Max Payne 2
By AhmadMetallic 1 Comments
This second part will take you through the sequel in all of its glory.
Just like the first blog, click on the YELLOW WORDS within the blog below will enlarge a picture on-screen.
Origins
I had beaten the first game 3, maybe 4 times up until 2005 without even knowing that a sequel existed. And when I did, I remember downloading a demo from Cnet's Download.com and finding a slightly stocky, creepy pornstar-looking man in a long (too long) black coat rocking my beloved Max's guns and imitating his style. The game also had passed the photo/painting line and clearly landed on the photographic, fancy looking visuals.
I love thinking about this. This is practically the very first gaming experience in my life where I cared about a game so much that my wrath screamed NNNNNNOOOOOOOOOOOOO at the thought of a "part 2 game" that did things differently.
I've come a long way in hating on sequels, no wonder I've given Crysis 2 more kicks than a baby in a mother's stomach.
Anyway, the reason I decided to finally get the game and play it escapes me. Trying to think about it, I draw a blank. I think it's because my 9th grade classmate at the time was a big fan of it and, being the gamer extraordinaire that I was among my peers, I got pissed at the idea of him knowing a bunch of Max Payne that I didn't know. I also simply wanted to discuss it with him as a friend, I wasn't crazy or anything. Promise.
Download the game and the game's installed, place a shortcut on my then-XP desktop and the game's launched.
Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne (2003)
I was 14 years old and wat is this?
Why is this pornstar telling me what happens in Max Payne like he was there? I was there, he wasn't! And why does he have Max's voice? Bare in mind that, like I said, I wasn't too familiar with sequels at the time, especially of story-driven and character-heavy games, so this felt all kinds of odd. I felt like I had stepped out of my room and, instead of stepping into my familiar house hallway, I'd suddenly found myself bare-foot on the cold metal floor of an alien ship.
OH MY FUCK WHAT IS THIS?
Okay, now that I've captured the warm loving vibe I received this game with for the first time as the intro movie played, let us move on, shall we?
[YouTube: MP2 main menu theme] <== Familiar, heartwarmingly sorrowful Max Payne music in the main menu, and a familiar menu layout, art and design. I like familiar things. So this is good.
:::PART I: The Darkness Inside:::
--[Prologue]--
The game begins with a familiar comic stripstyle cinematic, a big mansion in the dark of night, the rain falling down on it while, much like the beginning of first game, the sound of sirens echo in the horizon.
Mona's exhausted voice goes "God, I turned out to be such a damsel in distress" (**Reference to what she said when she met Max in the first game).
"They were all dead. Love kills. Did I love her? Was there a choice? The past is a gaping hole. You try to run from it, but the more you run, the deeper, more terrible it grows behind you, its edges yawning at your heels."
I was surprised. Maybe even a little shocked. When the elevator doors closed in the Aesir skyscraper in the first game, I thought that was gonna be the last time I see her. Max hadn't loved her in the first game, he didn't get a chance to, so she must have a role in this sequel.
Either way, Max changing the sorrowful heartbroken tone to one that is puzzled and confused by love just felt strange. It's as if I had expected him to stay true to his wife forever. Somehow.
Here you get to see her new sexualized face for the first time.
Wake up in a hospital, all kinds of mindtripping art, the new Max staring into your soul, one of the greatest disturbing introductions ever. You actually get the vibe of his painful psyche from the get go.
"I opened my eyes, and everything slid into focus. She was dead. I was hurt. My crime, what I had done, was like a hungry pit behind me. I had to run, as far away from it as possible."
You run through the hospital, impressed by the graphics and visual style, and the moment you dive head-first into the first armed asshole you run into, you see how much more fluid the physics and animation are. The enemies and surroundings are no longer stiff objects, they move when force is applied to them.
Running along I came across a TV. Oh, how I loved watching the Max Payne TV...
Made a quick stop to see what's on the telly.
It's a show that only had like 1 minute of air time in the first game (since Lords and Ladies dominated the first game's TV.) But it felt much more developed and relevant in this sequel, so I was sure I'll be seeing more of it.
Run into some more bad guys, then Jim Bravura who yells at you, the old man gets shot for a full 10 seconds by dual Uzis, you jump into an elevator and find yourself in the morgue.
