You know Max Payne is a different kind of beast when you can call it "funny" and "fun," despite the fact that a baby and her mother get fucking murdered in the opening chapter.
as a kid i had max payne on PC. those nightmare sequences when you have to follow a bloodtrail in the darkness. not gonna lie i had my older brother do that part for me as i watched. the crying baby man idk why but that shit still makes goosebumps form.
Ya gotta start somewhere. And it helps to give the protagonist some sort of motivation. What would you have preferred? Max gets rolled after a heavy night of drinking for $27 and his late father's pocket-watch?
My dad played this game a lot when I was growing up. I'll never forget the time he incidentally saved his game the instant before a mook fired a shotgun into his forehead, dooming his entire playthrough. I learned a _lot_ of new bad words that night. Good times.
My dad would watch me play alot. He loved pulps and thought hard boiled was the greatest gift God gave us since fire. He always said Horne looked like Hillary Clinton lmao
@@digitaldiablo1653 No, autosaves were not common in games like this one at the time, mostly due to the hardware limitations of consoles. If you didn't save or quick-save often enough you'd have to face restarting all the way back to the last time you did save, or even start all over again from the beginning.
Another fun fact - in Max Payne 1, Vladimir Lem is modelled after Marko Saaresto, the vocalist for the band Poets of the Fall, which made the song "Late Goodbye" which is heavily featured in Max Payne 2. It's the band's first ever song. Talk about an amazing start
And then went on to make banger songs for AW1, AW2 and Control. That Remedy has essentially their own house band that makes cool songs for them to incorporate in creative levels is one of the things that makes Remedy so unique in this industry. Nobody does it like them.
Saaresto also worked on MP1 as an artist too- he made the Captain Baseballbat-Boy comics. Just in case anyone wasn't convinced on how awesome this guy is.
@@LudusVan Supposedly the mooks are played by random devs and janitors they found. They didn't have money to hire professional actors so they just kinda used whoever would return their calls lol
A few gameplay tips for new Max Payne players: 1. Use the roll. You're gonna need it. You can use it by running sideways and pressing the jump button. Enemies have a harder time hitting you. 2. Bullets are not hitscan in this game, so you can dodge bullets even without bullet time by just running. Knowing when to run and shootdodge will supply you with way more bullet time when you kill enemies. 3. Shootdodge sideways or away from enemies, you dodge more bullets this way. This is especially useful if you're shooting out of cover or to reach cover. 4. Shootdodging reloads your currently equipped guns, so you can use this to your advantage right when your magazines are empty. You can also bypass reloads by switching guns. 5. The deseet eagle has nearly no recoil, even while shootdodging, so this is incredibly useful at long distances. 6. Don't underestimate the dual berettas, they are consistently useful for most of the game and are very useful for saving up on other ammo. 7. If you are one more gunshot away from being dead, shootdodging while getting hit by a bullet will actually save you from death. It can be a cheap move, but you'll have to act fast since you can still die as quickly. 8. The pump-action on the shotgun can be bypassed and it's totally a broken mechanic. Right after you fire a shell, shootdodging will bypass the pump so can you can immediately fire another round. If you do it right, you can fire up to 3 rounds by the time you've finished. I've played this game since I was 10 years old, so hopefully this will aleviate some of the seemingly unfair gunfights. Love this game still to this day. Good luck and have fun 👍
I've actually done a no bullet time and shootdodge run for the first two games and that roll really carried me through out the entire games. It's basically a free shootdodge cept it doesn't you anything and you get more control.
I forgot to add: the roll doesn't just move in one direction. By that, I mean you can roll around corners and cover, which is very useful for ambush scenarios. The only drawback is that you'll have flick your aim back on your targets. This is easier on mouse than controller, but I have been able to achieve this maneuver for both.
A cool fact for those of us who are even bigger dorks: in Europe there's something called the "demoscene" which is all about using as little space as possible and pushing computer hardware to its limits, we're talking like full realtime 3D on old Amigas. Remedy originally got their start making demos for the demoscene, I think you can still find some of their original demos on UA-cam.
