No.0007 Max Payne
When I first played Max Payne on release day back in 2001 (man, I suddenly feel really old) it was one of the first games that I bought with my own money and also one of the first games that I successfully lied about my age in order to purchase! When I got it home I was blown away by it. Not so much the story, although playing it again now I really quite like that as well. It was the attention to detail that had been paid to the guns, and the way those guns interacted with everything else. I had never seen any game capable of having a perfectly clean and intact environment as you entered and then for it to be very obvious that a gun fight had taken place afterwards.
It was the combination of persistent bullet holds, spent casings, spent magazines and dead bodies that was able to create that wonderful sense of destruction. At that time, few games kept bullet decals in the environment for very long, even fewer kept dead bodies around either and no one kept spent casings. I know those things were all made temporary because of hardware limitations of the day but it really has a profound impact when the action calms down for a moment between encounters. As the last thug falls to the floor, clutching his newly perforated guts, you stand up from your whatever John Woo-esq dive you last performed, reload your twin Berettas and think "Man, I really fucked this place up!".
Coming back to the game did however make me realise how much more varied the settings for this kind of shooter have become since Max Payne. You go through slums, construction sites, warehouses, sewers and other shooter tropes that weren't as tired then as they are today. The cut-scenes, shown through graphic novel panels , were a nice touch that I had almost completely forgotten about. It is funny however that I can now tell the images are all just photographs with a few photoshop filters dumped on them. The game is also much harder then I remember! Odds are that I've just gotten soft from all the regenerating health systems that are around today but still! Get too close to a guy with a shotgun and he will easily do 80% damage in one go. The game also had an early example of a dynamic difficulty system. I remember this malfunctioning once making an early boss fight almost impossible when I was young. I had run out of ammunition and couldn't fire on the last remaining guy. After dying several times trying to rush him as he reloaded something switched and instead of him waiting for me to come to him, he came to me and I was killed just as quickly and easily.
I'm really looking forward to revisiting Max Payne 2 now but I think I'll save that for closer to the new sequels release.
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