No, no, no. I said addiction to painkillers. Plural!
That's better.Story:
Max Payne is a man tortured. After losing his wife and child to a couple of drug-addled maniacs, he transfers from the NYPD to the DEA. In a single night, while undercover, the shit hits the fan and Max is wanted for murder, among other things, and takes a police-dodging journey across a blizzard-choked New York to destroy the Punchinello crime family, as well as figure out who really pulled the proverbial trigger on his family, all the while gunning down anyone dumb enough to get in his way.
That's a short write-up, but honestly I don't want to spoil too much.
Max Payne is unique in that it doesn't use cutscenes, instead employing graphic novel-style panels, speech bubbles and all, alongside voiceovers and sound effects. While occasionally coming across as goofy (Max is modeled by the writer for the game, who doesn't always quite nail it), they are eye catching, having been nicely rendered through what I assume to be a Photoshop filter and other such touch-ups, with possibly more (I'm not a great judge of photoshopping).
They're quite effective at drawing you into the story, and they're quite effective at capturing the noir feel of the entire game. James McCaffrey is sublime as the gritty, wearied voice of Max, shaping him into a compelling protagonist.
Stolen from Wikipedia!
Graphics:
Outside of cutscenes, graphics are...well. Max Payne was released in 2001 (there seems to be a bit of contradiction as to when the PS2/Xbox versions came out, but I thought I'd let you know anyway that there was a PS2 and Xbox version). The visuals are not bad by any stretch, but they are dated. Character models are a little blocky and are somewhat reminiscent of the GTA III trilogy's models. Max's head is tauntingly squared, as if a cruel mathemagician cursed him prior to the events of the game.
Um. Yeah.
To be fair, I did play through the entire game on an older graphics card, and had everything on medium. But going back now, not a huge improvement on High settings. And, since I did play it on the PC, I have no idea how the PS2/Xbox visuals compare.
In short, you'll probably notice the graphics, but if you put down the game because of them, in spite of what the game has to offer (and in spite of them not being particularly awful), you are a cur.
Holy fuck!! Are you okay, dude?
Max Payne is a man tortured. After losing his wife and child to a couple of drug-addled maniacs, he transfers from the NYPD to the DEA. In a single night, while undercover, the shit hits the fan and Max is wanted for murder, among other things, and takes a police-dodging journey across a blizzard-choked New York to destroy the Punchinello crime family, as well as figure out who really pulled the proverbial trigger on his family, all the while gunning down anyone dumb enough to get in his way.
That's a short write-up, but honestly I don't want to spoil too much.
Max Payne is unique in that it doesn't use cutscenes, instead employing graphic novel-style panels, speech bubbles and all, alongside voiceovers and sound effects. While occasionally coming across as goofy (Max is modeled by the writer for the game, who doesn't always quite nail it), they are eye catching, having been nicely rendered through what I assume to be a Photoshop filter and other such touch-ups, with possibly more (I'm not a great judge of photoshopping).
They're quite effective at drawing you into the story, and they're quite effective at capturing the noir feel of the entire game. James McCaffrey is sublime as the gritty, wearied voice of Max, shaping him into a compelling protagonist.
Stolen from Wikipedia!Graphics:
Outside of cutscenes, graphics are...well. Max Payne was released in 2001 (there seems to be a bit of contradiction as to when the PS2/Xbox versions came out, but I thought I'd let you know anyway that there was a PS2 and Xbox version). The visuals are not bad by any stretch, but they are dated. Character models are a little blocky and are somewhat reminiscent of the GTA III trilogy's models. Max's head is tauntingly squared, as if a cruel mathemagician cursed him prior to the events of the game.
Um. Yeah.To be fair, I did play through the entire game on an older graphics card, and had everything on medium. But going back now, not a huge improvement on High settings. And, since I did play it on the PC, I have no idea how the PS2/Xbox visuals compare.
In short, you'll probably notice the graphics, but if you put down the game because of them, in spite of what the game has to offer (and in spite of them not being particularly awful), you are a cur.
Holy fuck!! Are you okay, dude?Gameplay:
Max Payne is a third-person shooter. You run around with nice, tight controls, with the only off-putting thing being Max's odd/realistic ability to jump, which tellingly pegs him as a white man. In fact, now that I think about it, even allowing Max to jump seems like an afterthought, and I only recall maybe one or two times when it's useful or required, not including the secret area in the tutorial (which is itself a little weird).
More importantly, Max carries an arsenal of guns in his fifth dimensional pocket (or maybe it's just a really good trenchcoat), once again showing that raw badassery beats out cybernetic enhancement in the "carrying enough guns" department.
My only real complaint with the bullet-spraying penis metaphors is that they seem a bit unbalanced. Dual Berettas, provided you consistently get headshots (hard to not do with mouse look), always seemed like a better choice than the slow-firing Desert Eagle. The Pump-Action Shotgun was good for mowing guys down in close quarters, but I never saw the need for the Sawed-Off. And, once you got the Assault Rifle, there was barely ever a time where you'll need anything else.
