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.

Xbox 360 Review: 50 Cent: Blood on the Sand (2009)

"Where's my skull?"

50 Cent: Blood on the Sand is camp. Macho, meathead, miraculously ridiculous, straight people camp. I obviously can't recall how it was looked at in 2009, but today, on the very last day of 2023, Blood is impossible to take seriously because it takes itself so seriously. 50 isn't playing around. He wants his diamond encrusted skull back. He shoots big guns and is an incredible badass, blowing up helicopters, and pushing away women who want him because he is so cool but he is a busy man running an empire. I love Blood on the Sand. Frankly it's a dumb, bizarre, pleasingly confusing blend of mid-aughts rap culture and War on Terror fantasy role-playing. But, thankfully, backing it all up is a game that's surprisingly still fun to play, especially all 60fps'd up on the Xbox Series X. Fiddy and the rest of G-Unit, wearing bullet proof vests on stage, get tricked while out on tour by a bad promotor and set out on a mission to recover a priceless diamond skull offered to them in lieu of payment for their concert. You follow the skull through various stages of ownership, 50 often pondering "Where's my fucking skull?" There's a lot of shooting dudes in this game. That's pretty much all you do, except some times you drive a truck and shoot dudes. Albeit largely derivative and somewhat repetitive, the gunplay is satisfying and impactful. So, mechanically, Blood is a one-note Gears of War clone in a G-Unit wrapper. And that's fine. You get a couple of nice twists on the standard shooter formula, but not too much; an interesting combo system, a curse button with an attached combo bonus, and soundtrack of classic 50 tunes, such as "In the Club" and "P.I.M.P.". There's an beautiful satisfaction in those moments when you're riding around in a helicopter with your G-Unit pals, blowing up convoys, while "Disco Inferno" plays on the soundtrack. The whole thing is a bit rough around the edges, featuring an ugly 2009-ass user interface, no sprint button (just 50's saunter), and strange gaps in the story and transitions between scenes, yet the painfully earnest qualities of 50 Cent and his lil companions Tony Yayo, DJ Whoo Kid, and Lloyd Banks are all impossibly cute. Too bad it's unavailable digitally. I hope you held on to your 360 disc like I did, because it's pretty expensive and hard to find these days. 50 Cent: Blood on the Sand will be with me forever.

Xbox Series X Review: Turok 3: Shadow of Oblivion Remastered (2023)

If you've ever played Turok 3: Shadow of Oblivion on the N64, you know what that one was like. It wasn't the frame-rate crime that was Turok 2: Seeds of Evil (1998), but 3 still ran like big time butt, borderline unplayable in spots. Look. We put up with a lot of single-digit frame-rates back then. It was what we had. Thankfully, things have changed, and a lot of these old games are getting updated to look all spiffy and run nice on modern systems. They did it with the first few Turoks, but I figured they'd stop before 3 because it's so different from the others. But they didn't!

Turok 3 is different because it's very Half-Life (1998) of them; the focus on narrative is much more pervasive. Instead of distinct levels, you get a lot more interconnected areas. Instead of the sprawling, maze-like messes of the first two, Turok 3 is super linear. Overall I think this is a net positive, even if it makes the game generally pretty easy, because I'm just happy to not be lost in the meaningless, more-or-less identical corridors of Turok 2. Nevertheless, Turok 3 is a bit too short, with some aggravating sections, and a questionable level of replayability. You get two different characters (and a few unlockable ones), each with their own weapons, skillsets, and a few exclusive areas to explore, but in general the differences between them are pretty surface level.

In addition to a playable, barf-free framerate, the developers also added more ammo and health, as the dearth of pickups in the original version of the game made it much harder than it needed to be. And they took away the multiplayer! If you've played the original Turok 3, you likely remember that the multiplayer bot matches were excellent garbage, deeply customizable to break things apart with variable running speeds, anti-gravity, tons of weapons, and weirdly cramped and strangely innovative level design. They let you break it with some crazy settings and it was awesome. If they update this game, they should totally bring it back because without it, the Turok 3 package is a bit sparse for the asking price. Wait until it's cheaper! That's my advice to you.

Xbox Series X Review: Tomb Raider Survivor Triology (2013-2018)

I played all three of these in a row and I'm now officially burned out on The New Adventures of Lara Croft. But they were fun! Well, at least the first and second one were.