A quick day dream of kissing Mona, the first time you ever see Max in an intimate or sexual situation. Then he snaps out of it and sees the woman he just discovered was dead.
I remembered this level from the demo I resented in the past. It's the warehouse level.
Max explains to us why he's not in prison since he got arrested in the ending of the first game. Driving his car somewhere, he gets an APB on his police radio talking about gunshots in a warehouse. The warehouse belongs to his friend from the first game, the Russian mobster Vladimir Lem, so Max decided to check it out.
Drop off at the warehouse, check it out, you run into a peaceful CLEANER guy who tells takes you to his manager, and boom he turns on you with his cleaner buddies and you start shooting.
"the perps were masquerading as cleaners." Explore the warehouse and find it's full of weapons (weapon factory), and surprisingly we find the old Ragnarock neon sign (fan servic yo) and we find a newer-looking sign that says Vodka. What's that all about? We'll see!
Run into Mona Sax 2.0 for the first time and your penis starts tingling. Uh-oh. She escapes. The cleaners kill the warehouse manager, (once again a woman dies because of Max...... que the revenge music) then you get saved by your NYPD colleague, Winterson, as they escape.
Later that evening....
Vlad is under attack by Vinnie Gognitti, you have one of the most exciting shootouts in the game going through the familiar yet different club, running with Vlad's right hand man, a blonde russssian carrying an AK-47. Hell yea! By the way that guy fucking LOVES Baseball Bat Boy. [VIDEO]
You kill Gognitti's mobmen, Gognitti flees, and you save Vlad.
"Max! Dearest of all my friends." After talking to him you go home.
"Home, sweet home. Something in the night felt like a door had been opened, an echo of the past, an old monster snapping its eyes open in the depths of my brain.
"I hadn't slept in a long time. When I did, my dreams were nightmares."
DRUM ROLLL........... IT'S A
Dream sequence! Here you begin to believe that this is a real Max Payne game. Mona's suspect mugshot gets slipped under your door, then you begin chasing her through your building's hallways until you find her deadin the morgue. Why is she dead in your dream?! Also, boobs.
"I had woken up to a knock at my door. Mona, I was wondering when you'd show up."
"I'm not here to kill you. Aren't you going to ask me in?"
The brilliance that hits you in the face here is that you begin to realize that Remedy is incorporating the TV shows in the game. While Max was asleep dreaming, a madman in the TV show Address Unkown was talking about knocks on his door, and being chased by bad guys, and stuff like that. Then it all happens to you. Fucking brilliant.
Then you realize that the trippy TV show you saw in the hospital in the opening level was the same show, and that it has been paralleling your life all along. It had the same mad man and he was talking about being accused of murder.
Alan Wake much? ;)
Fan service again: You find Max Payne 1's infamous yellow-ish shirt in your bathroom (HELL YEAH), jump from ledge to another, run into your female neighbor who blasts one of the attackers out of her room with a shotgun with offers you painkillers. Then you reach the sniper's nest.
"I'd found the sniper's hideout. Room was full of surveillance equipment. They had been spying on me for days, weeks, months even. My every reaction observed, recorded, analyzed. The place was the proof every paranoia dreams of."
Then this funny shit happens. [VIDEO]
Run into a bum and a hot chick who tell you to get the special elevator password from the janitor, and....
So this is pretty fucking funny. Also that janitor was singing something about the night, that sounded like a cool tune.
Watch some good old Lords and Ladies in your dead neighbors' living rooms, then something explodes and the building catches on fire, you go outside and OWN THOSE MOTHERFUCKING CLEANERS.
--[CHAPTERS 6, 7]--
Mona calls you up at work and invites you over to her place. Winterson begins suspecting you.
Once again the game references itself within itself to create a more believable world. Mona lives in a funhouse, one that is BASED on the crazy TV show Address Unknown.
Here's a picture gallery of the amusement madhouse (funhouse) Mona resides in:
Gallery
Such potential for amazing shootouts in this mad house. WHY AM I RUNNING THROUGH IT ALONE WITHOUT ANYONE TO KILL?
Mona has a Lords and Ladies poster on the wall. God damn! You approach her bathroom and hear the water pouring down. She's showering.
But that's not the only thing she's doing.
Walk in on her because it's sexier than waiting for her to get out, check her out from behind, then you begin talking. You discuss the Inner Circle, the secret society from the first game, headed by Alfred Woden, who promised you to make you a free man again if you kill Nicole Horne.
