Xbox Series X Review: Max Payne Trilogy

I bought all the Max Payne games, full price on the Xbox Store, and then the next week they went on sale. Boo! Here's what I think.

Max Payne (2001)

I avoided the original Max Payne for a long time. I occasionally tried to play it, but the overdone, hammy faux-noir voiceover always turned me off (I really dislike voiceover narration in things in general). But this time, playing Payne in lovely HD backwards compatibility on the Xbox? It was lovely. I still the writing is way overdone and has all the maturity of a high school lit mag, poetry on the level of Fall Out Boy lyrics, but the shooting is excellent and rarely gets old. There's a few parts where the difficulty is all out of whack, where the level design punishes rather than facilitates, but this is a good time of shootin' some dudes and feeling real sad about my dead wife. Max Payne is also the perfect length; long enough to feel worthwhile, but also short enough not to annoy. I shouldn't have ignored the series for so long. I'm not perfect.

Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne (2003)

I actually appreciate how short Max Payne 2 is. I know some people act like that's a problem, but not for me! I like when games respect my time. Everything is improved in this one from the first: the voice-acting, the writing, the shooting, the level design, etc. It's a true sequel. This one has ragdoll physics in it, of the early-aughts variety, when ragdoll physics were new and in no way resembled the behavior of actual bodies, but instead looked like there were programmed by some kid very fond of tossing his action figures down the stairs and watching them bounce. This is a much better all-around video game. I don't know what happened in it because when Max's flowery voice-over begins, I tend to tune out, but I know some stuff happened and he hooked up with that lady in comic book panel form, which I thought was pretty funny. Max Payne 2 is sweet. I played the PS2 port one time and woof. Get this on modern Xbox consoles and it runs like a dream, even if it isn't a one-to-one match with the vaunted PC version.

Max Payne 3 (2012)

I hated Max Payne 3. Even by the end, when I sort of came around to some parts of it, I still think it is largely one of the the most sluggish, gross, boring, unnecessary, linear, childish, clunky, saccharine, idiotic, and frustrating games I've maybe ever played. Hey, it looks nice. There's hella animations and they blend together well. But playing 3? When the cutscenes occasionally permit you to? No, thanks. Everything about the visual style and presentation annoys me: the garish visual design. the hilariously pointless words flashed on screen, artificial artifacting, the unending, soul-crushingly tedious and unskippable cutscenes with writing a high school sophomore could be proud of only after watching a bunch of "badass" movies. Animation priority is all over the place. Max moves like a tank, delayed as hell, lag all over the place, and you just feel like you're sliding backwards the entire time you play. But as soon as I learned to tune out the cutscenes, and as the game finally got into the mood of letting you play for more than a minute or two at a time, I started to like it a bit more. Some of the gunplay wasn't bad, but that's as far as I will go on this one. It stinks.

Bonus! Movie Review: Max Payne (2008) 

It stinks. Mos Def is in it.

PS1 Review: Syndicate Wars (1997)

Syndicate Wars! Man, PS1 games can seem really old these days. That's because they are. They can also still rule.

I came into Syndicate Wars by way of the remake, Syndicate (2012), and all its dubstep-laden shooter madness. I skipped the PC originals because most of PC gaming still scares me, so I moved on to this PS1 edition of the RTS-RPG-shooter hybrid. You control up to four cybernetically-enhanced soldier man working for future Asian fusion corpo-nation-states and/or religious cults. Between corporate espionage missions (with optional side-missions, like blowing up banks), you upgrade your soldiers with cyber-enhancements and gunz. From what I can tell, this PS1 version involves a lot less resource and research management, so no wonder I was more drawn to it. I loved the ridiculous amount of chaos you can generate, and the bizarre strategic potential of hypnotizing dozen of ordinary businessladies and businessmans with the brilliantly-named "persuadertron" and arming them with mini-guns found on the ground so you can raid your enemies' fortresses. Sometimes you lose all of them in an accidental fire as you blow up police hovercars. The violent potential of the sandbox pretty much rules in Syndicate Wars. And it can get pretty hectic out there, so much so that on a few occasions I acquired too many characters on screen and crashed the game. Unfortunately, the PS1 controller is by no means capable of translating the complexities of control afforded by a keyboard and mouse to a d-pad, four face buttons, and four shoulder buttons. You can get used to the awkward controls, but they're complex enough to be easily forgotten if you stop playing for more than a few days, and some of the more difficult parts of the game become even more difficult when you can't remember how to reassign weapons to your allies on the fly. Syndicate Wars can also be incredibly, frustratingly difficult at times, with often opague mission parameters that practically require you to fail before you can come to grips with them and what you actually need to do to progress. Specifically, the last mission is complete crap; you can only beat it, basically, by getting lucky, and more pointedly, losing a lot first. I beat it because I'm impossibly hard-headed when it comes to bullshit video games. I won't let them win. Syndicate Wars did not win, except in the sense that it's a lot of old (and old-fashioned) fun.

PC Review: 007 Nightfire (2002)

We already did this one on consoles, but I finally managed to finish it on PC after years of trying. It sucks! But I was bored.

Nightfire on PS2 (and the other Sixth Generation consoles) is still an amazing 007 game. I break it out once a year and, while it's not flawless, fond memories aside it translates the formula of the films to video games better than any before or since. The PC version is a near disaster, however. I tried this version years ago (probably a decade) and couldn't bring myself to finish it. I kept coming back to it, though, for the fascinating and uncanny ways it evokes and even extends the console version in ways that nearly break it. Say goodbye to the excellent driving levels of the PS2 edition, for example, and the professionalism (if not the originality) of its storytelling. I'm not saying Nightfire is fine literature, but the PC edition is lacking production values and, for lack of a better word, polish. Audio quality is, frankly, shitty. The cutscenes have all the direction of CCTV footage. Gameplay variety is practically non-existent: instead, it's just a lot of corridors of clunky, Half-Life engine shooting, with super dumb, unresponsive enemy agents. PC Nightfire even has a few of those "classic" insta-fail stealth missions of yore, irritating beyond belief, and thankfully these don't exist in games anymore. Some of the levels go on forever against uninspiring, confusing backdrops. Yet, as someone who plays PS2 Nightfire annually, I'll admit there's something like novelty in seeing these slightly different, more stringently PC FPS-focused versions of the levels with a roughly similar narrative DNA. The multiplayer is also weird but much more palatable, especially given that there's still support and an admittedly small fanbase for it. Remarkably, I played a few hours of deathmatch and capture the flag while on a work trip with two or three rando human players and bots in 2023, and, even though the whole enterprise is janky and old-fashioned, managed to have quite a bit of fun whooping ass as a cell-phone grappling Christmas Jones. Nightfire fans might give this a try (you can get it for free if you look in the right places), but the console version is way, way better.