Thirith on 5/11/2019 at 22:06
I bounced off of the first Max Payne several times but I loved the second one. The third I enjoyed a fair bit, more so than what I played of Max Payne, but it's the second one that's close to my heart.
Sulphur on 6/11/2019 at 07:16
MP2 is Remedy's best work 'til date, really. It's got a balance of everything. I think I'd like MP3 more if it wasn't a Max Payne game, because the burden of expectation it shoulders is too great, and it's too fundamentally a different take on the detective noir absurdism of the first two. To me the larger problem is that it dispenses with the noir and symbolism in favour of hard-edged action moviemaking, and it doesn't have a plot so much as a breadcrumb trail of reasons to visit flashy locations and fuck them up.
And yes, I know what I'm saying here, but the biggest offender is that it has exactly none of Sam Lake's noir-flecked purple prose. I can't believe I'd ever admit to myself that I miss it, but... yeah. MP3 didn't have anything to fill in that void, and it shows.
Starker on 6/11/2019 at 10:57
Quote:
The rain was comin' down like all the angels in heaven decided to take a piss at the same time. When you're in a situation like mine, you can only think in metaphors.
They do try to have some in the third game, but it falls flat, because exactly none of it resonates or makes a lot of sense. Max has very little reason to really get invested in any of the locations or any of the people or wax poetic about his situation. And he has little personal reason to get pissed off about his antagonists or get angry about the organ trafficking.
In the first games, everything he did was tied to him or his past or people close to him. There was a goal driving him towards the conclusion and there were stakes in the whole confrontation. It was personal, intensely so. With Nicole Horne, it was personal, with Vlad it was personal. In the third game, the special forces guy and the politician brother are just some bad guys you could find anywhere.
Thirith on 6/11/2019 at 13:13
For me, Max Payne 2 was the pinnacle of that kind of Paynery. The first game felt like an imperfect prototype, the second perfected it. If they'd done a third game along those lines, I think the risk of repeating themselves, just louder and bigger, would've been considerable. As such, I think I appreciated Max Payne 3 as a flawed but IMO interesting way of taking the character and how he inhabits the world, and putting him in a different world with some of the same themes and motifs. If I'd been a fan of the first game, I might've been more annoyed with what it left behind.
Sulphur on 6/11/2019 at 14:55
Hard disagree on 'interesting' take. It's clearly influenced/inspired by Man on Fire, which is what I meant when I said I'd like it more if it wasn't a Max Payne game. It's perfectly serviceable as a generic adaptation.
A more typical sequel could be drawing from an empty well, true, but subverting the series' themes and characters still has mileage in terms of making Max face himself in a mirror and NOT do the misplaced revenge arc/shaving his hair off/all the other tropey hardboiled cop fiction bits MP3 went with but thematically made no sense given Max's history.
The thing about Payne is, like Starker said, it's personal. I'd also add that it's intensely weird as fuck, thematically and psychologically, and there's lots more to mine there, with a finality that doesn't have to hew towards MP3's unearned, on the nose retirement plan.
Thirith on 6/11/2019 at 15:11
Perhaps it helps that I haven't seen Man on Fire. If I did watch it, I'd probably think it's a generic Max Payne 3 rip-off. :p
icemann on 6/11/2019 at 15:30
Well it's like Jacob's Ladder with Silent Hill 2.
Sulphur on 6/11/2019 at 17:23
Quote Posted by Thirith
Perhaps it helps that I haven't seen
Man on Fire. If I did watch it, I'd probably think it's a generic
Max Payne 3 rip-off. :p
Cute, but no cigar. The series' thematic throughline remains ever so gently fucked in the arse, ipso facto I reject this [bad] ad hoc hypothesis.
j/k agree to disagree :cool:
Thirith on 6/11/2019 at 19:55
I'm not sure there's anything there to agree or disagree with, because all I'm talking about is personal impressions. There's no overall theory or interpretation behind it. As I wrote before, I bounced off of Max Payne. I started it several times but it never pulled me in, so I can't say anything about the series' throughline, because I never got far enough with Max Payne to be able to say much about its themes or its version of Max. And what I found interesting about Max Payne was mainly that, Man on Fire pastiche or not, the environments it presents us with were different from the vast majority of game environments I'd visited, and being able to walk through a place, look at it, observe how it's done, that's something I enjoy in games. I would also say that while obviously MP3's environment is much less open than other Rockstar games, it still felt more cohesive and less like just a themepark ride than, say, the levels of pretty much any Call of Duty at the time. And I bought the version of Max that I saw as a possible development of the Max in the second game, while pretty much fully ignorant of Max in the original game. But yes, I didn't find Max Payne 3 interesting in the way that I found Max Payne 2 interesting, because that game was idiosyncratic, unique, and it sang in a way that no other Remedy game has for me. (I have a dislike for Alan Wake that is stronger than I fully understand.)
Starker on 6/11/2019 at 20:49
Quote Posted by Sulphur
The thing about Payne is, like Starker said, it's personal. I'd also add that it's intensely
weird as fuck, thematically and psychologically, and there's lots more to mine there, with a finality that doesn't have to hew towards MP3's unearned, on the nose retirement plan.
Yeah, the originals play the noir angle to the hilt. You have all the classic beats -- a hard-boiled detective down on this luck, a grimy crime-infested city, rain-soaked streets, ambiguous morality, a femme fatale, doppelgängers, pithy one-liners, weird angles, flashbacks, a non-linear narrative, unhappy endings etc. Everything and everyone is filtered through noir -- the places, the characters, the dialogue, Max's inner monologue, the weird series you can catch on TV (screens within screens is another classic noir thing)...
The third game has some of the trappings of noir but it's there without any rhyme or reason and none of it feels like it fits. I haven't been to the real São Paulo, but as far as the game is concerned, palm trees, football, tropical weather, and funk don't exactly scream noir to me. I also haven't seen Man on Fire, but it very heavily gave me the vibes of action movies like Die Hard and Lethal Weapon.
Personally, I felt that the third game was simply unnecessary. Max had already come to a full arc when the second game ended with him being able to let go of the past and forgive himself. Making him wallow in misery and self-loathing again felt gratuitous rather than poignant.