I am sure you have all heard of this monster of a game that has recently hit the stores. And I, being the curious consumer that I am, bought it. There are many things to be said about Max Payne. First off, after installing it onto my computer, I had beaten the game two days later and then again on the next difficulty level by the fourth day. Dead on arrival, the hard setting, was beaten a total of six days after i bought it (although, I must admit I cheated this for this setting; some of the replay value had been lost and I could not help but beat it one more time). The fact that I beat it 3 times in the course of less than a week speaks two different things to me. One: "Damn! This is one fun fuckin game!" And two: "Well damn, this fun fuckin game is not very long." As entertaining as it is, I would give it a total of 8 hours gameplay (which is nothing if you are used to longer RPGs like Final Fantasy, but will suffice for a shooter).

Second, I would like to discuss the bugs in Max Payne, and there were a few. None of them were major glitches that delete your hard drive, but rather, small inconsistencies that just piss you off every now and then. I really did not notice any problems until my second time through the game. Near the beginning (and you will have to have played the game to really know what I mean so just bare with me) the pictures during the graphic novel - where a story is told in pictures and captions - the pictures were white. This continued until i restarted the game. Another bug (pictured) causes bad guys to roam around headless with their face at their feet. One or two times so far, I have been kicked back into Windows while the next level was loading - like I said, things that just piss you off. But more than just a couple times while exiting the game, the screen became distorted and my computer locked up. The 1.01 patch was supposed to fix this, but to my experience has not. This is the one bug that is very successful is pissing me off royally. How many of these bugs are attributed to the worthless Windows ME, though, and not Max Payne, I do not know. Also, I might add, Max Payne has no multiplayer support with nothing promised as of yet.

Enough pessimism, now on to the finer aspects of Max Payne! I have just acquired a brand new Pentium III 933 MHz with 384 MB RAM and a GeForce II GTS 32 MB. It looks amazing! This was the first game that actually gave this thing a run for its money. The detail level on the guns, people, and environment is mind-numbing - especially the guns. Prepare to test your computer, because this game will do just that like none other.

How long has Max Payne been out? Maybe 3 weeks or so and already there are tons of mods. I have not seen for myself yet, but the makers have surely made it easy to modify the game. Even better than that, Max Payne makes it incredibly easy to add and play mods. After placing a single file (.mpm) into your Max Payne directory, you start Max Payne and select the mod from an options box before actually running Max Payne. It could not get any easier. The only problem is that once you select a mod and run the game, you cannot change mods from inside the game, you have to restart Max Payne.

The gameplay factor leaves almost no room for improvement. The ideas that were implemented simply amaze me. First and foremost, of course, is bullettime. Bullettime is when you choose to slow down time, without affecting the cursor, so that Max can jump in, and take out a number of guys in a couple of milliseconds. Only, you have to take out so many bad guys in regular time to refill your bullettime. This proves to make Max Payne a one-of-a-kind shooter. As if it was not fun enough without bullettime... :) Another cool creative idea was the fact that the camera follows the bullet as it is shot out of the sniper rifle (only if the shot comes reasonably close to hitting its target). The AI can make it pretty hard at times. They are not so stupid as to blindly run around shooting. Ohh no... They will make it hard for you, ducking behind cars and barrels or even jumping and rolling around just like you can. The story is also very well done. There is even a little tongue-in-cheek humor added that makes it even better, in my opinion. It is the kind of story you can really get into, and there is not much more to say about it than that without giving anything away.

All in all, Max Payne ranks pretty high among my all-time favorite games. I would have to say that it excels in virtually every aspect of a game that matters to me. My advice (for fast computers): If you like shooters, you owe it to yourself to at least try this game once.