What about Max Payne 3 already

No thread at all? No general Max Payne thread?
I don't know about you guys but I really like violent action games and Rockstar games and I therefore am cautiously optimistic about this game. I have never played the other two.

Assuming the combat will be a step-up from your GTA standard, I'm curious to see what Houser et al will do with characters & dialogue after their advances in the Ballad of Gay Tony.

After the quantum leap in nuanced character and dialogue-driven gameplay that was the Ballad of Gay Tony

Enh, I liked it. GTA4 had a shit-ton of problems, but they nailed a lot of them down by the time of the expansion packs.

also, I didn't say it had nuance or anything driven by the dialogue, only that I thought the characters & dialogue was good.

the first two were tongue-in-cheek pulp; worried the more serious tone might just ruin it

I loved TBGT and dearly hope that GTAV is more like that than GTA4 proper, but it's mostly because it's actually fun and not so dreary and self-serious as GTA4.

I kind of feel like worrying too much about the plot and characters in what's clearly a linear action game is like worrying about the plot and characters in a porno movie

Prob getting this for the single player, though it doesn't look anything like the other MP games.

i am anti-gta, pro red dead and ignoring MAX PAYNE
mostly because it's named MAX PAYNE

TBH, I'd just be happy with Red Dead coming out for PCs, so's I can play it without dropping a few more hundred than I already do for gaming hardware.

I would be ^^^ if I didn't need to drop a few hundred for a new graphics card.

this game looks neat, altho predictable and i easily see boring about mid-way through. RDR was a fantastic gaming experience but in terms of story-telling i thought it not only paled on comparison to any western cinematic entry, but just didn't make any fucking sense. didn't i just kill "the bad guy"? why is there this new bad guy? am i supposed to feel bad about him having died? what is the deal w/ the mopey old man on ranch - what is he adding to the story? do you want me to feel bad about his death too?

i just expect this to be the same. rockstar can be so ridiculously fucking clever sometimes that it makes me really feel there's a real strength in the narrative & immersive capabilities of videogaming (the talk shows in the gta franchise), but then it tries it's hand in not being a blatant ridicule of the environment it chooses to situate itself in and it's at that point that you start realizing the flaws of videogames and videogame writers. i miss the terrible pastiche of vice city, and the fact that it was so unbelievably great at carrying it through.

but it's about damn time a shooter was released where the character's only movable parts were their forearms and legs.

soundtrack by HEALTH could either be amazing or terrible

The satire in GTA4 was shit, I must say; a real disappointment from what previous entries.

The fact that both the GTA and SR series(an who knows how many more) feel the need to be dick jokes and nob gags only in their fictional naming systems is disheartening. They had fuggin' Patrice Oneal in the game; they could have come up with tighter shit.

GTA4's satire came kind of tough b/c it had to be relevant and couldn't rely on communal opinions of things like hair metal or gangster rap as seen in the retro-themed GTA's. I'm most worried about that in GTA5 - I've got some horrible feeling they're going to have some spoof on the Obama birth-certificiate fiasco, and it's going to play every single time I turn on the radio. Worse, some sort of mock-up Jersey Shore themed thing considering the coastal location.

GTA4 had some funny moments, tho. A pleasure I didn't discover until late in the game was just running to your destination - so many funny quips from pedestrians. The websites were also occasionally hilarious and Jacob was is own sort of pleasure to deprive yourself of subtitles for and see if you could possibly guess what he was saying. But they were really reaching when they introduced Florian Cravic (the flaming gay guy)

i haven't liked much rockstar has done lately (la noire was awful, rdr was pretty but boring, gta4 was Very Serious) but all the tony scott distortion, captioning, splitscreen shit in this looks cool. will pay for developed (if maybe not original) aesthetic sense in video games.