Mona tells you she has connections to The Inner Circle, and she promises to help. You jump in the car and head to a fancy apartment building where she claims her connection guy lives.
"She wasn't telling me the whole truth."
Mona - "The circle goes back to centuries-old Masonic cults, corruption and assassinations reaching all the way to presidential level."
Max - "Right. And here I was thinking conspiracy theories had gone out of style."
When you reach the building you find the good ol' black cleaner vans parked outside.
"We are here."
"So are they."
Max enters the building and heads to Mona's friend's apartment while she sits behind the monitors and helps you via an ear piece.
YES, MAX PAYNE 2 HAD EARPIECES WITH A FEMALE VOICE ON THE OTHER SIDE BEFORE IT WAS COOL.
You find a - lot - of - dead - bodies. Including Mona's man. Then the police arrive and arrest Mona.
::Part II - A Binary Choice:::
Now you're in the police station, Bravura yells at you for working with a suspect. Then he assigns you to a desk job... laaaaaaaaame!
"Fraternizing with the enemy. I had stepped over the edge. The cartoon moment when the gravity waits for the coyote to realize his mistake before the plunge."
You get to run around listening to people. This sort of open diverse environment and real-time human interactions around you is what, I feel, distinguishes this game the most from MP1. I have to thank Rockstar for whatever Grand Theft Auto influence they had on this game.
I mean, is this amazing/hilarious or what?
[VIDEO]
After you explore the 3-floor police station and try to interact with the policemen around you as much as you can, including watching TV with them as they sip on hot chocolate (and possibly be a jerk by turning the TV off and having them yell at you and turn it back on), and also trying to sneak a peek at a fellow officer taking a shit, you feel Max waiting for you to quit fucking around and go downstairs to the prison to talk to Mona.
Max is an eager teenager now, you gotta obay that penis baby. To the lock-up!
Max runs down there, and once again you have hilarious Max Payne 1-esque conversations happening between the NPCs
[VIDEO]
"That's fucked up!" I laughed so damn hard when I stumbled upon this gem of a conversation for the first time.
Go to Mona's cell, talk about shit, watch The Bum throw up in his cell and laugh at the cop who had to wipe it clean for the tenth time, then BOOOM you hear an explosion, the cleaners (fucking CLEANERS!) run in with guns, Mona hides under her bed until they pass and steals the keys from the dead cop and flees.
Kill the motherfuckers AGAIN (getting sick of these jumpsuits), then you run after Mona and who drives by? "Max, dearest of all my friends!" Yes, it's Vlad in his VODKA-licensed Mercedes.
I'm sorry, the two mobsters didn't make it. But hey, the bum did! Will we see him again?
Vlad drops you off at the Funhouse, you run in and catch Mona.
--[CHAPTERS 1, 2, 3]--
"A smoke. A whiskey. For the sun to shine. I want to sleep, to forget. To change the past. My wife and baby girl back. Unlimited ammo and a license to kill."
Mona and Max make a run for it, but he falls off a ledge and forces her to go on her own..
"The trouble with wanting something is the fear of losing it. The thought makes you weak."
So, hey, remember when I was upset that the maaaaad funhouse didn't have any combat in it? It does now :)
Long story short, you run through the entire joint killing dudes as the cardboard characters pop up and all kinds of shit happens. With Mona's help of course!
The highlight of this firefight
[VIDEO]
After killing many cleaners, Max jumps into one of their vans as they flee. Jump out when the van stops moving and you find yourself in one of their "bases", so to speak.
A lot of running and shooting through a very memorable building, simply because half the floors were cracked, there was a lot of staircase climbing and ledge jumping. These guys love their chairs.
Then you find a room full of dead bodies..
"Like always, the dead had all the answers I was missing. It wasn't that they weren't eager to talk. Quite the contrary. The dead had plenty to say. And once they started, they would never shut up. Their words would keep you awake at night."
"The bodies, all the evidence of the murders the cleaners had done. All the answers. It would take days to dig through it."
The building catches on fire (again), things start exploding (again), you make your escape and end up jumping on a big scaffolding and falling to your seeming death.
Then Mona comes to the rescue. Literally.
