Max Payne (series): Difference between revisions

Three years ago, NYPD detective Max Payne's wife and baby daughter were killed in their home by junkies strung out on the designer drug Valkyr. Since then Max has transferred to the DEA and gone undercover with the Punchinello mafia family, intending to bring the Valkyr drug ring down once and for all. Then one night, as New York settles into the worst snowstorm in decades, Max's partner is murdered, Max is framed for it, and his cover is blown. With the police hot on his trail, Max wages a [[Roaring Rampage of Revenge|one-man war]] on the mafia, killing everyone in his way as he gradually unearths the truth behind the creation of Valkyr and the death of his family.

 

 

 

Two years later, ''Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne'' came out, in which Max investigates a highly organized and well-funded group of assassins who are wiping out the powerful syndicate The Inner Circle, while becoming entangled with the Circle's possibly-trustworthy-who-knows hitwoman [[Back from the Dead|Mona Sax]]. This second featured better sound and graphics, actual in-engine cutscenes with new animation beyond the standard AI movements, more varied gameplay (including having Mona appear as a playable character for several chapters), and an [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=atKv1JyQgV8 original song] by the newly-formed [[Poets of the Fall]]. It also rewarded patient players with several additional stories they could choose to watch; if Max stopped at the various televisions scattered around the game, he could catch the latest episode of the obnoxious animated series ''Captain Baseball Bat Boy'', the [[Self-Parody|self-mocking]] cop show ''[[Blaxploitation|Dick Justice]]'', the amusing period soap ''Lords and Ladies'' or the surprisingly creepy, ''[[Twin Peaks]]''-like psychodrama ''Address Unknown''.

 

 

A [[Video Game Movies Suck|Hollywood movie]] based on the characters was released in 2008 to a poor reception, but modest commercial success. Related tropes should go [[Max Payne (film)|to its separate page]].

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{{tropenamer|The [[Trope Namer]] came like a hurricane.}}

* [[Bench Breaker]]: In the first game, Max waits until Franky is out of the room and then falls backwards on his chair in order to crack the wood.

* [[Benevolent Architecture]]: Every single door in the city seems to be double-hinged.

* [[Big Applesauce]]: The first two games are set in New York, using fictional locations. The third has flashbacks as well.

* [[Big Bad Friend]]: {{spoiler|B.B. in the first game, Vlad in the second, and Victor in the third.}}

* [[Big No]]: Max does this after his family was killed in the prologue, and it's full of [[Narm|Narm-y]] goodness.

* [[Bilingual Bonus]]: Given that the third game takes place in Brazil, it's natural that much of the dialogue spoken by enemies and side-characters isn't in English. Max doesn't speak Portuguese, so the subtitles provide no translation.

** Notable in that there is ''so much'' flavor dialogue in Portuguese (and Spanish).

* [[Bittersweet Ending]]: Well, it ''is'' [[Film Noir]].

* [[Bling Bling Bang]]: Golden Gun parts can be collected for use in single-player and multi-player in the third.

* [[Blown Across the Room]]: When you use a shotgun, count on [[Mooks]] getting this treatment.

* [[Dirty Cop]]: {{spoiler|The entire UFE in part 3.}}

* [[Do with Him as You Will]]: {{spoiler|When Max is confronting Arthur Fischer, the surgeon who works for the organ thieves, the meeting is interrupted by a visibly disturbed and angry Serrano, who has been imprisoned along with the other unfortunate organ-theft victims. After a moment's consideration, Max lowers his gun, and allows his former enemy to kill the doctor with a scalpel}}.

* [[Dull Surprise]]: The uninterested "Aaaaah" sound the [[Mooks]] make when you kill them. Many people also commented on Max's strangely constipated expression in the first game.

* {{spoiler|[[Earn Your Happy Ending]]: Beating the 2nd game in the hardest difficulty setting nets you an ending wherein Mona survives. [[Road Cone|Given the 3rd sequel in the game,]] [[Doomed by Canon|this is probably not canon.]]}}

** The Crachá Preto in the third.

* [[Hit Scan]]: One of the first games to make a big deal of averting this; all of Max's weapons fired modeled projectiles, the bullet-time mechanic was created largely so you could see this more clearly.

* [[Hollywood Silencer]]: Taken to egregious levels in 3, where Max duct tapes a water bottle to the end of his pistol at the beginning of Chapter 12. ''And it works.''

* [[How We Got Here]]: The first game opens immediately after Max kills Nicole Horne, and then flashes back to how he got involved in the whole thing. The second game start right after {{spoiler|Mona dies}}, then flashes back to Max in the hospital after {{spoiler|falling down a hole}} earlier that night, which serves as the first level of the game. At the end of the level, Max finds {{spoiler|Winterson's body}}, which causes him to flash back (that's right, a flashback within a flashback) to the events that led to {{spoiler|Max shooting and killing Winterson and falling down a hole}}, starting with a routine mission the previous night. By the time ''that'' flashback ends, there are only a few levels left of the game, which are spent telling how Max wound up at the scene of {{spoiler|Mona's death}}. The third game shows how Max got from the NYPD Detective he was in the second game to the alcoholic screw-up that he is in the third game. Unlike the first two games that took place over two or three nights, the third game will take place over a few months and the flashback sequences are spread around evenly.

** Painfully averted in the first game, where enemies can peg you in the face with a pump-action shotgun blast from the other end of a football field, and in the third game, where some soldiers can drop smoke grenades that don't impede their aim at all.

* [[Important Haircut]]: Max shaves his head in the third game after failing to prevent a kidnapping {{spoiler|and murder}}.

* [[Infant Immortality]]: Gruesomely averted in the first game. We see a bloody crib and what's left of Max's baby in the very first level.

* [[Ink Suit Actor]]: People might not initially be aware, but in ''Max Payne 3'', young Max looks an awful lot like his voice actor, James McCaffrey. It seems that this time around, Rockstar modeled the character after his original actor instead of either Sam Lake or Timothy Gibbs.

* [[Inspector Javert]]: Bravura in the original game was out to capture Max Payne. Even ignoring the fact that he was framed for Alex Balder's death, Payne killed at least a dozen mooks before that scene, and hundreds after.

* [[Ironic Nursery Tune]]: heard in Max's first nightmare along with his dead baby's cryings.

* {{spoiler|[[Mercy Kill]]}}: {{spoiler|You have the option to give one to Becker in the third game, but he dies on his own if you refuse, which also nets you an achievement and unlocks [[Defeat Means Playable|his burnt, half-dead corpse as a playable character in multi-player Deathmatch]].}}

* [[Mighty Whitey]]: A [[Smug Snake]] military leader accuses Max of trying to be this in a confrontation towards the end of the third game. It rings pretty hollow considering that he and his men have been {{spoiler|pretty much ''re-enacting the Holocaust'' with the city's poor and criminal element by kidnapping them and harvesting their organs.}}

* [[Mook Promotion]]: In the first game, Vinnie Gognitti is a ratty, low-level flunky who Max chases and torments for information, and is so pathetic Max figures he's not even worth killing. By the second game, Vinnie seems to be pretty much running the entire Mafia, due to Max having killed everybody else in the Family hierarchy during the course of the first game.

* [[Multiple Endings]]: In ''Max Payne 2'', {{spoiler|Mona lives if you beat the game on the "Dead on Arrival" difficulty.}}

 

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[[Category:Visual Novel]]

[[Category:PlayStation 2]]

[[Category:Max Payne]]

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