If it weren't for the Euro demoscene crackpots, I think the video game industry would have looked a lot different. There were a lot of wild, hungry men back then, and they were doing things they probably ought not to have been doing... simply because they could. It was a glorious time, glorious.
that is because you guys got the awesome Amiga. We had the Commodore 64 everywhere in America at that time, but never have I once seen an Amiga in real life as a kid growing up in the 80's and 90's in Midwest, USA. NEVER. I always saw it in Magazines, it looks so cool and had so many cool games, but no one I knew owned one, and I have still never seen one at age 38.
I remember having a old demo disc from "Godgames" I think. It had a trailer for max Payne on it and alot of things looked really different. So much so I wonder if remedy didn't just use assets for a Ad Either way I really miss the demoscene
The health meter thing "you can do better" before reloading is ABSOLUTELY what I did in Max Payne. I felt I was the only one. Thanks for making me feel less crazy Civvie.
There's a reason for that; Once you end up in "The Land of Low Health and One-Shots" every pixel of health ends up worth more then gold. You don't ever wanna go back to that land. You can redo what you just learned now and do better, or *have to do better* when your luck and focus dwindles.
"You're in a UA-cam comment section". The truth reveals itself through a green haze: before me were descending walls of text, containing scant spam messages or witty observations for the current video. With each new comment, my own thoughts become dwarfed and lost in this digital ocean. I was in a UA-cam comment section. Funny as hell, it was the most horrible thing I can think of.
I love how Max Payne can have some of the funniest comic panels with something sobering and profound in between guys doing their best trollface impression.
Remedy wants me to play this serious Noir Crime Drama with a protagonist that's constantly trollfacing through the entire game and they are fucking right I will
The writing in Max Payne was in a whole new level. We have never seen anything so poetic and refined in a video game ever. There was nothing like it. It turned what could have been boring comic book panels into something extremely entertaining.
It didn't take itself too seriously, but it felt dead serious. I don't think i've played another game that had quite the same feel, it gave me some type of emotions I haven't felt in a game since. Thief almost had it, I can't put my finger on what it is. Some flavor of surreal.
"She is coming, and Hell follows with her! This is the twilight winter! I am ready to be her son! Her time is now, and all who stand in her way MUST DIE!" That delivery is killer.
Katie crushing on OG Max Payne is the kind of character development that makes this channel stand above the rest of the inmates--I mean "content creators."
@@hansknickerbocker9202 The worst part is the channel's lore makes so little sense that even when Civvie straight up says Katie isn't real... I'm not sure I actually believe that or if that claim was also a bit.
You threw a second grenade in the rat hole. Because if it was the first, a text would appear, saying "You declared war against the rats". It also appears as a secondary mission objective.
I didn’t realize Gary Coleman was a gamer and he had good taste in games! I just assumed he did Postal 2 (which is underrated) because they offered him a lot of money.
I didn't expect us to open with Civvie absolutely shredding Eli and Borderlands, but I'm always here for when "extreme hatred" and "surgical precision" overlap
Just a fun fact I figured out, Max Payne isn't the only person in Sam Lake's family to have a likeness used in the game. Sam's mother's face was used for Nicole Horne, and his father's face was used for Alfred Woden. The whole family's probably in there, somewhere. I miss using real human faces for game characters. By the way, your Vinnie Gognitti impression was so good I didn't even notice he wasn't the one talking after he got shot. That was probably the single best impression you ever did on this channel, not kidding at all. PERFECT.
And Max Payne was already at the later end of that. Where you have a low poly model, but you put a high resolution texture over it and it looks surprisingly good. Morrowind also did it and didn't disappoint. Before that you didn't have the memory for decent quality facial textures and later on games would just model the details. Even Half Life 2, which famously used real peoples' faces, used complex models and didn't just stretch a photo over a vaguely pear shaped blob.
@@Civvie11 When I suggested that the subgun in "Shogo: Mobile Armor Division" might have been a mac-11 and not a mac-10 in the comments. I didn't think it'd be snidely referenced five years later, let alone three times, lmao.
@@Player-10 I've only seen the reference three times. The first was in the "Terrawars: New York Invasion" Christmas video, and I didn't have an active account to comment on it then.
I love how in this Max Payne review Civvie spends the first 7 minutes talking about a terribly cut trailer fight for the inevitably going to be shit Borderlands movie. I love it because it's clearly just a long ass tangent that he left there for shits and giggles and i am all for it
As krieg fan it was very disheartening to learned that they dragged him into this fustercluck of a movie, but i will take solace in the fact that his fight scenes are going to be the only good ones cause you can't fuck up a berserker using a buzzsaw axe to rip and tear everyone, even in a pg13 film.