Part of this is likely due to the enemy design. Rather annoyingly, whenever a gun is wielded by an enemy, it does about twice as much damage to you than vis versa. This is probably worse on the higher difficulty levels. Max, being Max, packed all the guns but not the body armor. D'oh!
What Max does have is a Max-imum (har har! put a bullet to me!) of nine bottles of Painkillers that he munches down whenever necessary to heal. However, the pills are not a substitute for magical insta-heal health kits of the future; the pills take some time to actually kill the pain, which means that they're not really all that great for in-combat heal-ups. This also has the unfortunate side-effect of occasionally forcing the player to wait to heal before moving onto the next room full of mooks.
Said army of mooks sitting between Max and his goal packed a more balanced set of equipment that morning, however, leading to the later levels feeling extremely unfair as you struggle to line up headshots while taking heavy fire by guys in kevlar, sometimes wielding fucking grenade launchers.
The AI doesn't help, as all the enemies seem to have the reflexes of a cyborg, immediately supplementing you with lead if you so much as peek out from a doorway. Later in the game, where goons are wielding the Assault Rifles, Sniper Rifles, and yes, the fucking Grenade Launchers, it really felt like a crapshoot whether or not I'd survive a given encounter, leading to save game abuse.
The one leg-up on the mah-sheens that Max has is everyone's favorite cliche, bullet time. But! Max Payne was one of the first to actually have this space-time continuum-warping element, and it uses it for a clear stylistic reason, rather than just for the hell of it.
Though, somewhat oddly, the true "Bullet-Time Mode" never really did much for me, since it slows the entire game down, even Max, leading to me slow-moing my face into an already-fired bullet or simply being unable to dodge properly when Max is so sluggish to control.
Similarly, basic dodging is clunky and dubiously useful, performed by holding down the jump button and moving in any direction but forward, something that I rarely had time to consider in the middle of combat. The dodge controls (outside of changing the jump button) aren't even re-bindable, but there's still one good use for dodges:
Max Payne will return in Max Payne 2: Electric Boogaloo
The true fun is in the unstable, violent lovechild of Bullet-Time and Dodging, the "Slow-Mo Dodge" (aka Shootdodge, according to the options) where Max can dodge (read: dramatically dive) in any direction while slowing down time. This is where the real game is, as, perhaps a bit unwisely, the Slo-Mo Dodge only costs a small piece of Max's hourglass meter. One of my favorite maneuvers is dodging straight backwards and shooting a line of lead into a goon's face before he can even fire.
It's abusable as all heck, but damn if it isn't entertaining. After all, isn't that what action movies are about...?
Wait what? Action movie? Yup. To quote Wikipedia, out of laziness and to prevent being accused of stealing from it, "Max Payne is heavily influenced by the Hong Kong action cinema genre, particularly the work of director John Woo, as well as hard-boiled detective novels by authors like Mickey Spillane."
Max Payne is a gritty tale of revenge and sorrow overlaid atop a solid foundation of balls-to-the-wall action movie bullet trading (with a sprinkling of yummy Norse mythology for good measure). There's even a dramatic bullet-eye's-view (if the bullet's eye was somewhere vaguely above and behind it, I suppose) when you use the Sniper Rifle to splatter some poor bastards brains out, though this moment is occasionally spoiled by bad surface clipping, leading you to heroically propel a bullet into a piece of railing or a buggy corner. And then get blown up by a fucking Grenade Launcher.
Hey, who are those guys way up there?
Circled: guys with fucking grenade launchers.
Fuuuuuuuuck!
The game is also delightfully filled with moments when you can overhear various guards shoot the shit, usually about action movies if I recall, including a serious conversation about bullet-time. This is something that I wish more developers would make use of, as it's always funny or interesting.
Final Thoughts/Price:
But alright, enough about heralding the game as the second coming of Steve (not good enough to be Jesus, I'm afraid), how much does it cost?
On Steam (and elsewhere, but I'd rather not give them the business), it costs a mere $9.99, or, even better, the Max Payne Bundle, which includes the second game as well, for only $14.99. The games are also part of the Rockstar Collection but that's a bit excessive, in my opinion. I'm unsure how much the PS2 or Xbox version is, but I'd expect it to comparable in price by now, even better if used.
I'd definitely pick it up. While rough around the edges, Max Payne is damn fun, and from what I've played thusfar of the sequel, that's worth the money too.
These awesome people made Max Payne awesome.
Max Payne is a third-person shooter. You run around with nice, tight controls, with the only off-putting thing being Max's odd/realistic ability to jump, which tellingly pegs him as a white man. In fact, now that I think about it, even allowing Max to jump seems like an afterthought, and I only recall maybe one or two times when it's useful or required, not including the secret area in the tutorial (which is itself a little weird).