Why do I feel like I have a horrible guilty hangover after having played this game for 5 hours last night

the hangover wasn't from the booze or the pills. the hangover was the last tortured scream of my soul drowning in an sea of gunfire and broken promises.

yeah this is fun. the multiplayer is pretty good, the anarchic bullet timing old-fashioned deathmatch is solid and the vendettas and all that add some flavor. haven't fucked with the gang wars etc modes yet.

i would have liked more integration between cutscene and gameplay but that's how rockstar does shit i guess. once i figured out the tempo of single player (use cover until there's a manageable number of dudes then go john woo) (and if you stay in cover too long some asshole's gonna run up on you with a shotgun) i had a great time.

I couldn't get the multiplayer to work for some reason. I made it into the waiting rooms but not into a single game.

are you on xbox or ps3? xbox worked well for me but there are a lot of loading screens before/between matches.

How are the character bits?

I like how you can machine gun about two hundred guys throughout Hoboken over a half-hour without drawing any police presence whatsoever. Just a couple of drunk ex-beat cops from Jersey killing the Hoboken mob and half of Brazil.

like the story stuff? max payne is a broke down man. if you forget the game will remind you. a lot. i'm pretty sure it's not meant to be taken seriously but there's never a real wink, just more broke down man stuff. so my reading is that it's a commentary on Intense Grim Darkness in Games rather than A Horrifically Hamfisted Example of Intense Grim Darkness in Games.

this extends to the non-max characters who only really exist to be victims of max's drunken/doped-up ineptitude or to reflect his corruption b/c of the essential inhumanity of etc. so trying to engage with this story as a real story would be ridiculous, like with any rockstar story, because it is stupid. but this one is less stupid because it is more stupid.

that doesn't not... sound right

that is, maybe that's too much credit?

i know it is man

i just can't play this game if i think some dude at rockstar is writing this shit and lighting a cigarette and just being like "yeah... advancing the medium"

how's the v/a?

Kotaku said the single player campaign was short....10-15 hours. Can anyone comment?

If this is the case, personally I would have wished they spent more time on the SP...

voice acting is fine i think. better than the original games. on par with big-money modern productions

i just switched discs (switching discs!) maybe 4-5 hours in so a 10 hour SP would make sense. that's probably longer than either of the original max paynes and kinda long for 2012 given how many 4-hour battlefield/call of duty campaigns there are. also there's like speed run arcade modes and stuff if yr into that.

Can I just say I love this game and its low-stress, old-school multiplayer

what does that mean? i thought it was co-op or something

There's a million different modes-- most of them are some kind of adversarial type of situation. One, Gang Wars, is large-scale narrative co-op, kind of like Spec Ops. Otherwise there's lots of different kinds of DM and team tactical and so on.

By old-school I mean fast and fluid and lots of running around and action and it's not very frustrating when you die and there's no real way to be cheap with camping or sniping. And no MW-style support perks, which I realize are fucking horribly frustrating and un-fun. It kinda reminds me of the multiplayer on Syphon Filter for the PSP if anyone played that.

How does it avoid camping?

The levels are big enough that it'd never really be worth it, for one thing. It certainly wouldn't be any fun. And the game doesn't seem designed to be "about" maintaining a K/D or going for streaks. It simply doesn't seem to reward cheap gameplay in any obvious way.

Also, the slow-mo mechanic balances the gameplay such that there doesn't seem to be much advantage in hiding and then attacking someone unawares. There aren't many one-shot kills and the person who is moving in a gunfight has a big advantage over the person standing still, crouching, or prone. If you take a shot from behind or whatever the natural thing to do would be to shootdodge or turn on bullet time and then whip around for a headshot, which would pretty much always work against a static target, even if he did get the first shot in.

How does bullet time work when someone uses it on you? Does the action slow down?