I never cared about the original Tomb Raider (1996) game(s). I remember liking the movies, I even liked the sequel Lara Croft - Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life (2003); you know a movie is good when it has both a hyphen and a colon. So I didn't expect a whole lot from the reboot when I picked it up on super discount almost 10 years later, but I was pleasantly surprised by Tomb Raider (2013). It's true, however, that there ain't too much actual Tomb Raidin' in it. You do a lot of arrow shootin', a lot of bullet shootin', a lot of fightin'. It was way more combat heavy than I expected, which I definitely appreciated. "Tombs," such as they are (most of them are actually just caves somewhere in the woods), mainly exist off the beaten path of your mission and consist of a fairly simple, physics-based puzzle. They serve the purpose, however, of providing you with skill points on completion to upgrade Lara's weapons, equipment, and self. Of the three "survivor" games, Tomb Raider is by far the simplest, and I think that's what I liked about it the most: it's just a fun action game.

Rise of the Tomb Raider (2015) is the refined version of Tomb Raider. Everything is better. It's gorgeous, the animation in particular is excellent, the combat and exploration has opened up considerably, the spectacle is larger, the storytelling is pretty decent, and there's even more tombs! A lot more tombs. There's a lot more of everything. I think it becomes too much of a collect-a-thon, there's too many things to collect and craft and keep track of. There's a simplicity to the first game that I still prefer, but it's impossible to deny how incredible Rise truly is. Even if you, like me, don't have any particular attachment to the character or franchise and you don't mind if Lara Croft is less Tomb Raider and more Murder Badass Gal, Rise remains an excellent, all-purpose, generally excellent third-person action game.

I don't totally know what happened with Shadow of the Tomb Raider (2018). I really grew to hate this one. Technically, it's up there with Rise, maybe in some ways surpassing it: the traversal has never been better, the world is gorgeous, even if the character models look a bit off. The big problem, however, is how off-balance it feels in structure; by that I mean the balance between narrative, exploration, and combat. The writing is already awful, just belabored and breathless and half-hearted, and on top of that it has one of the biggest narrative drop-offs in gaming history. Shadow goes to hell as soon as you take Lara to Paititi (roughly midway through the game or so) and it never recovers. I almost gave up on it because you get sent on a thousand uninteresting fetch quests that don't even have action in them in a game that already struggles with having enough action in it. When the action picks up the game is fun, but there's an entire skill tree that ultimately doesn't matter because not enough happens and none of the skills have anything to do with all the talking in it. I don't think there's ever been a prettier failure than Shadow.

Xbox Series X Review: F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin (2009)

In a natural progression, I've returned to review the second F.E.A.R. (this is very irritating to type) game after reviewing the third game last month. Maybe I'll review the first one as well. Stay tuned to Code Redd Net for more reviews of pretty old games.

I hear people don't like this game. It's not so bad! It's pretty good. While it's not nearly as good as the original F.E.A.R. (2005), and I can understand why people might decry the direction of 2, there's still plenty in this one to recommend.  

The story, as you might expect, is a bunch of spooky, haunted nonsense strung between gun fights. Running somewhat concurrently (at least initially) with the first game, 2 is about a Delta Force goon squad captured and augmented by the evil Armacham corporation. That's how you get your slow-motion powers. Alma has grown up and wants to have sex with you, kind of. I don't know. It's very stupid. At least the first game had the dignity to make the story sparse and often limited to items you pick up and read. It was an atmosphere, just a veneer of horror wrapped around a Hong Kong bullet ballet. It was just generally spooky, whereas 2 makes you watch and engage with the Horror Stuff much more, and it's weaker for it.

Luckily, the action in F.E.A.R. 2 is generally excellent, even if it's a fair bit different from the first game. Much of it is modernized: aim down sights, sprinting, you name it. It feels better to play, with quicker, more responsive controls and movement, although the level design is much more condensed. I can't tell if the AI is better or worse because they have so few options in how they engage with you. As a result, the combat is fairly predictable, but it is no less explosive. All the guns feel great and the Soldier Mans you shoot explode and break apart in some wonderful ways.

Unfortunately, it's over a bit quicker than you'd want at about five or six hours. And because it's a single-player FPS from the late 2000s, there's nothing else to do. You can chase some achievements if you want, but you don't unlock anything, there's no extra modes, nothing. There was a multiplayer mode but obviously that's gone now. Hope you like additional difficulty modes!

