanette moon Anthony gallant Maurice dusky row the noble gamer Nemo bendin bring dice profit jacked Harvey Thomas Kershner Andrew up Lynette April yellow Sam will wore gray Noah I know you're reading this out loud Patrick McKenna ham Sebastian Corona will Dobbins Alexander Crohn's Luke Murphy John Hendrik Hansen Tom painter Oscar sangun bird Edward Clayton Andrews tin foil pancakes Samuel procopio Xavier Dominic Carlin Kim winsome Devon Vernon Jacob and McMillan highs are of the carrion medal of Connor Jody warden Jody Warren Elisha Nelson robot ghost Regan Merlin's Eden ak-47 Josh great app Sean Webber Andrew Britta Gary Berkeley's Johnson Milton side cool Alan Alexander Romanov Jesse focusin Alexander opodo Lucas mark on Dez de Moura toad heart Aaron Alba Matthew Sutton William Thomas Manuel Weidman Zak corpse team Ryan Schneider Lara's Ingvar Anderson art Toro Cordoba penny Arturo Kivar Diaz [ __ ] Dana stoop care in Glasgow Germany McQuaid Nicolas Rona your Genson Peter fling Tim Dodds Jack eight a77 n c8 Kevin shelled Anthony bar dill Andrew of Montevideo Jared Meyer andreas Larsen Ryan killed Lara's breakin Igor Bab Bab you Dan Thompson coumarin vision vision Alexander leister Morgan mall world war 2 3 Aaron Lee Darwin Eli birth mass Dennis Clark Daniel Daniel Pennypacker Corey Volvo - Jack Dawson Nick Cole Hamilton Carol Henderson reference error Milky Way resident advance Jordan Falls soiid chic comfy hat Eddie Burton Gabriel Nichols and Ron Gervais who's had enough to be holding the camera for me to do thanks dad and thanks to everyone else who is donating less than $10 a month you guys are equally as important and I'm very appreciative thanks for watching

Channel: Noah Caldwell-Gervais

Views: 263,521

Keywords: Max Payne, Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne, Max Payne 3, Critique, Review, Retrospective, Rockstar, Remedy

Id: c6-4oSTboqE

Length: 62min 41sec (3761 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 30 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/410-915-0909]

One thing Max Payne 2 has over Max Payne 1 I feel is a sense of tightness. A few times in Max Payne 1 you'd go on detours like attacking a ship to get weapons so you could attack a mansion or there'd be elaborate backstories for minibosses that would just be shot and be gone in part of a level

Max Payne 2 was much more of a streamlined experience in a narrative sense, no excess

I wonder what Noah would make of the New York trilogy by Paul Auster (Kojima was slightly inspired by it for MGS 2), it generally makes the detective a source of ridicule but plays around with the whole fate thing a lot more, going so far as to include the author in the story a few times

[u/gtabro]

Max Payne 2 to this day is the game I've finished the most times in my life.

Max Payne 1 I played first on a GBA emulator, liked it, and played the PC version. Still good.

Max Payne 3 is obviously the departure, but has the the best, most refined 3rd person shooting in these games, so I ended up liking it. HEALTH provided a weirdly great soundtrack.

[u/team56th]

After the Raycevick video series that praised MP1 and 2 while criticizing 3 (which is nice and comes up with its own good points btw), I am glad that Noah came up with a different view that speaks closer to me.

Lucas Raycevick, if I remember correctly, saw MP2 as a resolution of Max's own struggle and saw 3 as a rehash with a character wildly inconsistent with the previous entries - but I am more with Noah on this one. For all its layers and flairs, MP2 just follows what can be called fate at best, cliches at worst, and it remains unclear why he thinks "it's okay."

Compare that to MP3, and it's a much clearer resolution because of the reasons Noah pointed out. After MP1 and 2, he is stuck in the narrative logic he lives in. He should have died at the end of MP2, but since Mona died instead of him (if you do not see the hidden ending that is, which makes things even more muddied), at least he should have died in that bar in New York - and then he didn't. He is on a rampage of self-annihilation but he struggles to die. He's a painkiller-chewing tank that goes on and on and on, until he meets the wildly different and aggressive Sao Paulo and his habits, conspiracist theories and beliefs start breaking down.

By the end of the game, what has bound him to the events of MP1 and 2 is all gone. He looks different, his surroundings are different, it's finally time to walk away into the sunset alongside the killer synth sound that is so very different from the gloomy ballad of the first two games. It's a weirdly moving ending that I can't forget.

[u/ConstableGrey]

Max Payne 2 is still the tops in the series. I recently went back and played the original and the shooting is still good, but my nostalgia must have been blinding me, because I can't take that story seriously anymore. The Valkyr and occult stuff is just too much for me, it's so over the top. I like how the second is tighter with a focus on Mona.

I will still defend Max Payne 3 to death, one of the best third person shooters out there. I love old, grumpy Max backed by that soundtrack by Health. I'd like to see a spiritual successor by Rockstar.

[u/killkount]

Max Payne 2 was the greatest of all time. MP3 was fun when you were in a gunfight, but it lost everything else that made MP great. Too many cutscenes. Everywhere. Can't open a door without walking into a cutscene. There's no walking up on unsuspecting enemies having a funny conversation or anything like it. And let's not forget they turned the game into a cover shooter lite. All in all, the first two games are far superior games.

[u/RobotWantsKitty]

He really underplays the cutscene problems in MP3. In the first two games, the graphic novels were skippable, and rarely interrupted the gameplay, usually residing at the start and the end of the levels. Whatever few were in the middle of the missions, were rather short. In MP3, most of them can't be skipped, and break the pace of action quite often.

[u/[deleted]]

[removed]

[u/[deleted]]

If 3 isn't a Max Payne game, then I guess I don't want another Max Payne game. The gameplay blows the other two out of the water. I really had a far better feel of the character that he was in 3 compared to the other 2 games.

[u/ZiggyOnMars]

I cant forgive the developers of MP3 for removing slow motion John Woo styled body door break in and adding so many god damn commentary before any big fight from Max's god damn mouth.