Loved this game when it came out. It's bizarre how the player in the gameplay vid barely uses the bullet time. When I played it, that was the whole point of the game!
I didn't watch that video... yeah, that's more like it. Maybe we didn't dive around all the time, but you never ran around a corner if you could slow-mo dive while shooting instead! It's a pit the gimmick wore out and never really came back in a meaningful way. There was the John Woo game, Stranglehold, but it wasn't great. A lot of games still use slow motion action. But nothing quite replicated Max Payne 1 and 2 (haven't played 3).
This felt like a step away from the usual kinds of games you cover, in a fun way. Got a solid sense not just of how the game played but how the overall narrative of it feels from reading this.
I have stacks of games from this gen I really need to spend more time with on this newsletter, but sometimes I end up stuck going back through time to the beginning of a genre/style/etc. and can't escape that. Which is why I've been planning to write about Virtua Racing for like, a year now.
I've been revisiting Max Payne 3 and this was fun to read. I miss the Remedy-ness in 3 but overall it's much more of a polished game.
Also important that most shooting games before this didn't have projectiles as bullets - it was mostly hit-scanners. Max Payne was ahead of its time and aspects of it aged rather well like you said. I played it over and over in 2001 and glad we are still talking about it.
Oh that's a cool bit of info re: projectiles vs. hit scanners. The sniper rifle slo-mo makes even more sense now in terms of why they'd emphasize it that way other than "it looks cool"
Hope you get to Max Payne 2 eventually! The two of them are some of my favorite games and it was really fun to read such a fresh (and thankfully-for-my-nostalgia positive) perspective.
The gameplay holds up, even two decades later.
Loved this game when it came out. It's bizarre how the player in the gameplay vid barely uses the bullet time. When I played it, that was the whole point of the game!
I ended up putting in that other gameplay video where they arguably overuse bullet time just to compensate for that!
I didn't watch that video... yeah, that's more like it. Maybe we didn't dive around all the time, but you never ran around a corner if you could slow-mo dive while shooting instead! It's a pit the gimmick wore out and never really came back in a meaningful way. There was the John Woo game, Stranglehold, but it wasn't great. A lot of games still use slow motion action. But nothing quite replicated Max Payne 1 and 2 (haven't played 3).
Thanks for the reply!
This felt like a step away from the usual kinds of games you cover, in a fun way. Got a solid sense not just of how the game played but how the overall narrative of it feels from reading this.
I have stacks of games from this gen I really need to spend more time with on this newsletter, but sometimes I end up stuck going back through time to the beginning of a genre/style/etc. and can't escape that. Which is why I've been planning to write about Virtua Racing for like, a year now.
I've been revisiting Max Payne 3 and this was fun to read. I miss the Remedy-ness in 3 but overall it's much more of a polished game.
Also important that most shooting games before this didn't have projectiles as bullets - it was mostly hit-scanners. Max Payne was ahead of its time and aspects of it aged rather well like you said. I played it over and over in 2001 and glad we are still talking about it.
Oh that's a cool bit of info re: projectiles vs. hit scanners. The sniper rifle slo-mo makes even more sense now in terms of why they'd emphasize it that way other than "it looks cool"
Hope you get to Max Payne 2 eventually! The two of them are some of my favorite games and it was really fun to read such a fresh (and thankfully-for-my-nostalgia positive) perspective.
Thanks! Glad you enjoyed. I've got Max Payne 2 (on Xbox as well) ready to go at some point. I'll probably get to it later in the year.