Yeah, time slows down for you at the same ratio as it slows down for the person who used the perk, but they get to fire their gun and aim a lot faster than you do. It's not nearly as annoying as it sounds, as it happens for a maximum of 2.5 seconds and depends on a meter that's a drag to refill. And bullet time itself, as opposed to shootdodging which everyone can do and which only slows time for about a half-second, is one of like 25 perks and not a lot of people seem to use it.

yeah running around all the time quake style is important. so are dual pistols. i am for now at least really enjoying the multiplayer.

finished the single player yesterday. parts of the last level were kinda frustrating and after a certain point most of the dudes are wearing body armor so it's slow mo headshot after slow mo headshot which isn't as fun as the crazy shootdodging. overall though the single player was great, they did the best job possible with the gritty grittiness of the story and the characters and the setting.

generally i don't have a lot of use for HEALTH but the soundtrack is very good.

Can you do bullet time in multiplayer when there are more than 2 players and if so how the hell does that work

Yes you can and it makes perfect sense how it works but it's very hard to explain. Basically if you can see someone who is affected by bullet time, or if someone can see you who is affected by bullet time, you are also affected. Otherwise you're not. So as long as you're behind closed doors practicing bullet time it doesn't affect me at all, but if you think I'm going to let you move next door to me and marry my daughter you must think i'm crazy.

it is a bullet time chain reaction

pretty cool game but oof bad writing

that's the same capsule review of like every game tho i guess

sweet soundtrack

i don't understand how the people who have used bullet time or been in the same room as someone who used bullet time don't end up 2.5 seconds behind the rest of the game

oh wait, that's kind of obvious - they don't STRETCH TIME, they just ... move very slowly

i'm kinda feelin the multiplayer in this

The guns that become available at the higher levels seem to be way OP though. If you're stuck in a match with someone who's way levelled up it's a bit of a drag. Fucking dual Desert Eagles bullshit

well yeah.

participation numbers seem pretty low. i wonder if it will not really catch on like all the other rockstar MP

Played through the first two chapters. So happy that it's turning out to be a pleasure to play. Takes a bit to get back into the swing of it but once you're there it's great.

Watching Man on Fire at the same time as this (halfway through the film).

Bought this yesterday, as it was on the Steam Sale. Of course, as it's 30GB of download, I didn't get to play it. Hopefully it'll have finished by the time I get home! :(

i have MANY THOUGHTS on this game

1. yeah the story and the writing are v overwrought and silly. there was more than one occasion where i laughed out loud at max's v/o.

2. the game is very pretty and detailed, the choice of location almost totally in brazil with no help on all the portuguese is interesting. instead of a generic lat-am hellhole it's a very specific lat-am hellhole. in its pulpy way it is very clear on the huge disparities of wealth (mostly thru the diff btw interior and exterior spaces). adventure games like this have to cut a fine line between making the spaces seem like they pre-exist you being there, and being clearly linear enough to play through, and it's v well done. you do fight through the world's biggest and most convoluted police station tho. (all of the fast-cut & video bitrate error visual effects wear thin pretty quick, and there are too many brief cutscenes interrupting things).

3. in terms of getting the basics down right: a man's body as a physical thing, using guns as physical things that have to be carried, through physical places, the game is one of the best i've ever played. you have two holsters and a free hand. no endless backpack here! the early promos for this game talked up how much work they'd done on the body movement here, they were right to do so. i can't overemphasize this point, honestly; high class games like skyrim do simple stuff like modeling a person walking up a hill very very badly. i have some pissy quibbles as to 'gun realism' (the ammo, god, get it right for once, somebody!) but it is a video game, still, i realize.

4. points 3 and 1 end up being in direct conflict pretty quickly, however. max is, as he will not stop telling you, a broken-down wreck; too drunk, pilled-up, fat and stupid to know wtf is going on, a huge failure bringing misery to everyone who gets close to him. the character you control, otoh, is the most precise killing machine ever to have lived. it's hilarious. "uggh why am i such a loser, i should just die" *jumps over hotel bar putting four bullets each into three dudes faces*. i think you kill about a thousand people in the course of the game. all you do is watch cutscenes of max-the-fuckup and play max killing a thousand people.