Xbox Series X Review: Robocop: Rogue City (2023)

The first RoboCop (1987) is amazing. This likely isn't news to anyone, but I still find it wild that such a brutal, truly anti-corpofascist film could ever be released by a major studio. And then they made the sequels. RoboCop 2 (1990) is ooooook, it's fine, it has that child drug dealer, and RoboCop 3 is itself a crime. I went to the 2014 reboot and remember nothing about it. They also made some RoboCop video games! They're trash too, except for RoboCop Versus The Terminator (1993) on the Sega Genesis (and definitely not the SNES version), which was stupid hard but had cheats (thank god) and buckets of blood.

Anyway, this is all to say the RoboCop franchise is a total mess. Thankyfully, RoboCop: Rogue City attempts to clean up this mess. Taking place after the events of the second movie, Rogue City is a hybrid FPS and robo-role-playing adventure game, and a large part of it is a tribute to the series. When you're not shooting dudes and walking forward slowly, you're talking to dudes and walking forward slowly. Sometimes they ask you to find cats, find their sons, and hand out parking tickets to cars parked too close to fire hydrants. These parts, especially the more open world sections where you (Mr. RoboCop) walk around the streets of Detroit and talk to folks, can become fairly boring and the conversations drone on for too long. Still, there's some good character work and writing here, with choices that have effects on both the narrative and gameplay, but thankfully this mundane activity is then offset by some incredible shootouts. Rogue City is brutal. You kill guys really good in a lot of different, upgradable ways. This is the best part of the RoboCop Simulator. The combat is incredibly satisfying, in-depth, and shockingly customizable.

RoboCop: Rogue City is a fairly long game for a modern FPS, although too much of the 10 hours or so it takes to complete the game is dedicated to long stretches of dialogue. By the end the of the game, however, I found that the commitment to so much conversation actually worked somewhat in the game's favor and the characterizations paid off. Unfortunately, the final act does wear out the game's welcome by the end with one too many reveals and turns and final final boss battles. Nevertheless, if you dig FPS action and need something new to play, Rogue City is worthwhile.

Happy 22nd birthday, Code Redd Net!

 I can't believe it's been 22 years. Long live Code Redd Net!

Nintendo Switch Review: RICO London (2021)

I play RICO London on my Switch every so often, even relatively recently, and not because it's any good. It's not. I've just left it in my system every time I return from a work trip or vacation, and then I don't touch the thing again until I'm out the door for another long trip. This is a horrible cycle in which I play RICO London way too much on airplanes and buses, and I don't really know why I keep doing so. There's a bunch of fun digital purchases on there for me to mess around with instead of this game. I own a physical version of RICO London because I imported it. I don't really know why.

Maybe part of it is probably because I loved the original RICO and wanted this to be more of that. It's not. The first RICO (2018) was a fun, unsophisticated, procedurally generated mess of an FPS with cool co-op and some really goofy, solid slo-mo shooting. You could slide through doors and enemies and bust down doors with your boots! It was therefore a good game. RICO London takes that blueprint and screws it up virtually from top to bottom. There's an oddly compelling game here, but it's hidden underneath the backsliding gameplay, dated graphics, and consistently awful performance.

They tried to add a storyline to this one! Ha ha. There's even little comic book panels with voice-over narration to transition between some floors of the building you're sent to infiltrate, as it's supposed to be New Year's Eve and you're an inspector lady trying to bust some drug dealers on multiple floors of a high rise building in London. This means you get a bunch of different floors, including a garage, casino, and penthouse, and a group of Eurotrash baddies in beautiful track suits. The rooms on the floors are mostly random, but they're straightforward and linear (unlike the first game), and they always wind up in the same place against the same boss characters. You can pick up weapons now, but there's much, much less ammo, and your enemies are bullet sponges this time around, so you're constantly juggling a bunch of random guns as you dump ammo into them. The combo system is fairly well-implemented, pushing you to run through the levels in order to keep your combo up, score higher, and upgrade your character. That part mostly works, but the rest of the game often doesn't. Performance on the Switch isn't just bad, it's broken. The game just crashes for no reason, or crashes after the framerate often stutters real bad. I hope your enjoy rebooting games often.

Just play RICO again instead. Don't be like me. I beat this game. Take RICO London out of your Switch, or don't put it in there in the first place.

Xbox Series X Review: Trepang2 (2023)

It's a new F.E.A.R. game! kind of.

If you're wondering what the heck Trepang2 means, don't worry, because it simply doesn't. The meaningless name is indicative of an equally meaningless wrapper of alleged "story" or "plot", cloaked around a series of otherwise disparate missions and locations in which hella shooting and explosions happen. This is what happens when your game starts development as mid-2000s FPS cover band, principally playing the hits from the original F.E.A.R. (2005). You play an enhanced super soldier guy, waking up in a prison and rescued by a group of mercenary people who then recruit you for some missions to do things involving a lot of death and finding keycards. As you might expect, the storytelling in Trepang2 is delivered by a lot of men speaking in thumbnail images. Thrilling!

