Max Payne 3. That was for anyone who just wanted the quick answer. Now you can go back to whatever it is you do on the interweb (pursuing or sharing knowledge, socializing with family and friends from far distances, using memes to express a social or political stance that you don't fully understand and only realized you had because, hey internet!) but I still got your hit, so joke's on you.
Dammit, Condescending Willy Wonka! So help me, if you condescend me one more time I will passive aggressive the SHIT out of you!
Oh yeah, I was talking about a game I think. Max Payne 3 came out of left field only because it was in development for so long the population forgot about it. Hell, I'd been looking forward to the damn thing since before it graced the cover of Game Informer magazine in the summer of 2009. Back then it had a fall 2009 release date (I think. Thanks to college, my memory doesn't go much further back than twelve minutes ago. What the hell is Willy Wonka doing up there?), but it didn't end up debuting at retail until May 2012.
I was excited for the game then, and I remained excited until release day. And unlike almost everything that happened to me after learning how to drive, it was not at all ruthlessly harsh and disappointing (well, harsh maybe, in the sense that it's a game about murdering drug dealing human organ traffickers). The opposite occurred. It turned out to be the game that I probably put the most amount of time into last year. And that was the year that included a brand new Halo. No small feat, Max Payne 3, no small feat indeed.
At its core, Max Payne 3 is simply a cover based shooter that is working off two gaming gimmicks, the youngest of which dominated most shooters for this console generation. The aforementioned cover based, or stop and pop shooting (as opposed to run and gun like Call of Duty and Halo, yeah, I named them both, neutrally, in the same sentence and the the internet didn't explode) made a name for itself with Gears of War before it was aped by nearly every other game that had a gun in it. The even older convention is one that Max Payne 3's progenitor invented (read: Stole from the film The Matrix), Bullet Time, in where the user slows down time to easily dodge bullets while nailing headshots and looking like a god damn pimp the whole time. Max Payne 3 deftly molded these two practices together, and did it with panache.
Having been invested in Max Payne as a character since his first game, I enjoyed seeing where he ended up since then. The dude's been through a lot, and it shows. Unlike so many conventional video game heroes, Max isn't buffed out and wearing a suit of sci-fi armor. He's old, his hair is just starting to gray, and he's got quite a gut (see also: the three things that best portray hitting a dead end in life). But he still wears a suit in style, albeit a bloodied one by the end of most missions. What hit me the most was how the player assumes Max has hit rock bottom when the game starts. Turns out that doesn't actually happen until halfway through, and afterwards Max shaves his head and throws on a dirty wife beater because he didn't look quite pathetic enough before.
Rock bottom, rock bottom....ah, there it is!
Image from my favorite gaming website, ign.com.
The most immersive shootout I've ever had the joy of playing occurs near the end in which Max, having lost almost everything, chases the villain and his army into an airport and shoots it out with them in a very long lobby. In the scene, the song Tears by the band Health plays dynamically in the background. They composed the soundtrack to the entire game, but this scene melded gameplay, graphics, sound, and music together in a way that I've never experienced before, and I've been gaming since WAY before it was cool.
Max Payne 3 won no awards. No one recognized it for its story. No one claimed that it was art. No one talks about its stellar multiplayer. Why would they when games like Journey, The Walking Dead, Halo, and Call of Duty all released in the same year? Each of those games is excellent, and each really stands out and deserves all the praise and awards that they recieved. But Max Payne 3 did everything those games did, and if it didn't do them better, it at least melded them all expertly. It's just too bad that it came out so early in the year that everyone forgot about bestowing accolades during awards season, and it came out so far into its own development cycle that everyone else just plain forgot about it.
But why should you read a whole article about the game when there's someone else who can wrap this whole thing up a lot faster?
Condescending Willy Wonka: The Einstein of our Generation. Also, a douche.
Anything standout to you this year that you feel didn't get the recognition it deserved? Feel free to post a comment and let me know.
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