Static Zombie

Max Payne

I haven't played a computer game in a while, so to scratch the itch I picked up the full version of a game for which I'd previously enjoyed the demo: Max Payne. It's a first-person shooter with the twist that you can enter "bullet-time"-- a slow motion mode where you move a little faster than your enemies and can see (and perhaps dodge) their bullets. You can't do a slow-motion Limbo like Neo, but the effect is terrific and wonderfully enhanced by slo-mo cutaway shots of the last enemy in a scene getting knocked backward by your kill shot. In fact, it's the theatrical touches which make Max Payne sing. The story is told via a graphic novel format with gritty painted artwork and gloriously purple prose. The sounds come at you from the right directions. But what prompted me to write this entry was the most creative use of a first-person engine I've ever seen: a dream sequence.

In the game's prologue, Max's wife and baby are killed in his own home. Rather than reading about it in a graphic novel sequence, we play through it in-game. At the end of Part I, Max is slipped a mickey. He falls unconscious and relives those events in a dream. And again, we don't just read it-- we play it. It's brilliant. The rooms of the house are in a gray fog of memory. Corridors extend to infinity. Cries for help echo from nowhere. A door is mysteriously boarded up before our eyes as we try to open it. A trail of blood extends into space. It's a psychadelic nightmare and one of the freshest first-person-shooter experiences I've ever had. Bravo.