--[CHAPTER 4, 5, 6]--
You run in with a massive sniper rifle, kill a bunch of dudes, snipe some more dudes, roflol kill cam, kill some mercenaries, then you reach a high scaffolding where you see Max lying on his ass. You wait for him to get up then you cover him, having to RUN BACK AND FORTH through this series of buildings to be able to see him from all angles as he runs from one side to another trying to find an open door.
Shoot some more dudes, LOL AT THIS SUCKA, maybe pile them up, sail through the air in slow motion, kill a bunch more bad guys and then you hop into an elevator and make your way to the roof where Max just arrived.
And then..........
Watching it is much better than reading words:[VIDEO]
RIP.
"I had a dream of my wife. In it, I murdered her for my lover. [hospital noises of nurses trying to save Max] I had chosen Mona. It felt like I had lost her."
Mona: "You're a real angel, Max."
:::Part III: Waking Up From the American Dream:::
Hell even the name of the last MP2 part is a reference to the name of the first MP1 part.. Trip my balls some more would ya?
--[PROLOGUE]--
"You come to, amidst the wreckage of your own making. Do you stay there, eyes squeezed shut, afraid to move, hoping to bleed to death? Or do you crawl out, help your loved ones, make sure the fire doesn't spread, try to fix it?"
In these nightmares Remedy focused more on showing a man that is confused and struggling to pull himself out of whatever he's drowning in, as opposed to being truly HEARTBROKEN and sorrowful trying to push his demons away (the nightmares of the first game).
That is why instead of running on the trails of his dead baby's blood and crying as she cried, he's more aggressive and persistent, running through the hallways of the hospital trying to chase Mona, his apartment building, the prison where they were attacked and where he FINDS HIMSELF LOCKED UP, explosions occur and Max breaks out, finds Bravura dead, sees Mona on TV, then he goes to his office to find her and Winterson pulling guns on each other, replicating what you watched in the above video.
Max is all like "My name is Paul and this shit's between ya'll" but he didn't have much luck there.
By far the coolest moment in the entire franchise happened during this nightmare prison break out:
[VIDEO]
--[CHAPTERS 1, 2, 3]--
Wake up in the hospital. Winterson's dead. Max killed her, a fellow police officer. She had Vlad's VODKA card in her pocket. Mona's nowhere to be seen. He's unarmed and the enemy mercenaries are here to kill him.
This is thee Max Payne level where you just have to look it up or watch a yourube video of it because it's the perfect I'M STUCK level.
Here's how it is: There's an enemy goon waiting for you outside the locked morgue, you leap out of the room to push him to the ground, then keep running and leaping up the staircase, reach the highest floor, enter it and leap by two more enemies, and then you find yourself stuck in a room full of cubicles with nothing but a painkiller container.
So WHAT NOW? The two enemies enter and they start searching for you, and it never even passes your mind that what the game wants you to do is remain hidden until something happens.
When you figure it out, or watch a video of it, the hospital guard runs in and gets killed, at which point you pick up his MP5 and let the good times begin.
You speak to Woden, who tells you that the commandos belong to your dear friend Vlad and that he's a member of the Inner Circle.
You visit his club Vodka again, formerly known as Ragnarock of course, the place where you saved him the first time around. Kill a whole lot of his goons, SHOOT THAT GREEN GUY, MAX PAYNE 1 RAGNAROCK CATWALKS AW MA GAWD <3 Then find the cleaner's dressing room, pick up the beastly shotgun DAO-12 for the first time (just like MP1 introduced you to the Jackhammer in the ending levels. Remedy love rewarding you with a fat high-fire-rate shotgun, dude). Then you get a clue of where to go next, drive there in a cleaner van and crash the fuck out of it.
On your way there you listen to a tape of Winterson while she was on the phone with Vlad.
"I don't know, is this a crime? Is it against the law to be happy? They haven't seen you with my boy, haven't seen you with me. Miss you, call me."
"The gilding on the mask had cracked to reveal the rot underneath. Winterson's confession didn't wash away my guilt, It made me feel worse. I had a meeting scheduled with Vlad at Vinnie's place."
Anyway we just crashed the van into this building, jumped out to find ourselves in a pretty intimidating New York neighborhood that I remember being very uncomfortable running through all those years ago, especially that the apartment buildings and alleys within it are pretty fucking confusing.