February 12-18, 2004

naked city

Expressions of Payne

THE FALLING DOWN OF MAX PAYNE: Why just walk into a room when you can leap sideways?

If the bullets don't get you, the metaphors will.

by Patrick Rapa

You don't wanna live in Max Payne's world. It's dark, rainy and cold. Everywhere you go there's a TV blaring, a door that won't open, an elevator that doesn't work and blurry windows. A brooding cello score hovers overhead. And nine times out of ten, there's a perp just around the corner looking to put a bullet into your gut.

Max's daily stress is compounded by some impressive personal demons. He's a gritty cop -- Lava soap gritty -- haunted by memories of a dead wife, an equally dead child and all the killing he had to do to avenge how dead they are. Reznor-ian flashbacks strike like lightning. Voices echo in his head.

But most inescapable is Max's nonstop internal monologue. The similes flow like blood from the neck wound of hideous torment. Or something. Max does it better. And he does it often.

Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne (Rockstar, PlayStation2, xBox, PC, $49.99) is many things. A cinematic video game, obviously. A noir-ish comic book escape. A timeless story of love and/or bullets conquering all. But mostly it's a vehicle for over-the-top narration from the double-titular main character.

"There was a blind spot in my head -- a bullet-shaped hole where the answers should be," he tells you in the beginning of this, his second grim romp. You don't need to have played the first Max Payne game. The sequel will fill you in on the backstory ad infinitum. Ad nauseam, even.

Payne's got one of those voices -- simultaneously silken and gravelly, like Grape-Nuts in whole milk. He moves humorlessly and unstoppably. He just can't have a good day. He is a man of singular purpose and not much joie de vivre. (Fans of 24 know the type.)

Payne's internal expositor is always on, and often baffling.

Max Payne on love: "Kissing her, I felt the cold laws of cause and effect."

On co-inky-dinks: "Like all the bad things in my life, it started with the death of a woman."

On … something: "Logic told me that backup must be on its way -- someone must have heard the gunfire. Logic was such a liar."

The wacky adventure begins in a labyrinthine hospital. The controls take some getting used to -- it just feels natural to make Max run backwards sometimes -- but the interactive atmosphere makes learning fun. Just walking around you can knock over tables, IVs, boxes and such. You can also, on purpose, turn on faucets, hit answering machine buttons and make a small pile of soda cans accumulate on the floor in front of the "Cola" machine. There's almost no need to do any of it. Fun though.

Despite all the woozy dream sequences, those early moments in the hospital are peaceful and optimistic. Maybe, you think, Max won't have to kill or be killed today. You must be drunk.

How important are guns to the story? Max doesn't meet anybody -- must be siesta at the hospital -- until he's already found a gun. He can't even punch somebody unless it's with the butt of a gun. (There is no "kick" option, perhaps because there's no plausible way for Max to wedge a Glock between his toes and crabwalk into the fray.)

As the game proceeds into impressively gloomy warehouses, morgues and not-quite-abandoned buildings, our hero kills people and gets their weaponry (grenades, Molotov cocktails, semiautomatic rifles, etc.). And we learn a life lesson: Guns never fall far from the body.

Max is particularly fond of jumping sideways while shooting the slightly more-bad guys in the game's signature Bullet Time mode, wherein time slows down for everybody but him. Easier to kill that way.

Of course, with all the bullets flying around, Max is bound to get hurt. But, where other shooter games might repair characters with little medi-kits or foodstuffs strewn about the various levels, The Fall of Max Payne offers only painkillers. Every time Max starts gushing blood he needs simply to pop a bunch of pills to get better. No bullet-removal surgery. No stitches or gauze. At the end of the game, assuming he survives, Max will have more lead in him than a Bella Vista trinity. But he'll feel fine.

Along the way, Max meets Mona Sax, a pretty lady who really loves guns, too. She's the chick who always gets hit on at NRA mixers. (Naughty nerds love her too: According to numerous dorksites, you can use a cheat code on the PC version of the game to get her naked. The terrorists have already lost.) Mona doesn't flat out shoot Max, but she's not very helpful either. Is she luring him into some kind of sexy trap? Could be.

Poor pill-popping, flashbacking, metaphor-bearing Max. He's had such a hard life, you really hope things work out for him. But he'll be the first one to try to tell you something about not having faith in stuff.

"The past is a puzzle, like a broken mirror," he says. "As you piece it together you cut yourself, your image keeps shifting, and you change with it."

Wait, what?