A fool I was to get involved in this madness (Max Payne 3)

[JetMechRadio]

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Max Payne 3 is a game out now for consoles. After years of planning, Rockstar developed the game they wanted, wherein Max wears a Hawaiian shirt, shaves his head and delves into the Brazilian underworld.

As a disclaimer, this is just me typing out a stream of thought consciousness, with minimal spell-checking afterwards. I will most likely revise this later and put my thoughts into a more coherent block.



This is the opening cutscene that starts once you boot the game up for the first time. I have only seen it once, and to that gives it a haunting, nostalgic feeling.

I haven't finished the game; as of now I am around the sixth chapter, and already I have begun thinking about its narrative. Not the plot, mind, but Max Payne himself. Rockstar has more or less preserved the essence of the ever dour, self-narrating Max Payne from his previous games. Whatever plot there is exists only to affect and be affected by Max, who himself stumbles from one setting to the next, blinded by his own drunkenness and remorse as well as the searing flashes of modern society that disgust and disorient him. He responds by firing bullets into each hostile in his immediate vicinity until he and his friends are alone in the room. It's a stark, no survivors policy for every level, something common in the action genre. We make Max Payne murder a score of gangsters on a short stroll through the city because he will die if he doesn't. Max Payne doesn't care if we pause the story to spin him in circles for a few seconds, or if he were to suddenly go looking for golden gun parts. All of this is background noise; he tells particularly no one he has to hurry up or else the people he's supposed to be protecting will die. Max Payne tells us he has nothing to live for: no family, no ambitions, nothing. He hates the modern wealth and all its deception and glamour, he understands corruption as the same in every country, and he cannot ever let go of the lives that was taken from him, his own included. So why doesn't he just stop? Rockstar has written a protagonist who cannot win, who has nothing to win, and who will not stop. The extent of what I can imagine is that if Max Payne were gone then his employer would not have that unstoppable, bullet-guiding force that could only exist in Max Payne, and that's what I find intriguing: Max Payne is a constant; it doesn't matter what he's wearing, if his head is shaved or where he is at the moment, he will always be flying through the air, unloading bullets into the heads of people around him, reflecting the world around him as nothing but emptiness.

Which is neither a good thing or a bad thing, but what I think is a step towards better writing in videogames, the creation of a three-dimensional personality, and an identifiable being that does not change no matter what the player opts to do with controlling Max Payne.

Like I said, I haven't finished Max Payne 3, and all of this would be rendered waste should the game take a sudden shift in gameplay and character. What you guys think about the game? Also, did anyone who played the first two games notice any shift in character in the new game?