ThunderPeel2001

Maximillian Payne: Part Trois

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This is the best thing about max payne 3, the old school skin looks so hilarious.

I have to admit that the biggest reason I never played Max Payne 1 was because of how smirky he looked.

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Finished it today, and thought of another dissonance. They've hidden both health pick-ups, gun upgrades/collectibles, and little story pieces around the environment, encouraging you to explore after you finish a firefight. However, whenever you do so, Max or whoever he's with will start complaining, because there's always something in the narrative that should require haste.

So in the end Max is combing through a room, looking over desks, grabbing painkillers, looking for the telltale shine from golden gun parts, stopping and whispering to himself; "I'd better get a move on quick, or those scumbags are gonna give me the slip...", continuing around the room, then turning on the TV to watch a cartoon.

Yeah. This is common in Rockstar games generally, and I always find it really weird for that reason. The Housers are so into (what they perceive as) elevating game fiction and worlds, and sometimes they succeed, but they often have these incredibly bizarrely arbitrary gamey collectathon things also just crammed in there.

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This is the best thing about max payne 3, the old school skin looks so hilarious.

Is that only available in MP?

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[media=]

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This is the best thing about max payne 3, the old school skin looks so hilarious.

Hahaha. Splendid.

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I played the apartment level where the vietnam vet helps you out, that scene is so much more silly with max doing his derek zoolander face while the vet takes on the mob guys.

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So I finally started playing this and I'm enjoying it... to a point. Every time I try and use Bullet Time™ or Shoot Dodge™ I get my ass handed to me. Every time I use Cover (and start playing like Gears of War) I do fine (more or less). Friends have told me that you use the slow-mo stuff more when you get better, but at the moment I just feel like I'm punished when I use it.

Anyways, aside from that, it's pretty fun. The levels and presentation are AMAZING. Really slick.

Just got to Chapter 5.

Do the clues do anything? I presume they help with the story in some way?

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Got this on Steam sale. So lets see:

  • Cool bullet time mechanics but very limited non-regenerating health
  • Collecting gun parts while being in constant hurry
  • Max complaining how shitty he is while actually being pretty awesome
  • Collecting clues yet going everywhere guns blazing

Someone in the design team must have realized how bizarre all these decisions were.

Still, the environments are stunning and the action is quite fun. In a way, this feels to me like Uncharted without puzzles and exploration. And while those were my favorite parts of Uncharted, so far I'm actually enjoying Max Payne 3 more than, at least, Uncharted 3. This is almost entirely because I was so frustrated with the combat in Uncharted (I suck at playing shooters with a controller). I'm playing Max Payne 3 on a PC. The controls are tight, the graphics clear and the waves of enemies bearable.

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Rockstar, not you too!

"Social Club UI Failed To Initialize (7)"

I don't give a fuck about their social club so I wasn't really bothered by that at first. Then I realized that I was stuck at the title screen forever.

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Been playing this a bit lately. Just finished up Chapter 7, the one where he shaves his head. It may just be because I watched season four of Breaking Bad last week, but when he pops out with his head shaved and his goofy shirt on, does it feel to anyone else like they're suddenly playing as Walter White? Aside from that weirdness, I'm liking the game more than I figured I would. Max Payne 1 and 2 still hold up as two of my favourite games of the early 2000s, and though this doesn't quite feel like them, I'm finding that (on Normal difficulty anyway), I'm able to mostly play it like I used to. I'm not using cover very much at all, a few specific setpieces excluded, and instead am shootdodging all over the fucking place. Good fun. Also, props to Rockstar for making a proper PC port. Not only can you tweak everything in the video settings, but it tells you how much of your video card's power said tweaking will use. I was able to optimize perfectly without once going into the game, thinking "oh shit, frame rate needs work", and popping back to the menu. Awesome. If GTAV has the same thing, I will be the happiest.

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Yeah, the PC version is great, with enough graphics and mouse sensitivity options to suit most people's needs.

I finished the game some time ago and actually liked it quite a lot despite the huge relatively boring shootouts near the end.

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You should join the Idle Payne crew (if you haven't already :).

I have, but as I recall I discovered right after joining that it was mostly 360 people? How much good does my PC version do me there?

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...and done. I quite enjoyed that game. As much as I love MP 1 and 2, I don't know if a straight-up re-hash of that would have really worked nowadays, so props to Rockstar for trying something new. Still undecided on whether that new direction was entirely successful, but it hit a lot of the notes I was looking for from a new Max Payne. It was a bit of a relief that for 8 of the 14 chapters, he wasn't the bald slob from the advertising as well. Do I think it worked out as a good game? Definitely. Do I think it's a great Max Payne game? I think I'll need to see where I stand on it in a few months. I enjoyed the ride through it, at the very least, and spent over 24 minutes killing people in mid-air according to the game's tracking, so that's a thing. Glad I picked it up on the Steam sale, but also glad that I've finished it and can free up the 30 gigs of hard drive space for other games now. I don't know what the hell they did to get the file size so huge, but holy hell.

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I have, but as I recall I discovered right after joining that it was mostly 360 people? How much good does my PC version do me there?

