What should be a fairly routine call gets quickly out of hand as Max hears shots fired within the warehouse. The normal shadow mapping of the previous title is gone now, replaced by better defined, more dynamic shadows. With street lights all around, we also get a look at the game's new radiosity effects. The car Max arrives in, a white sedan, has a sheen on it that you can only get by applying forty coats of Turtle Wax. Surmising that at night things look better if they're wet, Remedy has showered the level with rain that shines in puddles on the street. In the parking lot behind the warehouse, we get our first glimpse of some of the new effects in the game. The first chapter, Elevator Doors, begins as Max responds to a disturbance call at one of Vladimir Lem's warehouses. He's so upset that he's managed to come out so clean after getting his hands so dirty that he leaves the DEA and rejoins the police force. In keeping with his masochistic tendencies, Max admits that he'd wanted to be punished for his previous actions. Max has become considerably less than gruntled with the outcome of the previous game. ![]() After a brief prologue the story opens with Part One, The Darkness Inside. We've tried to avoid spoilers here but the preview does focus on a few of the story points that come up very early in the game. After the initial level demos were finished, we had the chance to see a few engine tests as well. The team from Rockstar played through the first two levels of the game for us and highlighted many of the improvements and additions that have been made since we last saw the title. After a recent demo of the game here in San Francisco, we've managed to uncover a few new bits of information about the game's story and technology. And considering that "Marky Mark," Ludacris, and Nelly Furtado are all in this cast, I wonder if Max Payne might have worked better as a musical. But aside from accepting the role in the first place, I can't fault him or any of the other actors-well, except perhaps the laughably awful performance from Beau Bridges. Night Shymalan's recent bomb, The Happening. Payne is played by Mark Wahlberg, whose career has taken a serious nosedive between this and M. In a world where visuals rule and moviemaking budgets are tight, director John Moore (responsible for the slightly less atrocious Behind Enemy Lines and pointless remakes of The Omen and Flight of the Phoenix) and the filmmakers apparently felt that the movie could get by on the "strength" of its dramatic storytelling. And with virtually no action for the first hour of the film, it's a tediously paced action film at that. What does that leave? A clichéd cop action movie based on a game about cop action movie clichés. Yet as stylish and fun as the storytelling and game-play were, with a tongue-in-cheek name like Max Payne, the game was clearly an homage to action classics rather than a serious story.Īs a movie, the game is gone, and with it, surprisingly, most of the action. It played like a graphic novel heavily influenced by action movie clichés, particularly John Woo films and The Matrix with its nifty ability to slow down time, leaping with guns blazing while dodging the enemy's bullets. As a video game, Max Payne was fairly groundbreaking for its time, offering a cool, but gritty crime noir about a New York City cop driven to the edge by the murder of his family.
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