Alright, everything he's written so far has struck me as fruity and completely wrong. I can at least *see* how someone might have those opinions, in contrast to this:

'Interwoven with a realistic, compelling story, a postmodernist's sense of ironic wit and, even more startling, a strong moral tone, Max Payne is the kind of shooter that most gamers have been avoiding for years.'
.....
'But if the initial sales deluge holds up, Max Payne may be the one that finally advances the genre, and our expectations for it -- and in the process, it may be the game that finally forces the industry to grow up.'
.....
'I was disabused of that assumption pretty much the moment Max Payne began: As related in flashback, the New York detective returns to his New Jersey suburban home to find his life eviscerated. Upstairs, rage-high drug addicts are slaughtering his wife and child. While Max tries to save them, he's sobbing. This must be an industry first: While they've endured every variation of physical pain with scarcely a grunt, has there ever been another action protagonist struck with enough emotional trauma during gameplay to actually cry? I can't recall any.'

Jesus.

"'Interwoven with a realistic, compelling story, a postmodernist's sense of ironic wit and, even more startling, a strong moral tone, Max Payne is the kind of shooter that most gamers have been avoiding for years.'"

Oh baloney. Realistic? Compelling? Ironic wit? It's the gaming equivalent a bad B movie that goes straight to video starring some second rate actor along the lines of Dolph Lundgren. Sure, like any bad movie or novel, once you're in the middle of it you want to see how it comes out, but I'd hardly consider Max Payne to be any kind of watermarket of narrative in gaming.

I guess Au can't get a review placed at Salon unless it's sweeping and grandiose in tone.

Er, watermark. I hate typos like that.

I'll only support Au in one way. He's right about the crying character and the brutality of the slaughtered wife and child.

Since the narrative is so ham-handed though, that whole scene comes across less as tragic and more as offensive. Bad B movies don't usually have crying babies, and when they do they go beyond bad B movies and into dreck-land.

-Andrew

"Strong moral tone?" Geez. He's a friggin' vigilante. He's Charles Bronson cast in bits and bytes. Except Bronson can actually act.

I want some of what Au is smoking.

I love when someone says they liked the writing in Max Payne. They either love it because it is campy or whatever Au said, my brain hurts too much when I read him. The two camps should get together and maybe they could negate each others existence.

Chet

"I love when someone says they liked the writing in Max Payne."

I don't hate the writing. In fact I think it's funny at times, just because it's so over-the-top. Is it supposed to be serious? I can't imagine that it is. "The sun set with practiced bravado?" That's hilarious.

Actually, strike that. I've started to hate it with the second dream sequence. Yikes, those phone calls made me quit out.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: people expect too little from games. Any sort of talent gets overpraised. You want a good Noir game? Look at Grim Fandango. It wasn't just a riff on the cliches of the genre, with a bunch of bad metaphors that got annoying by Raymond Chandler's third novel. Most games that aspire to noir-dom (Max Payne being only the most recent) seem like a fake b&w episode of Hangin' With Mr. Cooper, with some precocious kid actor wearing a fedora and doing a bad Bogey.

The entire Tex Murphy series, for instance.

-Ron

I'm still torn on whether or not Max Payne was written by a bad writer trying to do a tribute to the hard boiled genre. Or a bad writer trying to parody it.

It adds up to the same thing... Ron, I personally thought those phone calls were the single best part of the game's writing. It was the only time I was 100% on the game's wavelength. Then, of course, the story began again.

-Andrew

I should also say that I didn't start playing Max Payne until after I had read over and over again about how bad the writing is. So, my expectations were very low.

"personally thought those phone calls were the single best part of the game's writing."

I just thought it was silly. I mean, that whole self-reflexive "protagonist recognizes his medium" thing got old a long time ago.

Then again, here I am semi-defending a noir parody and complaining about something being hackneyed.

-Ron

"I just thought it was silly. I mean, that whole self-reflexive "protagonist recognizes his medium" thing got old a long time ago."

