falling slowly (in bullet time)

Can't believe in hindsight that it's taken me a couple of years to finally go out and pick up the truly outstanding Max Payne 2: The Fall Of Max Payne". True, it's probably because, after spending several weeks tussling, puzzling, and mostly shooting my way through the awesome initial game, it froze on the penultimate level and became an object of great angst and pain. This should not reflect on the game as a whole, of course, because both are mind-blowingly good.

There are very few games that you will look at and be able to say, "This is why I want such-and-such a console." The few that spring to mind have been the Grand Theft Auto series for the PS2, Halo (if you like that sort of thing - not particularly fussed myself, too easy to survive when your life automatically regenerates, ya wusses... want you mummy to complete it for you, too?) , Super Monkey Ball for the GameCube (ok, joking a little there.) I honestly think the two Max Payne outings should be right up there at the front of Playstation's achievements. Why?

It's not the fluid gameplay. It's not the beauty of curving through the air, dodging bullets and returning in style. It's not the brilliant puzzles (which don't need to resort to extremes like Tomb Raider used to... how to kill a T-Rex with a shotgun, anyone?*). It's not even the sheer range of innovative structures brought to what should really be a straight-forward third person shooter.

It's the story. Currently being turned in a Mark Wahlberg vehicle (who to be fair, was probably the only option to play "tortured cop", after Thomas Jane stalled at The Punisher (I didn't hyperlink that one cause you don't want to know how bad it was). Borrowing from every film noir technique ever dreamt up from the 1930's forward, via David Lynch's back catalogue, this is storytelling at it's absolute best. Anyone who has ever sat through the marathon cut scenes in the PS2 Metal Gear Solid games can testify, even the best storyline can be killed if not told in the right way. Payne's saga is so gripping that even though most of the cut scenes are told in narrated graphic novels, you will hang on every single line. It would be criminal not to.

And the gameplay reflects it. The most striking thing about the first game was the nightmare sequences. For the uninitiated, the premise of the game is the murder by mobsters of Payne's family, and his subsequent quest to banish the memories. At least three or four times, the active gameplay returns to Payne's nightmarish memories, warped and haunted, of the scene, and you as the player actually play through his dreams...

The same happened to me today. Sixth chapter of the second game, you walk around an abandoned, warped but terrifying theme park fun house. This sequence does not contribute to moving the story in any way. There are no enemies, no gun battles, nothing necessary other than get to the other side to meet a contact. But the number of times I found myself whacking the bullet time button, diving out of the way, shooting at a cardboard cut-out that had just appeared, and most of all, jumped out of my skin... you become totally immersed in Payne's world, to the point of understanding how the character is haunted. It's an effect most modern filmmakers don't even bother trying any more.

Do yourself a favour. You can get both games preowned for a fiver. Do it now. NOW, dammit.


* In case you never worked it out, I tried sliding underneath him when he stood still and blasted him in the chest with the shotgun. But you got to have huge cajones to try it, amigo... cause everyone knows what happens if you get stuck at the mouth...