Rockstar Games
Max Payne 3 The newest version of this video game, by Rockstar, is set in Brazil, with the title character working as a bodyguard.
As the Champagne flowed amid the giggles, the bodyguard looked out from the rooftop soiree high over São Paulo and stared at the vast slum below. He turned to his partner in arms and mused, “Nothing like the view of extreme poverty to make a penthouse cocktail party really swing.”
.
Max Payne used to be a cop in New York, but after his wife and infant daughter were killed, he set off on a murderous quest of vengeance. He ended up running down some of those responsible, but he never outran the guilt that plagued him for failing to protect those he loved most. Max drank away a few years in Hoboken ratholes. He took a lot of pills. And now, near the end of the line, he has ended up in Brazil’s biggest city, supposedly looking after the wealthy Branco clan: the industrialist, the trophy wife, the cokehead younger brother and the various members of their retinue.
As he put it: “The family we were protecting were local celebrities, rich parasites with delusions of humanity. The kind of people who end up in glossy magazines or body bags, depending on how their luck runs.”
You know the type. Or at least you will if you play Max Payne 3, the sleek, stylish and brutal new shooter from Rockstar Games.
After the better part of eight years in development (the last Max Payne title was released in 2003), Max Payne 3 is a taut and compelling action game wrapped in the sumptuous, gritty and delightful production detail that is the Rockstar hallmark. That means pitch-perfect writing and voice acting, luscious and realistic visual design, and by far the finest musical taste in gaming. And oh, yeah, the actual gameplay of leaping through the air while firing hurricanes of bullets at bad guys is a lot of fun too.
I’ve said much the same before, but it bears repeating: No one in video games does the real world like Rockstar. Sadly, hardly any other studio even tries. Now I love demons and aliens and zombies and dragons and spaceships as much as anyone. But once in a while I want to play a video game that feels as if it were set in some approximation of reality — even if it’s a violent, drugged-out and profane approximation of reality. And no one delivers a dose of perverted reality like Rockstar, whether that’s Grand Theft Auto, Red Dead Redemption or L.A. Noire, or more obscure efforts like The Warriors or Bully. Or now Max Payne 3, set for release on Tuesday for Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. (A PC version is expected on May 29.)
Max Payne 3 is obviously rated M for Mature, not only because of the language but also because of the lovingly rendered violence. This series pioneered the use of slow-motion bullet time in video games, and this latest installment embraces its heritage. You know that if Rockstar is going to make a game in which you can watch a bullet tear off someone’s face, it’s going to look fabulous in all of its gory detail. And it does.
Unlike Grand Theft Auto or Red Dead Redemption, the new Max Payne is not an open-world game. Those other games are about setting your character loose in a vast virtual landscape, whether a version of New York City, as in Grand Theft Auto IV, or an expanse of the Old West, à la Red Dead. There you are free to wander, indulging in side quests and activities or pursuing the main story line.
The Max Payne games, however, are narratively driven, essentially linear third-person shooters. Third person means that you actually see your character on the screen, rather than appearing to inhabit the character, as in a first-person game. As in many action or adventure games, you don’t have any choice about where to go or what to do next. You start a level; kill a few dozen or a hundred thugs, paramilitary soldiers or corrupt policemen; and (you hope) make it to the end alive. If the bad guys blow you away, you restart at a previous checkpoint.
After acquiring the Max Payne franchise around 2003 from its original creators, Remedy Entertainment of Finland, Rockstar executives considered converting this universe into the open-world mold that the company pioneered. In the end, they wisely refrained. Instead of a sprawling 50-hour experience along the lines of Grand Theft Auto or Red Dead Redemption, Max Payne 3 takes only 10 to 15 hours to complete in its basic story mode.
One of the other reasons this game spent so long in development — it was first meant to be released at least two years ago — is that Rockstar engaged internal design, programming, art and production teams from all over the world on this one project. Many game companies prefer to have almost everyone working on a game in one place, or at least in the same city. But on Max Payne 3, Rockstar’s brain trust in New York coordinated with teams in Canada, Britain, around the United States and elsewhere in Europe.
In the end, though, they produced a focused, coherent and excellent entertainment experience. The shooting and combat mechanics are very good, but, as in all Rockstar games, the real touchstones are dialogue and visual design and the verisimilitude they provide.
Most shooters these days are set in military war zones. Here you’re fighting through slums called favelas, gleaming office towers, dank sewers and brothels. Angry men with guns constantly scream invective at you in very real Brazilian Portuguese.
Rockstar had been planning to withhold subtitled translations of the vile curses being thrown at you. But an early downloadable patch is planned to add them. The Portuguese curses are far more obscene than anything that even Rockstar would include in English, though I suspect that they are entirely realistic, in the sense that if you were really being chased down by members of an incensed Brazilian street gang because you had killed some of their friends, they would probably be yelling some pretty nasty things.
A few days after that rooftop party, Max and the cokehead brother, Marcelo, take a helicopter to a nightclub across town. In a rare reverie after dissing a soccer player across the V.I.P. lounge, Marcelo asks Max, “What do you do about life?”
Max (played wonderfully by James McCaffrey) sneers in self-loathing. “Look at me,” he says. “I’m standing in a nightclub listening to music I can’t stand. I’m 5,000 miles from home. I’m armed, and I’m drinking. You don’t want to listen to advice from me, Amigo.”
Marcelo laughs and says, “Oh, Max, I love you man.”
He’s not alone.
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