True, but not in this genre. Everything in Max Payne is hackneyed but that kind of silly self-awareness was, oddly, refreshing. I don't think I've every seen anything that self-aware in noir.
Noir is almost always played too sincere. (I also don't think it's ever been done in a game before.)

-Andrew

Standard disclaimer, this thread is NOT referring to me.

- Alan "not related to WJ" Au

"Standard disclaimer, this thread is NOT referring to me."

It's not!? LOL, thanks Alan.

I had no idea and was wondering what was going to happen when *you* showed up: "Doesn't that Alan fella post here? These damn game reviewers have no shame!"

That's hilarious!!

Nah, the only person we say bad things about who actually hangs out here is Wumpus. Everyone else is pretty free from personal attacks. Well, most of the time.

I seem to recall Bub catching a pretty good ribbing from Tom now and again, but...

Au strikes me as a guy who's trying too hard to justify gaming to his snobby intellectual friends. He's looking, and seeing apparently, things in a game like Max Payne that lord knows aren't there.

And let me side with the "I hated the 'I'm in a videogame'" scene. Ugh.

The "I'm in a videogame" scene was just typical of the awful writing in the game.

I don't really think the game was trying to be a parody. If it was, it failed at that too.

I liked the "I'm in a video game scene" much in the same way I'd probably like it if someone from Days of our Lives (which my wife still watches) would turn to the camera and say: "Isn't this lame?", then wink, and then continue the story.

Sometimes when I'm in the living room and that show is on, I daydream about that actually happening. It makes me smile and giggle.

-Andrew

Yeah, but this assumes a certain measure of self awareness. I still can't figure out if Max Payne is serious (or more accurately seriously bad), a parody (and a bad one), referential noir (which it fails at), or what. That would be a problem.

If it were full of little self parodying moments, that wink to the camera might make sense. But considering your disturbance over the earlier baby scene, Bub, don't you find it... an unfortunate juxtaposition. "Hey look, let's exploit a crying baby for shock value, then make jokes later!"

You can't have it both ways...

Actually I found the baby thing so offensive I don't think any amount of jokes could have made it worse. When that scene happened, I smiled. It's the only time the story made me smile, so the memory of that scene is a happy one. It sort of gave me hope that maybe the writer was going to go off in a new trippy direction with the story. He didn't, of course, but I still remember smiling involuntarily during that scene.

You have to take your amusement where you can get it in Noir York, I guess.

(I understand completely what you mean by a juxtaposition and yes, looking at it that way, the scene does serve to further cheapen an already cheap story, and make the "wife-n-baby" thing all the more offensive)

-Andrew

What's surprising is that 3DRealms has already successfully done the parody angle with Duke Nukem. Of course they stole their best material from Sam Raimi and Evil Dead....

I don't get the "Max Payne is the kind of shooter that most gamers have been avoiding for years" part.

Avoiding HOW? Max Payne strikes me as EXACTLY the kind of game that "gamers" (meaning the minority of vocal gamers online and such, the hardcore) have been playing to death. You know, games with a decent idea for a story but poor execution in telling it. But lots of cool graphical shit happening every two seconds. And lots of canned, scripted interactivity.

Not that it makes Max Payne bad, but it's hardly evolutionary.

NOLF is the kind of shooter that gamers have been avoiding for years. And it's a damn shame.

What was with 3drealms trying to copyright the lines Duke Nukem said? It was a couple years ago, I remember reading the report on, hmm, Gamecenter I think, so I'd imagine it was legit.

But really, what was the deal with that? Considering they _did_ ripoff Sam Raimi and Evil Dead, I'd find it quite hard to believe that they thought they were ever going to get anywhere with that.

---

Quote:

NOLF is the kind of shooter that gamers have been avoiding for years. And it's a damn shame.

---

>the kind of shooter that most gamers have been avoiding for years

...and who's been avoiding shooters? It's a ridiculous, nonsensical statement. Gamers have been always commercially rewarded good shooters.

Stefan

"...and who's been avoiding shooters? It's a ridiculous, nonsensical statement"

Heh. My feelings exactly.

