Video Games : Max Payne

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from: Rockstar Games

: Max Payne
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Price: $14.60
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Amazon Maximum Age: 20 years
Amazon Minimum Age: 204 months
Binding: CD-ROM
Brand: Rockstar Games
EAN: 0710425212062
ESRB Age Rating: Mature
Format: CD-ROM
Label: Rockstar Games
Manufacturer: Rockstar Games
Publisher: Rockstar Games
Release Date: July 26, 2001
Sales Rank: 3452
Studio: Rockstar Games

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Editorial Review:

Product Description:
Max Payne is the game where your life has fallen apart in a New York minute, and you have to get revenge before you can move on.

Amazon.com Review:
Max Payne, the New York police detective, has had a bad time of it recently, and it's time for payback. Three years ago, junkies high on a mysterious new narcotic called Valkyr slaughtered his wife and child. The tragedy drives him on a prolonged path of vengeance. It turns him from a detective looking for easy work to a deep undercover vice cop infiltrating the Mob to a hardened vigilante. Max Payne is a film-noir-inspired game about revenge that is unflinching in every way possible. It's dark and moody, extremely twisted, and turns PC action gaming on its ear by featuring state-of-the-art graphics, audio, and cinematic action.

Aside from its inspired use of photorealistic graphics and unique graphic novel (comic book) panels to further the plot, the game also features something called Bullet Time: a slow-motion toggle, usable for a limited time, that re-creates the awe-inspiring diving maneuvers made popular by director John Woo and, of course, The Matrix. At the touch of a button, Max can go into slow motion and leap forwards or back, and side to side, while pumping generous amounts of lead into his enemy's bodies. This toggle isn't just eye candy, it's a strategic device that evens the sometimes staggering odds the game throws at you. The action is made even more visceral by the interactive environments (glass shatters, plaster puffs into dust, and wood splinters) and generous amounts of blood.

The game carries a Mature label, and this should be taken very seriously. The game doesn't pull a single punch, whether in flashbacks showing Max's reaction to his gunned-down spouse, or even, somewhat tastelessly, flashbacks that include his slain infant daughter. And he mows down a virtual army of hackneyed Joe Pesci-style Italian mobsters or ski-mask-wearing terrorists with extreme prejudice. The plot is predictable, the script is humorously bad (intentionally so?), but the action will definitely make a shooter fan drool. Max Payne is the übershooter, and as such, it should be kept out of the hands of kids. But mature action fans will love it. --Andrew S. Bub

Pros: Cons:

Amazon.com Product Description:
Remedy and 3D Realms present Max Payne, a story-driven 3rd person action game aimed for a mature audience. Realistic weapon setup includes over a dozen real-life guns, all fitting the crime-story setting like a bullet in the head. The action is surrounded with more than 80 hand-painted comic-screens that enhance the game's gritty atmosphere and attitude, introduce the game's murderous cast of characters, and carry the plot from one location to the next.



Customer Reviews
Average Rating: out of 5 stars

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars - Gritty aesthetics don't completely hide the straightforward gameplay
Max Payne got immense praise when it was first released; PC gamer gave it a whopping 95%.Perhaps at the time it was easy to hail it's features. Many graphic features were excellent for the time. The graphic novel cutscenes. And (of course) the bullet time feature.

Looking back at it though I think that 95% is surely too generous a score. It has some serious flaws to gameplay. Firstly the structure is almost entirely linear (In fact as far
as I know it is entirely linear but I've only played it once) After a few levels gameplay becomes quite predictable. You *know* that there are going to be bad guys lurking around, if
not that corner, then probably the next one. And unlike some games, like say, Thief, there isn't any way of telling they're around until you run into them. There is no lean feature
and you can't run while crouched meaning that your only option is to either charge in guns
blazing, or use the bullet time to slow things down. However the bullet time isn't quite as
helpful as you may imagine. Certainly with the sniper scope it gives you a valuable edge,
but with a room full of 3 or 4 enemies it's often just as effective to charge in, keep
moving about to present yourself as a difficult target and aim for headshots. (You'll never
run out of ammunition in this game) The game soon becomes a fairly routine exercise in
clearing rooms of bad guys (who usually say old cliched gangster type things like "Ice him!"
and finding an exit to the level. There is no tactical subtlety at all in the game except for the bullet time feature. I might also point out that the game features one of the worst
grenade implementations I've seen. Only one throw range and a puzzlingly small blast radius. Throwing a grenade into a room will most often merely result in enemies escaping unhurt and rushing out of the room to shoot you while you're switching weapons.


One thing that you'll either love or hate (or at least like or dislike) is the whole idea of the graphic novel cutscenes. Various important points in the game will trigger off a comic
book style cutscene with a cynical world weary voice over from Max Payne. Although I can see why this might add atmosphere tot he game and appeal to a lot of people I personally grew a
bit tired of the constant stop-start pace of the game. Those looking for constant action will be disappointed.


On the positive side though the plot is genuinely engaging and I found myself wanting to
finish a level if only to see what the next plot twist was. However even this was spoiled somewhat by the stupid names of the characters, all to obvious play on words; even the main character "Max Payne". It's groan worthy more than anything else.
Special mention too must go to the fact that this game models vertical dimensions well. It's
rare to find a game that features more than 2 or 3 elevation changes, but by the end of the game you'll find yourself in a New York skyscraper 50 stories high having to edge along the
outside. Looking down at the city beneath you is liable to produce some palpable vertigo!

So, yes I think this is a 3rd person good adventure, and worth buying. But for all it's noirish style the actual gameplay is all pretty straightforward a lot of the time.


