Max Payne (series): Difference between revisions
I'm surprised that Jack Lupino's satanism wasn't mentioned.
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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.
This [[Third-Person Shooter]] from Remedy was an attempt to break video games into an untapped genre, [[Film Noir]]. A mixture of both the film and graphic novel treatments of noir, it featured such stalwart elements of the genre as the hard-boiled cynical hero, the capable and mysterious femme fatale, and the convoluted criminal plot with myriad linear and tangential echelons of villains, all played under a gravel-voiced narration laden with gothic imagery and twisted arthouse metaphors. There are even a number of references to Norse mythology.
The game's biggest selling point, however, was the use of ''[[The Matrix|Matrix]]''-style [[Bullet Time]] (despite the game being in the works before the movie came out), which allowed the player to slow down
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''.
Due to a combination of ''Max Payne 2'' selling poorly and Remedy getting [[Development Hell|bogged down]] working on ''[[Alan Wake]]'', it took eight years for ''Max Payne 3'' to be developed and released. It was developed entirely by Rockstar, with no design work but constant feedback from Remedy. Set eight years after the end of ''Max Payne 2'', the third game finds an alcoholic Max trying to make a fresh start by accepting a job as a private security guard for the wealthy Branco family in Sao Paulo, Brazil. After his employer's young wife is abducted by a band of paramilitary extremists as part of what appears to be a ransom plot, Max sets out to sober up and get her back. It has received quite favorable reviews from critics, and despite being released the same day as ''[[Diablo III]]'', it managed to sell 3 million copies in the first week. Tying in with the release of ''Max Payne III'' is a mobile port of the first game, with War Drum Studios (now known as Grove Street Games) handling the conversion and released on iOS and Android in 2012.
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]].
In 2022 Remedy announced that a remake of the first two games in the series is in development in association with Rockstar, using Remedy's own Northlight Engine.
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** 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 Satanism]]: Jack Lupino's obsession in the occult in 1, where he has a room in his nightclub strewn with Satanic paraphernalia all over. Turns out that his devil-worshipping schtick was due to his addiction to Valkyr driving him to a hell of a delusion, making him believe that he was a wolf and a messenger of Hell.
* [[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.
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