I have no idea. Actually, I think if you play with the IDLE crew activated, it all adds to the crew score, no matter what version you're playing. That's kind of cool. I guess. Sort of. Hmmm.

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Sorry to dig this thread back. I completed it over the weekend, just thought I'd post some thoughts into this box on the internet. Still not entirely sure what to think about it.

Brendon Chung's post sums up most of my issues with the game. Standing up before getting in cover, changing to pistols after a cutscene, waiting after a last stand - these all suck. They're all fairly obvious problems the game, I can't imagine they didn't come up in development. The game is so lacking in variation that the least I'd expect are well-considered and implemented combat mechanics.

I kind of felt the game was way too long as well, when it became clear that it wasn't going to do anything different from what it was doing at the start, I was ready for it to end a good four hours before it did. Fair play to Rockstar for really making Max Payne their own, it's kind of a gusty call even if you are Rockstar. However, I'd rather that took it in a less generic route. For the most part it kind of felt like I was playing the worst bits of Uncharted for twelve hours.

I'm probably making it out to be worse than it is, it is enjoyable. It's probably just tough to live up to the name.

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I definitely thought it was too long. I got pretty impatient with it. Really it's all downhill once he shaves his head, the best parts are the New York flashbacks, and the game gets more and more like GTA towards the end, until finally

you're shooting a plane with a grenade launcher from a car while your sidekick makes ten shitty quips a minute about how he's not sure his insurance is going to cover this!

It did make me want to replay the first two games, which I did, and man, they are still so good. The dialogue in particular is so much weaker in 3. I walk into a room in 3, Max is almost certainly going to say something like "It was time to find out what was going on here!" I walk into a room in 2, maybe he'll say "I felt like I was walking into a trap. I felt guilty, like I was about to get caught." Or "your past has a way of sneaking up on you. You'll hear broken echoes of it everywhere, like a bad replay. You'll get mad at everyone for reminding you about it, even if it's all in your head."

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I finally decided to start this game. My god it has a lot of cinematics. It feels like more than half the time I'm waiting for the game to lets me play again. Also, Max keeps losing the painkillers. It looks like every longer cinematic the number of painkillers is reset to a predetermined amount. For example in chapter 2, I had like 4 or 5 painkillers before I boarded the heli. And after that, just 1.

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I finally decided to start this game. My god it has a lot of cinematics. It feels like more than half the time I'm waiting for the game to lets me play again. Also, Max keeps losing the painkillers. It looks like every longer cinematic the number of painkillers is reset to a predetermined amount. For example in chapter 2, I had like 4 or 5 painkillers before I boarded the heli. And after that, just 1.

 

In theory the game is loading during those lengthy cinematics, but if you're playing on a PC I think it's been shown that the game has often long loaded before they're finished. Annoyingly. Secondly, yep, I believe each section is a level within itself. I think this is so they allow you to replay it and beat your "score".

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This game has really become annoying. After murdering a couple of hundred cops in the police station, and redoing some segments a shit load of time I arrived at the airport where I more or less have to do the exact same bullshit. Kill a shit load of people, walk a few meters, kill even more, get killed, and start from the beginning. Do this often enough to stock up on enough painkillers just to reach the next checkpoint and start over again.

The shitty 3rd person camera isn't helping at all in the right corners you often have to walk through.

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In theory the game is loading during those lengthy cinematics, but if you're playing on a PC I think it's been shown that the game has often long loaded before they're finished. Annoyingly. Secondly, yep, I believe each section is a level within itself. I think this is so they allow you to replay it and beat your "score".

I think it was also part of the architecture of turning an open world game engine into a linear level based game.

 

Also I recall the whole weapon switching problem after a cinematic was a design decision rather than a tech thing... I remember us mentioning it 3 years before the thing shipped so someone wanted it in.

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The airport was the worst part of the game. If it helps, it's also the last part of the game. I really quite like most of the game, but that final firefight at both the police station and the airport levels drove me crazy. Bah, bad final levels. Why do so many freaking games have to be just fine right up until the end?

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I totally played the new co-op mode, Dead Men Walking, today. It's pretty fun. Interestingly, they recorded a bunch of new dialogue for Max. Some of it, like the "I was running low on ammo!" lines, sound more like the dialogue from the first two games than most of what's in 3 (in 3, he always kind of sounds like he's yelling, even in voiceovers), but the dialogue for when he's killing dudes and yelling at them afterwards (?) is absurd and awful. For instance, I shoot one of those young brazilian gang members in the face and Max screams "YOUR CHOICES BROUGHT YOU HERE!" or "IN ITS OWN WAY, THAT WAS JUSTICE!". Ultra weird considering the single player made the point that all these guys grew up in the slums and had basically no choice between being in a gang or starving.

 

Or as I tweeted: "Max Payne dives through the air and shoots three young men in the face in one second. As he flies, he murmurs "it never gets any easier.""

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The airport was the worst part of the game. If it helps, it's also the last part of the game. I really quite like most of the game, but that final firefight at both the police station and the airport levels drove me crazy. Bah, bad final levels. Why do so many freaking games have to be just fine right up until the end?

I have't yet played the final version, but at the start of the level does airport security call him Señor Payne? Because I thought that was pretty hilarious and hope it stayed in.

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