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The Max Payne remake is likely years away, but one ambitious modder cranked out an 'RTX on' remaster of the original game's first levelJan 14, 2024 - PC GamerRay traced lighting, man. I often feel like I can do without its beastly hits to performance in my games, but then I'll see a transformative use of it that makes me want to slam that "RTX on" button. Modder Slasks Psybunker's demo for ray tracing in the original Max Payne (first spotted by DSOGaming) is one such dinger... Read more.James McCaffrey, the voice of Max Payne, has diedDec 18, 2023 - PC GamerMax Payne and Alan Wake voice actor James McCaffrey has died after a battle with cancer, according to a TMZ report. He was 65... Read more.Remedy's Max Payne remakes and Control spinoff are now in 'production readiness' but the success of Alan Wake 2 might mean they're still a long way offOct 31, 2023 - PC GamerAlan Wake 2 is Remedy's big project of the moment, but it's far from the only thing the studio is working on. Today, as part of its most recent financial report, the company shared a look at how its other projects, including a sequel to Control and remakes of the first two Max Payne games, are coming along... Read more.Gaze upon PC gaming's greatest facesAug 31, 2021 - PC GamerThe great philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein once said that the face is the soul of the body, which, upon reflection, doesn’t make any sense whatsoever. Surely the soul is the soul of the body, hence why it's called 'the soul'. That'll teach me to start off writing articles by googling 'Profound quotes about faces.' Wittgenstein, what the hell did he know?.. Read more.Max Payne's original face and voice team up to prove that 20 years later, he's still got itJul 23, 2021 - PC GamerIt's hard to believe but Max Payne, the neo-noir shooter that gave us bullet time, madly over-the-top dialog, and one of the most enduringly famous scowls in all of videogames, is now 20 years old. To celebrate the big birthday, Remedy creative director Sam Lake and Max Payne voice actor James McCaffrey got together to prove that the tragic, grizzled detective has still got it... Read more.20 years on, Max Payne is still an action masterpieceJul 23, 2021 - PC GamerIt's Max Payne's 20th anniversary today, so we're re-running this article from last year about why it's such an enduring classic... Read more.The story behind Late Goodbye, the song that defined Max Payne 2Aug 21, 2018 - PC GamerAs a Max Payne 2 fan, the opening chords of Late Goodbye by Finnish band Poets of the Fall always give me a shiver of nostalgia. The atmospheric song plays over the end credits, but has always felt like the game’s theme to me. When I think about Max Payne 2, I think of that acoustic guitar and those low, swelling strings. But in an example of developer Remedy’s knack for clever world-building, Late Goodbye is more than just a credits song: it’s threaded into the game itself, and deeply connected to the story. “We have in-game television shows in Max Payne 2 that become a larger part of the world, such as the Address Unknown theme park,” says Sam Lake, creator (and face) of Max Payne, lead writer at Remedy, and co-writer of Late Goodbye. “In the same way, I didn’t want this song to just play over the end credits. I wanted it to exist in, and be a part of, the world we created." You overhear snippets of Late Goodbye throughout Max Payne 2. A janitor sings it as he scrubs graffiti from a wall, and you can hear the song blaring loudly from his headphones. Later, a contract killer plays a beautiful rendition of it on a piano, over which the body of one of his victims lies slumped and bloodied. And after making his way through the Address Unknown funhouse, Max hears his love interest, Mona Sax, singing it to herself in the shower. “It all comes down to world-building,” says Lake. “How do you create an imaginary world that feels like a real place? In a contemporary setting, things like music, television, and movies are very much present in our daily lives. And when you’re building a world, these details become opportunities to bring colour to it and add to and comment on the story’s themes.” While studying screenwriting at the Theatre Academy of Finland, Lake wrote a treatment for a movie script that would eventually become Max Payne 2. “Coming up with these stories is a winding road,” he says. “You try something, it doesn’t work, and then you go a different way. Early on, the idea was that Max would be involved in some kind of traumatic event and forget all about it—except for a snippet of a song called Late Goodbye.” Lake worked on the script for a month before deciding to take it to Remedy and turn it into Max Payne 2. In the earliest version of the script the song would awaken Max’s memories of this traumatic incident, and he would realise that it was playing on a car radio while it happened. But in the end, it didn’t play such a pivotal role in the storyline—an example of that winding road. Now Lake needed someone to write the song. Luckily he was close friends with a songwriter, Marko Saaresto, who had just formed a new band. “Sam and I have been friends since childhood, so the connection was already in place,” says Saaresto, co-founder, lead vocalist, and primary