What is up with people getting all uppity over a crying baby in a video game? Sheesh. I would think that if a couple drugged up thugs were smashing around in a room with a baby and generally terrorizing the mother that the baby would, just hang with me here, cry. Whoa, what a stretch...

Besides, who F'in cares? It added atmosphere and a sense of urgency to the scene. That's all. Quit trying to read more into it than is there.

The game was meant to be fun with a little drama thrown in for spice. It not trying to engage you mentally like some flipped out Kubrik film. Geeezus.

When it comes right down to it the game was fun. I had a blast playing it and my only complaint would be I left the game wanting more. Was it worth 40 bucks? Yeah, sure it was. I have spent 40 bucks faster feeding my face with alcohol so lets put a little prespective on it shall we?

Jeff

"I would think that if a couple drugged up thugs were smashing around in a room with a baby and generally terrorizing the mother that the baby would, just hang with me here, cry. Whoa, what a stretch..."

No no.. the baby is killed. The level(s) clearly depict a toppled crib covered in blood. I don't believe that the scene shouldn't have been done, but I did find it disturbing. Which I'm sure, was the designers' purpose.

'Besides, who F'in cares? It added atmosphere and a sense of urgency to the scene. That's all. Quit trying to read more into it than is there.'

I agree, it's a good game if you're evaluating Max Payne on the "is it fun" scale. However, if you're using the Au SuperFruit evaluation method, where you a game's quality is only related to the deep metaphysical statements it makes about the nature of reality, then Max Payne is quite possibly the worst game ever made. Even Q-Bert was more existential. It had a better written plot, too - not having a plot is better than Payne.

Now that I think about it, Q-Bert was a really fucked up game. A furry, cursing orange thing without a mouth or arms and a cylinder for a nose doomed to "complete" geometric shapes by blessing them with his existence. After all, the pyramid isn't "real" and Q-Bert can't continue with his life until he "acknowledges" the current level by touching every square inch of it with his feet.

Throw in the subhuman, freakish "monsters" that attempt to prevent you from realizing the geometric world (their inferority is obvious: you are orange, and they are green and purple, not orange), and you could probably extract a doctoral thesis out of this thing. Doubtlessly the Randites would find deep meaning in it if you gave them a chance.

Apparently it has that freakish nose because originally missiles would shoot out of it.

>No no.. the baby is killed. The level(s) clearly depict a toppled crib covered in blood.

Not to mention that the entire game takes place three years after his wife and son's murder, after he had switched from being a cop to the DEA. And Max doesn't have a 3-yr old kid running around.

>Besides, who F'in cares?

Because EVERYONE knows that a baby's life is WORTH MORE than a grown-up person's. =)

>Let's quickly tack on System Shock, Terra Nova and System Shock 2 to that list. You might even be able to include Thief and Thief II.

Well, those are first-person games, but I have a hard time calling any of 'em "shooters." Even System Shock/SS2, in which you shoot things. Those are more like RPGs in my book, only since they're modern the weapons are naturally mostly guns. Still, part of their brilliance is that the game itself is too big to fit in one genre, or some wild hyperbole like that.

I still think they're far closer to shooters than RPGs. I never really liked seeing them lumped with RPGs because it implies a huge sprawling gameworld with lots of "stats" and "levelling" which really isn't the main point of Shock 1/2 or Terra Nova. They're simply shooters with a story, some added complexity and a lot more smarts in the design that reward alternative solutions or tactics.

But yeah, all of them are far beyond some silly genre definition. That's why they're just as valid in your context above because while NOLF has a lot of shooting, it also rewards the smart or sneaky player.

--Dave

NOLF is awesome! I've played that game many time though and I never get tired of it. Gamers complain that the game is to linear but I don't have a problem with that. In fact, it's better this way because than the player doesn't get lost and knows what to do.

I believe NOLF is selling well because even though the hardcore players ignored it, FOX is still going ahead with a sequal!

And you guys thought Curt Schilling was the only celebrity into gaming.

Right on man!