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| By Brad Cook Tough guys on the lookout for revenge litter the worlds of comic books and movies: Frank Castle (a.k.a. The Punisher); Dirty Harry; John McClane. Now you can add a videogame character to that list, courtesy of publisher MacSoft: Max Payne. |
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 We can do this the easy way or the hard way. |
He’s the star of the new action game Max Payne, and he was built to take on the bad guys in Mac OS X, where the rock-solid stability of the OS means no interference with the action. His tale is one of tragedy and revenge told with generous nods to the film and comic book stories that inspired it.
“In Max Payne, we have tried to make a Hong-Kong-action-meets-film-noir-detective story and boil that down to as playable and entertaining a computer game as we could,” explains Saku Lehtinen, art director at Remedy Entertainment, which developed the game.
Go ahead: Make Max’s day.
It’s Time for Bullet Time
Max is a New York City detective living what he thinks is the American dream: a wife and child, a house in the suburbs, and a good job with room to grow. Then he comes home one day and discovers a nightmare: intruders have murdered his family. Devastated by the loss, he throws himself into the investigation of their deaths.
The trail he follows leads him into the seedy underbelly of New York’s crime world, and eventually he is framed for a crime he didn’t commit. On the run from the mob and the police, he desperately tries to find out who was really behind those awful murders and why he was set up for a fall. This is where you enter Max’s story.
You view Max from a third-person perspective, which means that you see him as he moves through the environment, as opposed to looking through his eyes like you would in a first-person shooter (FPS). This comes in handy when you employ his secret weapon, which the team at Remedy dubbed “bullet time;” when you activate it, your opponents’ movements slow to a crawl, and you have ample opportunity to aim for a perfect shot at them.
Take out the bad guys with bullet time.
It’s similar to the effect used in the 1999 movie The Matrix, but Lehtinen points out that “our prototype engine in 1998 had time-scaling features designed just for this effect, and we knew that we wanted to make slow motion gameplay into a new and unique feature.”
There’s a limit to your use of bullet time, though you can replenish your supply as you eliminate bad guys.
“Clever usage of bullet time is essential for the player’s survival,” notes Lehtinen. “And the best part is that while being used, it’s just incredibly fun to play and extremely cool to watch.”
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Adds MacSoft product manager Al Schilling: “It’s amazing to watch Max dive to the left, in slow motion, while being able to put the crosshair right between the eyes of the bad guy. I’m sure you’ll see something similar to bullet time in a lot of games in the future.”
An Emotional Roller Coaster
The team at Remedy employed not only the usual cinematic cutscenes to tell Max’s story but also static comic book pages that give the game its film noir feel. Lehtinen says that Frank Miller, best known for his moody take on Batman in the classic graphic novel “Dark Knight Returns,” was a primary influence on those sequences. “In general,” he says, “we’ve read a lot of graphic novels from a variety of modern masters and tried to reach a similar quality, and naturally adapt everything to meet our game’s technical and story demands.”
Detailed, gritty graphics so real that you’ll
swear you can feel the cool nip in the air.
swear you can feel the cool nip in the air.
Schilling adds that “the emotional involvement in this game is incredible. Playing it will definitely run you through some emotional highs and lows.”
The story takes you through grungy underground subway stations, seedy hotels, a grimy riverfront, and other New York City locations as you help Max uncover the truth. Eventually the trail leads you to a ritzy penthouse, but will Max be able to convince the police that he was set up, or will he end up another tragic hero?
Just one of the many obstacles facing Max.
A Good Platform for Games
Lehtinen is the person at Remedy who worked with Westlake Interactive on the Macintosh version of the game, and he says he’s glad that “Apple has gone to great lengths to make the Mac a good platform for games. I have every reason to believe that in the future we will see the best games be published on the Mac and they will be great.”
You can find your copy of Max Payne at the online Apple Store, a Apple retail store, or an Apple authorized reseller near you.
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It’s lock and load time, so we’ve outlined weapons and cheat codes that Max will have at his disposal throughout the game.   
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