songwriter in...What's the most hyped you've ever been about an upcoming game?Jul 21, 2018 - PC GamerThis weekend, we've asked the PC Gamer writers about the upcoming games that have made them the most excited over the years, sometimes from reading ancient issues of our own magazine. You'll find a mix of old and new games in here, and we'd love to hear your choices in the comments below too. We've also thrown in some answers from subscribers to the PC Gamer Club membership program via our exclusive Discord channel. Find out more about the PC Gamer Club here. Tyler Wilde: Max Payne I remember reading a preview in PC Gamer which stated that you could go from an indoor environment to an outdoor environment seamlessly—and in New York City! That was really all it took to get me hyped. I was a Quake 2 map maker, and the best you could really do there is have an outdoor area with a skybox surrounded by architecture. The idea that I could walk around inside an NYC apartment building, and then walk right outside into the street was huge to me (and with physics!). I was getting tired of sci-fi settings at the time, too. In the late-90s and early 2000s, even most historical war shooters were mods (this is before MoHAA and Call of Duty) and there wasn't a lot of modern day stuff (there was Rainbow Six, but that wasn't really up my alley). So I was playing a lot of Action Quake 2 (a mod that attempted to turn Q2 into a modern day action movie) and watching movies like Enemy of the State and Rush Hour and wondering why games weren't reflecting that stuff. And of course I'd seen The Matrix. So Max Payne became my obsession after I read that preview—the only game I wanted. I don't recall feeling let down at all when it came out. Evan Lahti: Starsiege: Tribes Image source: MobyGames I owned Starsiege: Tribes for a full year before I had internet. I had the instruction manual, which featured generous descriptions of the Diamond Sword, Blood Angels, and other factions. I had the CD-ROM, but all I could access were a handful of dull tutorials and some demo files (replays, basically) of the developers playing real matches—just another way that Tribes was years ahead of its time, now that I think about it. I bided my time, writing fan fiction of imaginary battles. I don't know if a game has ever built up in my mind so much... and then actually delivered on the fantasy I'd cultivated in my mind. Tribes was the first shooter I'd played with bases—the whole concept of bases with tunnels, generators, turrets, and infrastructure that could be attacked and defended was so cool to me in '98-'99. It paved the way for addictions to stuff like Unreal Tournament's Assault mode in '99, which, thankfully, featured bots. Tim Clark: Operation Wolf The one which springs immediately to mind is Operation Wolf on Amstrad CPC 6128, a conversion of the arcade game which had a big metal Uzi strapped to the cabinet. I first played it on Eastbourne Pier (...Great moments in PC gaming: Max Payne's faceJul 3, 2018 - PC GamerGreat moments in PC gaming are short, bite-sized celebrations of some of our favorite gaming memories. Can a man's face be a moment? This one can. It's a photograph wrapped around a low-poly head to represent the angst-ridden gunslinger Max Payne. It's a picture of Remedy writer and designer Sam Lake, who chose to represent the character's deep pain at the loss of his family by scrunching up all the parts of his face at the same time. Should we do another take, maybe more brooding and serious? No, Sam. This is it, the expression Max Payne players will be looking at for 12 hours. Nailed it. It is the face of a man so cross his eyebrows have gone to war over the middle of his face. It is the face of a man engaged in a deep internal conflict with a bad curry that won't quit. It makes me unreasonably happy whenever I see it, and I have played a lot of Max Payne. I'm convinced it would have been a lesser game if the studio had used a more conventional look. It's part of Max Payne's oddball personality. It also reflects the make-do-and-mend nature of the first game's development. Faced with limited resources, the devs at Remedy just put themselves in the game to save money. Max Payne 2 dropped the Sam Lake grimace for a new head based on the actor Timothy Gibbs. Lake still continues to appear in the surreal video skits you can find on televisions in Max Payne 2 and Alan Wake. It's not quite the same. It's a stretch to say that Max Payne was ahead of its time for giving its hero a real human face—among others, Bowie gave his likeness to Nomad Soul a few years before—but I think it's a rare example of a game character being memorable purely because of their demeanour. Max eventually evolved into a generic thug over time, but I'll always remember him as this goofy hardboiled hero, narrating his own revenge tale in overwrought Raymond Chandler-eque monologues. Quantum Break developer Remedy Entertainment is working on two new gamesJun 8, 2016 - PC GamerFinnish studio Remedy Entertainment has been around for more than 20 years. In that time, it's managed to release Max Payne and a sequel; Alan Wake and a sequel; and, earlier this year, Quantum Break. (There's also its first game, Death Rally, which it remade in 2011, but nobody's ever heard of that one.) It's not exactly a blistering