That paragraph makes it sound like I really soured on Trepang2. I didn't. You won't either. Ignore the plot and just start moving the character around and you'll know. Trepang2 is beautiful in motion. It feels good simply to move in this world. T2 has some of the best FPS movement and shooting I've ever experienced. While your powers (bullet time, cloak, general kung fu) can be a bit much at first, as the enemy counts grow and the blood and sparks fly around everywhere and drench the screen with way too much stuff, pretty soon you'll get used to it and you'll just flow, man, with the brutal mutilation and blood splatter. There's really nothing quite like the ferocity and speed of action in Trepang2. No other game can quite match it, except maybe Doom (2016).

Still, though, it's hard to ignore how shallow Trepang2 ultimately reveals itself to be. It makes a hell of a first impression, but soon enough you'll see the empty storytelling for what it is and you'll see how the side-missions are all just wave-based survival nightmares, and the final boss is beyond irritating and cheap. I had to turn the default difficulty down in order to push throw it. Growing up is allowing yourself to turn the difficulty down because you have other things you want to do in life. Don't be too proud.

Trepang 2 is a good game. Maybe wait for a sale and pick it up then.

Xbox Series X Review: F.E.A.R. 3 (2011)

I miss writing reviews for Code Redd Net, so I'm back! Unofficially... maybe? We'll see how this goes. We started this as a Geocities page in 2001 (holy crap) while Chicken Man and I were both in grade school, letting the world know what we thought of 007 games and Jet Li movies from our world headquarters in the school's keyboarding classroom. We also brought it back in 2012 when I was a grad student, living in the world's worst studio apartment in Montreal. I'm old enough now to really miss it, and even though I have an actual job now, I'm writing this seasonally-appropriate October review of F.E.A.R. 3 because I want to and it's the last thing I (re-)played and I just found out I can still log in to this account. The world needs to hear my thoughts on this game from 12 years ago! Let's go.

I love the first F.E.A.R. game. I even like F.E.A.R. 2 a little bit more than most seem to. I suppose we'll get to this in future reviews of these games (when I go backwards in time and review the first two in the series), but I avoided these games for a long time because I thought they were just horror games and I'm not really into horror stuff. It wasn't until I watched a YouTube video on them and someone described them as J-horror mixed with John Woo that I became interested. I'm glad I did, even if 3 is by far the weakest in the series. It's still a decent FPS by the standards of 2011, but it loses a lot of what made those previous games special.

It's virtually meaningless to map out the plot of F.E.A.R. 3, or the other games, because it's both difficult and simultaneously and definitely not the point of playing something like this. You play (at least the first ime) a super soldier man, rather artfully dubbed The Point Man, on a mission with his psychic brother?-guy, Paxton Fettel, as they run from and sometimes fight a experimental haunted girl named Alma. She's going to give birth? and this future military corporation wants to harness or reclaim her powers. That's good enough. It's mostly just a lot of gunplay; the horror elements are essentially limited to a few jump scares and generically spooooky images of creepy little girls and blood on things.

Sadly, F.E.A.R. 3 is so mainstream now. Unlike the first game, with its wide-open combat and remarkable enemy intelligence, 3 is hella Call of Alma: Black Ops. ADS, vaulting, super linear level design, experience point upgrades, very scripted events, the works. It's smooth and plays well, but your options for movement and shooting are much more limited than they need to be, and once you've played through the campaign you've mostly seen it all. And your series trademark slo-mo powers have never mattered less. As in 2, in 3 you get to jump into a huge mech from time to time. It's fun and mixes things up a little bit, it's a welcome change from the normal business of shooting guys, but it's not enough (and not as good as it was in 2).

When you finish the game, you open up the option to play as Fettel. This 100% should've been the option from the get-go. As Fettel, you can possess the bodies of enemies, throw stuff, and fire little energy balls from your fists. It doesn't sound like much, but his powers make the gameplay much more dynamic, varied, fast-paced, and unique. While F.E.A.R. 3 needs it, it still isn't quite enough. We never gave scores back in the day, but if we did, F.E.A.R. 3 is the definition of a two star game: brimming with promise, but the new ideas don't matter much and the other games in the series render the entire exercise almost pointless. Give it a try if you're bored.