Rating: 1 out of 5 stars - biggest shame of the gaming industry ever.
this game came out half a decade ago. reviews on it stopped shortly afterwords. but to this day, i get enraged when i think about my awful experience in this game. coming to this review out of mild curiosity, and seeing the fossilized brainless fanboy droolings from 6 years ago in it, is the last straw.

in the name of the forces of light (and my seething resentment), i am digging up this games festering corpse, in order to properly ***** **** it into hell, where it belongs.

this, is the worst game ever made. to merely call it a bad game, would be like saying that getting stuck in a time warp in which you dying in a fiery, flying scrap metally 50 MPH car crash, once every 5 seconds, again and again, forever, is merely an unpleasant experience.

there have been many bad games made over the years. but this one would headshot all of those other bad games in 2 seconds flat. which happens to be the only type of combat that ever came from it.

not only did this game have nothing worth **** going for it, but it was full of irritation, pointlessness, boredom, depression, false promises, and some far more sinister offense against the mind, which was never distinct enough to identify. similar to something you might read in a lovecraft novel. only lovecraft would never have dared to traumatize the world with a book based off of this game.

the graphics were not good. they were depressing. they made me hate large cities even more than i already hate them. the graphics had the emotional effect of being swallowed alive, digested, and then passed by one of the band members of "emo".

if you want "graphics", than stop hounding game developers for them. look at a picture book instead. or, if you want to match this game to the mental development level that would find it interesting to play, a hello kitty coloring book.

the primary playstyle offered by this game, was to get you to reload the game as many times as possible. by being killed as swiftly and cheaply as possible. in a wide variety of infuriating, underhanded, downright smelly methods.

opponents that always know exactly where you are at all times, AND who possess the accuracy to almost always make a headshot against you? ESPECIALLY when you are up close to them, and their field of vision in which to see you, let alone accuratly aim at you, is supposed to be at its most limited?
and that is not when the opponent magicly materializes out of places where they have no reason to be. or places that they are not supposed to know to be, at just that EXACT moment in time. not that you could see them coming anyway, in the depressing darkness of this ultra-scripted combat, meat shredder game that you are being fed into.

opponents are not supposed to violently burst through windows and closed elevator doors, land on the ground, stabilize their center of gravity, get their bearing on their surroundings, notice you standing 5 feet away from them, aim at your exact location, and make a perfect head shot on you, ALL IN 1.5 SECONDS! and even if they could do it once (lame), then they are not supposed to do it OVER AND OVER AGAIN, LIKE CLOCKWORK! (ultra lame).

the 2 main things that the developers were doing over the 4 years of development, was watching porn (likely snuff films, if their game development style is any indicator), and inventing ******** ways to kill you. they certainly didn't spend 4 years working on the boring, pointless storyline, the ultra-brainless maps, the non-existant strategy use in the game, or that moronic excuse of a game feature called "bullet time" (after 10 mintues of playing, i re-named it "cheat time". because it ammounted to cheating against the computer. and it wasn't even cheating that gave you much of an advantage, because your opponents STILL had that ******* godlike awareness, flawless accuracy, and in some cases the hitpoints of 3 elephants which were all high on speed).

this game was about as enjoyable as working at a customer service station, at which you take abusive, stressful calls from angry customers all day.
accept such a job wouldn't be as tedious as playing this game (not as much pointless button pressing or endless savegame reloading), would involve more strategy than this game (defusing angry customers), involve more mental capacity than this game (listening skills and conflict resoluation skills), be more entertaining than this game (you could play with a pen and paperclips while you are being screamed at), be more educational than this game (you might learn new methods of insulting other people), be less mentally traumatizing than this game (the customers can merely yell at you. they cannot kill you from out of nowhere every 5 seconds, hundreds of times, like these opponents), and would compensate you for your time with a paycheck (you could eat at a restaurant with friends who don't **** you the **** off like this game does).

now as for YOU, reading this on your computer screen. if you thought that this was a good game, than you are a prime candidate for sterilization. your vile, easily amused, unthinking kind is directly responsible for the encouragment of truely horrible games like this filthy creature of the abyss. as long as subhumans like you are in a position to influence game development companies (and the penny pinching investment entities which practicly tell them how to make their games thse days), software atrocities like max payne will stay an ever present threat in the practicly dead PC gaming market. infact, scum like you are DIRECTLY RESPONSIBLE for the dark age of PC gaming which we are currently in, and will likely never recover from ever again.

so, to summarize my graffiti on the tombstone of this great satan of all games:

the forces of evil won control of the PC platform, it is all your fault you empty-headed *****, get yourself sterilized for the good of all mankind.

* and then max payne 3 was released. and the world ended as a direct result *


Rating: 5 out of 5 stars - Why you should by Max Payne
Max Payne is a truly glorious game. The other reviews have what i want to say except this. He is always constipated. Just look at his face in those screen shots. CONSTIPATION. In number 2 he's got rid of that though. Anyway, stop reading reviews and buy it!


Rating: 1 out of 5 stars - Should have finished it and released it in 1999
Back when the game was started and developed, it was technologically way ahead of its time. Too bad that by the time it came out, other games with game engines like Max Payne's or even better were already out and dampened the already losing popularity. On top of it, the story finishes in a New York Minute so darn fast and then the interest in giving it another play is all sapped out. Would have been better if the story had been more dynamic rather than linear ! And don't count on the sequel to be any better as it copies another game engine to soup itself up barely !


Rating: 1 out of 5 stars - Started out ok and did get some traction but when the game's over, so is the fun
I didn't find myself coming back to the game as it got more boring after the first time. The tougher levels were not all that difficult either so I don't regret having bought a cheap and used copy and will be happy to sell mine and put this crap behind. Overall, the game's not worth the money and neither is the sequel. Don't let the liars and hypers mislead you on how really great either of the Max Paynes are. Get it cheap and used and see for yourself.

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