pace of development, which is why Remedy's decided to split itself into two teams, working on two separate projects at the same time! First things first: we ll continue supporting Quantum Break, which became the 'biggest-selling new Microsoft Studios published IP this generation.' It s something we re extremely proud of, so thank you to all of our fans for making the game a success and our long-time partner Microsoft for helping us create something unique, Remedy wrote in a State of the Studio blog post. As for the future, we have some very exciting news to share. Moving forward, we want to create more games and hopefully get them out more often. In order to achieve this, Remedy has expanded into two game development teams, the message says. For a while now already, we ve been developing a brand new Remedy game with a new partner. Our second team is working on an early concept, which will turn into another Remedy game sometime in the future. Sadly, neither of the two projects Remedy is currently working on is a new Alan Wake game, although it added that we re exploring opportunities in other mediums to tell more Alan Wake stories. Beyond that, though, it plans to keep a lid on what it's getting up to for a good while yet. We can t wait to show and tell you more about these new projects, but if there s anything we ve learned from the past, it s that we should have the patience to announce games when they re ready enough, Remedy said. So don t expect us take the stage at E3 or gamescom this year. The PC Gaming Show returns to E3 on Monday June 13, featuring game announcements, updates to existing favourites, and conversation with top developers. You can find out what to expect here , and also book free tickets to attend in person at pcgamingshow.com . The PC Gaming Show will be broadcast live through twitch.tv/pcgamer from 11:30 am PT/2:30 pm ET/6:30 pm GMT, but be sure to tune in beforehand to check out The Steam Speedrun , in which one lucky winner will buy as many games as they can in three minutes. How to play Max Payne on Windows 7/8Feb 12, 2015 - PC GamerThe Trippiest Video Game LevelsFeb 4, 2013 - KotakuSurreal stages, events, or gameplay that somehow just don't fit have always been present, and even expected. Their crazy graphics, weird aesthetics and ideas make sure that we have absolutely no idea what's going on. But they have their charm, they are funny, or they're simply part of the experience—and so we love them. We collected a bunch of them below. Bad News in DmC source: DmC Chapter 10 The Cardbridge In Alice: Madness Returns source: Alice Wiki The Nightmare Scenes In Max Payne source: Max Payne's first nightmare LSD Dream Emulator source: LSD Dream Emulator Wiki Inside The Red Dragon In Rayman Origins source: Rayman Origins Dragon Trailer Yume Nikki source: Yume Nikki Wiki The Space Harrier Stages In Bayonetta source: Bayonetta Chapter 14 The Final Stage In Beautiful Katamari source: superadamsworld's LP Goro Majima's Karaoke Minigame In Yakuza: Dead Souls source: Yakuza: Dead Souls - Goro Majima Karaoke Stage 7 In Parodius source: cubex55's LP There are probably a lot more mind-cracking levels or games, so you should submit your own picks below (with visual support)! These Deal Breakers Make Me Give Up On A Video Game Within The First HourJan 16, 2013 - Kotaku When it comes to deciding what game gets my attention and why, I am absolutely ruthless. I don't care how much better it's going to get, I don't care that it's actually an amazing game and I just have to give it a chance. No. If you mess up in the first hour of a game, I'm done. I call these missteps 'deal breakers,' in reference to when there is something you can't overlook in dating—something that outweighs all other redeeming qualities. Deal breakers don't have to happen in the first hour, of course—most of them do for me because once you've already invested hours into a game you might feel obligated to finish what you started. There's almost this expectation, right? That you can't talk about a game unless you've played it from start to finish, even if we're not talking about a review or anything. This expectation/guilt is what drove me to finish Max Payne 3, even though I think I outright dropped the controller when Max said that even he has no freaking clue what's going on in the game anymore. Early on though, there's no remorse. It's quick and painless to drop a game. Recently I tried picking up Planetside 2. I liked MAG; I'm excited by the idea of large-scale warfare. I figured that Planetside 2 would be a good idea to try out, since it's an MMOFPS that promises "epic, massive combat" in battles that might last "days or weeks." Alright, cool. That sounds like a great premise! Count me in! So I boot up the game, I pick my faction, and I'm dropped into a match. I see players all around me, they're running someplace else. I look at my map. I don't know where to go or what to do, really. Early on, there's no remorse. It's quick and painless to drop a game. But I figure the best thing to do is to just follow other folks—I mean, this is a shooter, right? How complicated can the objective be? I'm probably supposed to go somewhere, capture a point or something like that. Simple stuff. All else fails, I know that left click shoots. I play for twenty minutes, following