5. the MP is pretty fun but some of the details seem to be badly worked out. if you get in a match with someone who as figured out how to snipe, you are fucked.

have invested about a week into this. it continually bores me, but sucks me back in because i want to progress to the next locale. i guess that's sorta the schema with most videogames for me - man, it's just rare that i actually have a blast playing the actual gameplay. me3 comes close, having replayed some recently and realizing how fun it is to just roll around and charge at peeps.

anyways, the near one sole complaint about this is the ridiculous number of enemies thrown at you everywhere you go. it's nuts, it's insane, it's just fucking incredulous. it's been the same deal for this last gen of videogames, admittedly, most especially having started with the entire population of kenya you slaughter in Uncharted but it still remains that if the game wants us to take it so seriously as something advancing the story-telling medium, the key disparity between videogames and cinema is how much action is actually allowed to occur in the realm of tolerability and actual likeliness. i got the "kill 100 people" achievement not even 2 hours into the game. i mean, for fucks sake.

more a gripe against the current state of videogames as of now, i guess.

but also, those little text pop-ups in cut-scenes are ridiculously self indulgent and kinda make me realize how rockstar is fully composed of film school drop-outs a la hideo kojima. they've got the basics, they've got the flash, but they have no fucking self control.

Would you prefer if there were less enemies to shoot?

i think i would, if each of them were smarter.

the really ridic ones are the heavily-armored dudes that you have to shoot the helmet off their head, then shoot them in the head. that's like mario or something.

i just can't see games, in their current state, really making a riveting play out of just having to combat 4 dudes unless extremes were put on realism and minutae really had to be watched - ex: you can't reload a clip and expect your previous ammo to be retained. no painkillers, no health, just wits and a shoot-first survival system.

that aside, just in the context of max payne 3 it's just incredible to me that an entire high-school graduating class will be amassed with intent to kill you and only you, frequently and often and a number of times throughout the game. it's even worse that rockstar would make "clever" little quips Already Done in Uncharted such as your protag breaking 4th wall and commenting about how fucking weird it is that all these dudes are after your ass, when it does nothing to obscure what i'm seeing as lazy game-making, actual semblances of innovation being set aside to present us with this cool little filter you can run the cut-scenes through and reminding us that this is *no ordinary medium*

more a rag on the current state of gaming that max payne 3, really. it's a fine game, if it does nothing that hasn't been done before - continuously, repeatedly, and at this point, at point of being laborious.

i do give this game props for, as somebody above noted (?), presenting us with environments that seem to serve a functional purpose as well as one for gameplay. it was the absolute worse in mass effect 2 when crouch-level walls would literally POP UP in order to provide you with cover. the office fights in max payne 3, while frustrating to me, were riveting in sense that there was no *clear* sense of identifiable cover that my brain has been trained to recognize as a breather-point. instead, everything was capable of being able to take cover behind, in turn lending itself to a - funny enough - chaotic sense of the game providing you with no real hand-holders, just a reasonable set of furniture to keep you from being completely obliterated.

a boon of 3rd-person games, i think. a lot could be done with presenting games as an entirely immersive medium if we went back to counter-strike days of taking cover not an activated gameplay function, but something you do if you were smart about how you wanted to present yourself to enemies/vice versa.

ok

don't be a dick. if you wanna say something, say it; but fuck off if you're already predisposed towards the game and anything that challenges your wealthy knowledge of it based off the first 2 chapters - of which encompass about 30 minutes total of gameplay.

This argument would be more exciting in bullet time.

man there's gonna be a fuckton of MP dlc

http://www.rockstargames.com/maxpayne3/dlc

seems a little excessive, there's only ~1000 people playing at a time

yeah so i was just invited to a mp crew with a member named "Eur0p34nunity88" (proofed). yeah no thanks!

long shot, but could someone post a completed game file? I got up to the last level and then lost all in a hard drive crash.

i don't have the ability to do that, sorry. unless i do. how do you do that?

perhaps \Documents\Max payne 3 Savegames

oh haha i'm on xbax