Max Payne 2

I apologize for my recent hiatus. I am now behind in my goal, but not by as much as you think I am! Notice that the title of this post is not Arcanum, Of Mystery Magick and Bladeeblah, but instead the succinct Max Payne 2. Arcanum wouldn't run after I exited it for a time and Tomb Raider won't run at all. Somehow I can run that in DOS, tips anyone? But lesson learned: if a game does run, don't exit the game until you've powered through the entire thing. If anyone finds my corpse amidst a pile of stinking feces and walnut shells, you can blame Arcanum.

But Max Payne 2, Max Payne 2, how little I thought I would care for you and how much I turned out to adore you. I took your noir/action setting and hard-faced noir cop protagonist and let my imagination run wild with the terrible pack of cliches that I believed you to be. But I forgot the magic of genre fiction, (and I can hear my masters-in-english, Gertrude Stein-loving, pinko-commie sister choking on bile as I say this) you take these tired old cliches and make them work, make something beautiful. Perhaps my limited experience with noir tropes makes this interesting to me, but I loved Max's twisted recounting of his own sordid past, his requisite descent into gloom and paranoia, the beautifully cliched lines. What is so riveting about the weathered cop who alternates between growled metaphysical haiku, terse reflection on the passage of time, and masculinist love poetry? Death, the past, fate, the slippery nature of reality, these are the things on Max Payne's mind. Just try and imagine these with that voice the archetypal father figure had before his first cup of coffee in the morning:

“All this time, we got the fable of sleeping beauty wrong. The prince didn’t kiss her to wake her up, no one who’s slept for a hundred years is likely to wake up. It was the other way around. He kissed her to wake himself up from the nightmare that has brought him there.”

“The genius of the hole: No matter how long you spend climbing out, you can still fall back down in an instant. ”

"The past is a gaping hole, your only chance is to turn around and face it. But is like kissing the lips of your dead love, darkness waiting in the hole of her mouth."

"You try to run from it, but the more you run, the deeper, more terrible it grows behind you, its edges yawning at your heels."

"If you think nothing can get to you, you’re lying to yourself. At best you are temporarily dead. A lighting bold can reanimate you without a warning."

But Max's inner psychological life was always interwoven with the action. Typical "thoughtful" games seem as if they hired a guy with a liberal arts degree to write some musings for the voice actors after the game had already been made. Not so with Max-- Max's running monologue drew inspiration from the environment, making metaphors out level design and interactive objects.

Another aspect of Max Payne 2 that set it apart was its many deviations made from conventions of the shooting genre. Typical of shooter is a large and conspicuous cross hair, in a practical, highly visible color, smack in the middle of the screen. If the game-maker leans toward the realistic, he may have it bob as a character runs, but never does it seem to occur to him that maybe a huge cross hair floating over the otherwise highly realistic tableau detracts somewhat from his goal of immersion. Obviously, it would be unacceptable to have no indicator of where you are aiming, it would make the game rather frustratingly difficult to play, "cheap", as the saying goes. But in Max Payne 2 is a rather beautiful compromise between gameplay and screenplay. I never even noticed the lack of crosshairs to be honest, so taken was I with the cinematic panoramas on my screen, In my typically humble style, I just assumed I was shooting well without it. But on closer examination, in the middle of the screen, there was a single white mark, a whole pixel in size that acted as my crosshairs. Ingenious.

The game is speckled with sequences, typically in Max's surreal dreams, where he navigates an environment and he has no access to weapons. With your inventory gone, and the lack of crosshairs, the sense of game is further stripped away, leaving you with a total sense of immersion. Max typically will navigate an environment his dreamscape until he comes into contact with another character that will merely expose narrative, a sort of interactive theater. Sometimes you are required to answer phones or activate other objects in the environment, but there is a conspicuous absence of the titular shooting in this shooting genre game.

But that's not the height of genius. The height is, after having become accustomed to these weaponless, threat-less scenarios, you go to a funhouse to seek out your hard-boiled love interest. There, you have access to all the weapons you did at the end of the last level, as normal. Using the knowledge acquired from years of game playing, you thereby infer that you will have to fight somebody or something in the funhouse level, even though there is no obvious room for such a conflict in the plot being that the funhouse is the secret home of an ally--no conflict should possibly occur here. But you have your guns, so you know that must have something against which to defend yourself coming up, and so you tense up and prepare for the game maker to try and spring something on you even though the game maker has already tipped his hand by giving you access to your weapons.

And so I went, through the level, awaiting the inevitable ambush... and it never came. I proceded to the ending cutscene of the level, letting go of the tension that had been building in my stomach that I did not even realize. And I thought for that moment that I knew what it was like to be wary, paranoid Max Payne.

And so I doff my cap, because in that moment, the game maker had reached from beyond the computer screen and played with me, instead of me with his creation.

So I recommend the game, obviously, and could write a lot more about it, but someday when I'm teaching classes on video games, I'll hopefully get to say everything about this game that I want to.

Duke Nukem, coming up!