people, going off on my own, scaling buildings to get a better view of what's happening. I die a few times. At best I understand there's an area where I'm supposed to be, but I have no idea what to DO there. So I stopped playing. Could've looked it up. Could have asked people. ...Could play a game that just gets it right instead of rewarding shoddy introductory levels where nothing is explained. I'm not even sorry; again, no remorse—there are games that get it right and those are the ones I'm going to spend time with. Then we have games that treat me like an absolute idiot and overexplain everything—the tutorial never effing ends. I hate those too, and have been known to stop playing a game if it becomes too grating. But at least these set ups make it so that I actually know what the heck is going on! Planetside 2's approach, where little is explained, CAN work. The most sophisticated introduction to a game is the one where nothing is explicitly said, a...How HEALTH Made That Amazing Max Payne 3 SoundtrackJan 10, 2013 - KotakuThe band HEALTH's killer Max Payne 3 soundtrack was easily one of the best of last year, and a chunk of the reason Max Payne 3 was among my personal top games of 2012. This video from The Creators Project shows the band talking about the process of scoring the game, focusing on the stadium level (maybe my favorite music in the game) and that climactic late-game moment when the vocals kick in. They've also shared some of the musical "stems" they used over at the Creators Project blog. You can listen to those below, and check out the various ways the band would layer sounds to make the music more or less intense. If you've played that stadium level as many times as I have, this stuff will be very familiar. HEALTH's John Famiglietti points out that numbers 2 and 4 are dominant stems, so they won't mix. Nifty. Makes me want to go crack wise and dodge some sniper-fire. HEALTH Breaks Down Their Score For Max Payne 3 Proof That The Best Thing In Max Payne 3 Is Messing With The Hilarious, Glitchy Bullet TimeJan 10, 2013 - KotakuI can't tell you how many hours I've lost in Max Payne 3 doing exactly what YouTube user birgirpall is doing here. Poor Max. There he was, brooding and going on about not saving the girl and what is my butt doing? Trying to do 'trick shots' with his body. Can I clear this gap? Can he fit through here? What happens if I bullet time off this ledge? Oh my god, why is fire a one hit kill? Whoops, I got stuck in this place I wasn't supposed to go. Let's see where else I'm not supposed to go! Dead, dead, dead. Geeze Max, you're no fun. But sometimes it wasn't even a choice. There were some parts where I knew I had to move forward, but I couldn't find the way up. And apparently Max dearest can't jump or climb a freaking step, so I ended up dramatically lunging over the smallest of inclines. It's stair climbing, Max Payne style. You wouldn't get it because you don't know how screwed up the world is. Nothing nearly as bizarre as how birgirpall manages to make Max go flying after colliding with a scared partyer though. Woah. I broke Max Payne 3 The Best Video Game Music of 2012Dec 13, 2012 - Kotaku You press a button, and the beat drops. Forward you fly, straight into the perilous unknown, beats pushing against your eardrums as you push back against the controller. Tempo and harmony swim together, and you lose yourself in the rhythm of play. 2012 has been a fine year for video game music. The finest in recent memory, I'd argue. We've seen soundtracks of every shape, size and tonal color, compositional collections complementing games that have incorporated harmony and discord in ingenious, exciting ways. Granted, my affinity for this year's music is at least in part because it was the year I started running Kotaku Melodic, and so my awareness of all things musical and video gamey has been at an all-time high. But as the list below demonstrates, this year was something special any way you look at it. It was a year in which game design and music composition moved ever closer, where composers and instrumentalists played vital roles in development teams, and where game-makers demonstrated a greater than ever understanding of the many things video games and music have in common. Here, in no particular order, are our picks for the best video game music of 2012. Gravity Rush I was expecting to like Gravity Rush, but I wasn't expecting its soundtrack to cast quite the spell it did. Sweeping and old-fashioned, Kohei Tanaka's score conjured old Hollywood in a way that few games even attempt. It mixed Django-esque gypsy jazz with rambunctious orchestral arrangements to build a tone all its own. I chose this tune, "Gravity Days," because it so well captures the soundtrack's charm. Though it was hard not to pick, "Pleasure Quarter," which marked the moment when I truly fell for Gravity Rush. The color palate switches; neons dot the night sky, the violin kicks in, and Kat takes flight. Hotline Miami Even among this heady list, the Hotline Miami soundtrack stands apart. Assembled by a collection of artists, it channeled the 80s-tinged, neon-drenched funk of the game perfectly, and is entirely listenable on its own merits. This track, "Miami" by Jasper Byrne (whose soundtrack to his game Lone Survivor is also outstanding), perhaps