The lobotomized devotees of the Personal Computer love to tell anybody who will listen about how one of the platform's greatest advantages is that it has the best backwards compatibility in existence. Of course, they neglect to mention that trying to play any game that's more than about 10 years old requires going to the PC gaming wiki, searching steam forums, and eventually downloading weird DLLs and mysterious EXEs from some freak's google drive.
Anyway, after doing that, and also limiting my framerate to 60 so the shootdodge would work as intended, I was ready to revisit a seminal game of my youth: Payne in da butt. Hehe, yeah, Payne to da Max!
It's really quite astonishing that, as the de facto progenitor of the modern third-person shooter (no, Tomb Raider was an action-adventure game, you dolts) they nailed it right out of the gate. Gunplay still feels good to this day, although movement can be a little wonky. I think that might be a side-product of playing it on a 2023 computer, though.
Its biggest problem is that its difficulty can often feel cheap. This is setting aside the famously broken adaptive difficulty: it only lowers on deaths, but if you're playing on PC you'll be quicksaving and quickloading, so it never goes down and by the end of the game the enemies are insane bullet sponges that will headshot you in .000001 seconds. Some areas can amount to trial-and-error, incentivizing that sort of constant quicksaving due to how often offscreen enemies love to chuck grenades at you in stairways, or slide around corners to ambush you with shotguns. I also recommend turning off the aim assist, as bullets aren't hitscan. This is no doubt due to the need to model their movement in bullet-time, but they move so slowly that the auto-aim making you shoot at where enemies are instead of where they will be means you'll whiff if they're moving at all.
Many of Remedy's future trademarks are on display here: Integration of live-action, via comic cutscenes. Fictional TV shows within the game, though limited to one episode each of Lords and Ladies and Address Unknown here. And, of course, experimental storytelling within the game itself.
I feel like an aspect of MP1 that's often overlooked is how goddamn nightmarish it is. Literally, in some cases -- As a kid I think I didn't grasp just how insane it was that this John Woo-inspired action game opens with an on-screen baby corpse. But as Max trudges through this New York Fimbulvetr, apparently brought on by the death of his partner Alex Balder, the grimness is constantly offset by some of the goofiest shit imaginable. It really shouldn't work as well as it does -- the combination of New Yawk Guidos, X-Files-esque government conspiracies, and Norse mythology somehow results in a cohesive aesthetic against all odds.
No doubt this is due in large part to the late, great, James McCaffrey. Without his voice, it's hard to imagine Max being as iconic as he is. This was also a time when 99% of game voice acting was still total dogshit (the non-Max characters are indicative of what we were all used to) so it really stood out.
MP1 isn't the peak of the series, it was surpassed by Max Payne 2, a game whose only flaw is its rather short length (something shared with 1: although How Long to Beat lists MP1 as 8 hours, I completed it in about 5, so I don't know what they're talking about) and equaled by Max Payne 3.
If you want to play Max Payne 1, this is what I had to install to get it working. Limiting your FPS will depend on what video card you're using, but on a 7800xt I found it was the "radeon chill" option in the AMD Adrenalin software. God, I hate PC gaming so fucking much. Too bad the console ports of Max Payne 1 were total crap from a butt. I think the ports of 2 were fine, but I never played them. Time to see what sort of voodoo magicks I have to employ to play 2...
Anyway, after doing that, and also limiting my framerate to 60 so the shootdodge would work as intended, I was ready to revisit a seminal game of my youth: Payne in da butt. Hehe, yeah, Payne to da Max!
It's really quite astonishing that, as the de facto progenitor of the modern third-person shooter (no, Tomb Raider was an action-adventure game, you dolts) they nailed it right out of the gate. Gunplay still feels good to this day, although movement can be a little wonky. I think that might be a side-product of playing it on a 2023 computer, though.
Its biggest problem is that its difficulty can often feel cheap. This is setting aside the famously broken adaptive difficulty: it only lowers on deaths, but if you're playing on PC you'll be quicksaving and quickloading, so it never goes down and by the end of the game the enemies are insane bullet sponges that will headshot you in .000001 seconds. Some areas can amount to trial-and-error, incentivizing that sort of constant quicksaving due to how often offscreen enemies love to chuck grenades at you in stairways, or slide around corners to ambush you with shotguns. I also recommend turning off the aim assist, as bullets aren't hitscan. This is no doubt due to the need to model their movement in bullet-time, but they move so slowly that the auto-aim making you shoot at where enemies are instead of where they will be means you'll whiff if they're moving at all.
Many of Remedy's future trademarks are on display here: Integration of live-action, via comic cutscenes. Fictional TV shows within the game, though limited to one episode each of Lords and Ladies and Address Unknown here. And, of course, experimental storytelling within the game itself.
I feel like an aspect of MP1 that's often overlooked is how goddamn nightmarish it is. Literally, in some cases -- As a kid I think I didn't grasp just how insane it was that this John Woo-inspired action game opens with an on-screen baby corpse. But as Max trudges through this New York Fimbulvetr, apparently brought on by the death of his partner Alex Balder, the grimness is constantly offset by some of the goofiest shit imaginable. It really shouldn't work as well as it does -- the combination of New Yawk Guidos, X-Files-esque government conspiracies, and Norse mythology somehow results in a cohesive aesthetic against all odds.
No doubt this is due in large part to the late, great, James McCaffrey. Without his voice, it's hard to imagine Max being as iconic as he is. This was also a time when 99% of game voice acting was still total dogshit (the non-Max characters are indicative of what we were all used to) so it really stood out.
MP1 isn't the peak of the series, it was surpassed by Max Payne 2, a game whose only flaw is its rather short length (something shared with 1: although How Long to Beat lists MP1 as 8 hours, I completed it in about 5, so I don't know what they're talking about) and equaled by Max Payne 3.
If you want to play Max Payne 1, this is what I had to install to get it working. Limiting your FPS will depend on what video card you're using, but on a 7800xt I found it was the "radeon chill" option in the AMD Adrenalin software. God, I hate PC gaming so fucking much. Too bad the console ports of Max Payne 1 were total crap from a butt. I think the ports of 2 were fine, but I never played them. Time to see what sort of voodoo magicks I have to employ to play 2...