Crucially, aiming is still done in real time, which provides an important tactical advantage in some of the more intense firefights. With the tap of a button, you can shoot goons in slow motion or execute a slow-motion dive in any direction while shooting. While ostensibly a typical third-person action shooter with an arsenal of single and dual-wielded pistols, rifles, grenades, and other destructive paraphernalia, Max Payne set itself apart from its contemporaries with a bullet time mechanic. The enthusiasm spills over into the gameplay. You can almost see it in the way Max is animated to jog lightly down corridors and snowy alleyways, leather jacket billowing open behind him despite the worst blizzard in the cityвЂ™s history. There is a hint of it in MaxвЂ™s violently scrunched up eyebrows or his cynical half-smile, which were based on photographs of writer Sam LakeвЂ™s face. You can feel the youthful enthusiasm and exuberance of a crime and noir fiction enthusiast. In short, despite every effort to stay gritty and grounded, it is willfully over the top. There is even an all-encompassing conspiracy that ultimately gives a motive for the killing of MaxвЂ™s family and paints a target for his revenge. There are evil mobsters with unconvincing Jersey accents that could have been extras in The Sopranos. There is a вЂњmandatoryвЂќ capture-and-escape level seen previously in Half-Life, Deus Ex, and others. Films of the era had popularized nonlinear storytelling, including Pulp Fiction, Fight Club, and Memento, and Max Payne starts with the ending, more or less completely stripped of context for maximum dramatic effect. The story is a greatest hits of crime and noir staples, from the maverick cop archetype of Inspector вЂњTequilaвЂќ Yuen in John WooвЂ™s Hard Boiled, to the double and triple crosses seen in Raymond ChandlerвЂ™s The Big Sleep (both sources that Max explicitly references in his monologues). Either way, itвЂ™s an excuse for some of the most joyfully ridiculous metaphors and one-liners ever committed to a video game script вЂ“ numerous puns on MaxвЂ™s preposterous name, for example, or the deadpan delivery of phrases as absurd as, вЂњI donвЂ™t know about angels, but itвЂ™s fear that gives men wings.вЂќ The narration is so heavy with purple prose that itвЂ™s unclear whether to treat it as a parody of hard-boiled crime and noir fiction or an overly earnest attempt to be part of that canon.

The assignment leads him on a bloody climb through the hierarchy of New YorkвЂ™s mobster families, narrated with pitch-perfect sourness by James McCaffrey and delivered through a mix of graphic novel-style panels, in-engine cutscenes, and gameplay voice-over. Max Payne is a self-proclaimed вЂњman with nothing to lose,вЂќ a young New York ex-cop who deliberately takes a dangerous undercover assignment with the Drug Enforcement Agency after his wife and baby are murdered by junkies high on a new drug. And yet it remains one of the most impressive sophomore efforts from a young studio and one of the standout games from the era.

There is a strange brew of youthful naivety and borderline sociopathy in a narrative replete with tropes and clichГ©s, while the gameplay trades on the cultural zeitgeist established by The Matrix two years earlier. Going back to it now, particularly in light of its sequels and legacy, feels like picking up a piece of the industry preserved in amber. Max Payne will celebrate its 20th anniversary next month.

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