best captures the energy of the game. But other tracks from M.O.O.N., Perturbator, Sun Araw all elevate Hotline Miami to a level of deep, almost filthy glamor. XCOM: Enemy Unknown It's not an easy thing to make a turn-based game seem fraught and action-packed, but XCOM: Enemy Unknown managed it with energy to spare. Part of that is due to the game's brilliantly tense mission design, but some credit belongs to Michael McCann's brilliant score. McCann lent XCOM the same futuristic flair for the dramatic that he brought to last year's Deus Ex: Human Revolution, and his combat music gets me pumped like no other. Mix that with the eerie, keening sounds of a quiet ("too quiet") battlefield, and you've got one of the best strategy soundtracks in recent memory. Botanicula Few game soundtracks have ever charmed me like Botanicula's. When ...The Dark, Troubled Thoughts of Cat PayneNov 6, 2012 - KotakuThe litter was calling me, like granulated pieces of my broken past. But pooping on the floor was all I had left. They'd taken everything else from me, that night my world came crashing down. A knife in the dark, a cold table. My manhood, gone, along with the rest of the garbage. Her scent is what brought me back. That hint of sex, and cheap perfume, that told me she was out to get laid, and wouldn't be back to feed me until morning. Cat Payne In Da Club: A Musical Moment Few Video Games Get RightOct 25, 2012 - Kotaku Games take us to all manner of fantastical, unlikely places. But as good as video games have gotten at accurately recreating a space-marine shootout or a mountaintop dragon battle, there's one thing developers are still learning how to create: A dance club. Many games try to create thriving urban environments for players to occupy, and there's nothing that says "thriving" and "urban" like a packed, sweaty dance club. Unfortunately, until very recently, games have been very, very bad at rendering realistic dance clubs. This scene from Vampire: The Masquerade: Bloodlines (a game which I love, I should say) best exemplifies the sort of awkward, embarrassing antics you'd see in early video game dance clubs. There just wasn't enough processing power to make the club as hazy, loud, or crowded-feeling as it needs to be to be convincing. I love dancing at The Asylum, but mostly because it's so endearingly goofy. There's nothing sadder than an empty dance floor, though, as evidenced by this video from Star Wars: The Old Republic. It's like being at an unpopular kid's Bar Mitzvah. I remember playing Mass Effect 2, when I first arrived at the Afterlife bar, I was incredibly impressed with how alive it felt. (Now, when I visit, I'm more aware of how empty it is.) Still, it's a pretty good scene, if only in how it builds up to the entrance to the club. I liked the vibe of The Hive in Deus Ex: Human Revolution. The audio may not have been quite right, but it conveyed an icy, cool energy that worked with the game. Don't know how I feel about the random chicks gyrating around the place, but hey, no video game club is perfect. Rockstar have long understood how dance clubs feel, once again demonstrating their preternatural ability to be ahead of the curve on this sort of thing. Even with its now-primitive graphics, Vice City's Malibu Club is a pretty convincing club: It paves the way, of course, for the much more convincing clubs in Grand Theft Auto IV and its expansion chapters: The dance club scene in Max Payne 3 may represent the pinnacle of video games' representations of dance clubs so far: Nice. The thrumming bass, the way that dialogue instantly gets cut out and muffled, the fact that you can't understand what the hell anyone is saying. There are some shortcuts—see through the smoke and mirrors of the lens filters and fog machines and you can tell that the dancefloor animations are somewhat repetitive and limited—but all the same, this club feels more authentic than any before it. A huge part of creating a convincing digital dance club is the music and more specifically, the way the music sounds. It can't just be the regular background music that plays during the game—music in a club is thrumming, physical, oppressive. You can't hear anything over it, and as a result everyone is shouting. On top of the pounding bass, there's a high-frequency scream of reverberating voices. It's not an easy thing to get right, making it all the more remark...Max Payne 3, Now Available in Black & WhiteAug 21, 2012 - Kotaku Taking a page from LA Noire's case notes, Rockstar's Max Payne 3 will on August 28 be adding something called "Noir Mode", which is a tidy term for "playing the game in black & white". It fits with the game's noir overtones, I guess, but given so much of Max Payne 3 is spent in the ridiculously over-saturated Rio, it seems almost a crime to rob your eyes of the city's lush colour palette. The New Jersey sections, though? Well, they're just about perfect for it. Max Payne's Miserable Life Still Looks CoolAug 3, 2012 - KotakuThis video starts off slow, showing you just how depressed and lifeless poor Max is, but it really picks up once some of Max's, um, "friends" come around. Max Payne's life might be full of misery, but at least the special effects are pretty awesome. Max Payne: Bloodbath
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