More importantly, Max carries an arsenal of guns in his fifth dimensional pocket (or maybe it's just a really good trenchcoat), once again showing that raw badassery beats out cybernetic enhancement in the "carrying enough guns" department.
My only real complaint with the bullet-spraying penis metaphors is that they seem a bit unbalanced. Dual Berettas, provided you consistently get headshots (hard to not do with mouse look), always seemed like a better choice than the slow-firing Desert Eagle. The Pump-Action Shotgun was good for mowing guys down in close quarters, but I never saw the need for the Sawed-Off. And, once you got the Assault Rifle, there was barely ever a time where you'll need anything else.
Part of this is likely due to the enemy design. Rather annoyingly, whenever a gun is wielded by an enemy, it does about twice as much damage to you than vis versa. This is probably worse on the higher difficulty levels. Max, being Max, packed all the guns but not the body armor. D'oh!
What Max does have is a Max-imum (har har! put a bullet to me!) of nine bottles of Painkillers that he munches down whenever necessary to heal. However, the pills are not a substitute for magical insta-heal health kits of the future; the pills take some time to actually kill the pain, which means that they're not really all that great for in-combat heal-ups. This also has the unfortunate side-effect of occasionally forcing the player to wait to heal before moving onto the next room full of mooks.
Said army of mooks sitting between Max and his goal packed a more balanced set of equipment that morning, however, leading to the later levels feeling extremely unfair as you struggle to line up headshots while taking heavy fire by guys in kevlar, sometimes wielding fucking grenade launchers.
The AI doesn't help, as all the enemies seem to have the reflexes of a cyborg, immediately supplementing you with lead if you so much as peek out from a doorway. Later in the game, where goons are wielding the Assault Rifles, Sniper Rifles, and yes, the fucking Grenade Launchers, it really felt like a crapshoot whether or not I'd survive a given encounter, leading to save game abuse.
The one leg-up on the mah-sheens that Max has is everyone's favorite cliche, bullet time. But! Max Payne was one of the first to actually have this space-time continuum-warping element, and it uses it for a clear stylistic reason, rather than just for the hell of it.
Though, somewhat oddly, the true "Bullet-Time Mode" never really did much for me, since it slows the entire game down, even Max, leading to me slow-moing my face into an already-fired bullet or simply being unable to dodge properly when Max is so sluggish to control.
Similarly, basic dodging is clunky and dubiously useful, performed by holding down the jump button and moving in any direction but forward, something that I rarely had time to consider in the middle of combat. The dodge controls (outside of changing the jump button) aren't even re-bindable, but there's still one good use for dodges:
Max Payne will return in Max Payne 2: Electric BoogalooThe true fun is in the unstable, violent lovechild of Bullet-Time and Dodging, the "Slow-Mo Dodge" (aka Shootdodge, according to the options) where Max can dodge (read: dramatically dive) in any direction while slowing down time. This is where the real game is, as, perhaps a bit unwisely, the Slo-Mo Dodge only costs a small piece of Max's hourglass meter. One of my favorite maneuvers is dodging straight backwards and shooting a line of lead into a goon's face before he can even fire.
It's abusable as all heck, but damn if it isn't entertaining. After all, isn't that what action movies are about...?
Wait what? Action movie? Yup. To quote Wikipedia, out of laziness and to prevent being accused of stealing from it, "Max Payne is heavily influenced by the Hong Kong action cinema genre, particularly the work of director John Woo, as well as hard-boiled detective novels by authors like Mickey Spillane."
Max Payne is a gritty tale of revenge and sorrow overlaid atop a solid foundation of balls-to-the-wall action movie bullet trading (with a sprinkling of yummy Norse mythology for good measure). There's even a dramatic bullet-eye's-view (if the bullet's eye was somewhere vaguely above and behind it, I suppose) when you use the Sniper Rifle to splatter some poor bastards brains out, though this moment is occasionally spoiled by bad surface clipping, leading you to heroically propel a bullet into a piece of railing or a buggy corner. And then get blown up by a fucking Grenade Launcher.
Hey, who are those guys way up there?
Circled: guys with fucking grenade launchers.
Fuuuuuuuuck!The game is also delightfully filled with moments when you can overhear various guards shoot the shit, usually about action movies if I recall, including a serious conversation about bullet-time. This is something that I wish more developers would make use of, as it's always funny or interesting.
Final Thoughts/Price:
But alright, enough about heralding the game as the second coming of Steve (not good enough to be Jesus, I'm afraid), how much does it cost?
On Steam (and elsewhere, but I'd rather not give them the business), it costs a mere $9.99, or, even better, the Max Payne Bundle, which includes the second game as well, for only $14.99. The games are also part of the Rockstar Collection but that's a bit excessive, in my opinion. I'm unsure how much the PS2 or Xbox version is, but I'd expect it to comparable in price by now, even better if used.
I'd definitely pick it up. While rough around the edges, Max Payne is damn fun, and from what I've played thusfar of the sequel, that's worth the money too.
These awesome people made Max Payne awesome.