@@Sonichero151 Even though I love everything Borderlands up to original Tales, and Borderlands 3 is fun to play. I just can't walk into watching the movie, ever. It's clear they don't care about the brand both with the casting and character selection, just a cash grab and Randys personal chance to meet his stars.
When the movie was first announced, like what, r years ago? Oboeshoe Game made a clip of what he thought the movie would be like. It’s pretty good, and Ill watch the movie just to compare the two.
I can tell just from the snippet of the trailer, that whole, 'claptrap pooping bullets' bit is going to go on for WAY beyond it being funny in the final movie.
Goon before he sees Max: "I hate to be stereotyped. I'm not a cold blooded killer. I'm a nice guy. I love my wife and have two boys I'm very proud of. You just have to make ends meet..." Goon as soon as he sees Max: "KILL THE BASTARD!"
Hearing Max saying "Thank you" after shooting down the siren/speaker in the vault is something I will probably never forget. No, thank you, Mr McCaffrey, Max, and Civvie. I also love how back in the day game basically communicated "Look at me, I can be an action game, I can have a story and it doesn't have to be stupid story."
@@Sheridan2LTI love Max Payne but it's not a genius story lol, it's entertaining and fun but nothing really complex. Now Max Payne 2 on the other hand...
@@nisnastNo way in hell you can say Max Payne 1's story is not a genius one but then point to the second game and say that this one is. First game's story is so much superior to second one it's not even close.
The Junkie line, "I think I'm dying. I think I'm dead." has been stuck in my head for roughly a quarter century. There's a hidden level/Matrix tribute that's pretty brutal
My biggest gaming flex to date is that I beat the mobile port of Max Payne on the highest difficulty, all without the ability to crouch or zoom in your sniper scope, because they didn’t give you screen buttons for those actions. It took me a week, but I did it.
I don't remember how to crouch in the mobile port, but to zoom with the sniper scope you had to press and hold that scope button, just like how you hold E to do that in PC.
Max Payne is the game that taught me to quicksave every ten seconds. It's also the game that taught me that doing that sometimes puts you in a situation where you have 1 hit left and you're 3 seconds away from being killed and now you're stuck in a Groundhog Day-like death loop unless you can either think real fast or get real good.
At 15:40, it's funny how you can see the face on the model of the mysterious person who kills Alex, because this was originally 4:3 like everything in 2001 and he was previously out of frame.
Max Payne and even more Max Payne 2 might be the first games I played that really made me care about the protagonist as a character. Max Payne 2 still has one of my favorite endings in any game I've played. "I saw my wife and daughter. They were dead. But it was alright."
@@graphicsgod3 I think is underrated, yeah it probably sold decently but that’s because of R*, Civvie’s dig at rockstar and 3 shows that he’s probably not a fan of it and I feel like that’s how most people are when it comes to 3, it’s got decent stuff but compared to MP1 and 2, eh 6/10 is what i think most would give it, but i still think it’s one of the best shooters Rockstar has made, it gets a 9/10 from me.
@@derpstick5467 I admit i never played 3 because I never liked the idea of it. Part of telling a good story is having a good ending and when you reach the right ending, that's where the story should stop. Continuing the story for the sake of having more will make the story worse, even if the game is still fun. Max Payne 2 ended where this story should end, I don't think there should be more.
@@josephlikely3849 you know how fans of halo 3 feel and I disagree with both camps, I liked halo 4 and max payne 3, though now I definitely feel how you and H3 fans feel but it’s halo 4 for me, at least with the master chief/Cortana thing, they should’ve had halo 5 and infinite focus on something else.
@@sharpfalcon6196 Gotta love when media goes for Brits to play Americans and vice versa lol. I only played the game with Czech dub which i remember being campy as all hell
It was less a Remedy thing and more of Rockstar not caring when it came to porting. The same thing can be seen in the PC port of Manhunt which, thanks to the way the crack works, still triggers the anti piracy anyway. There's a great video about Manhunt's bizarre anti piracy measures by Vladim M just talking about it. It's worth a watch.
@@icravedeath.1200 It's more common than you think. For the longest time, the Steam copy of Rainbow Six Vegas had a crack Ubisoft took from GameCopyWorld and just used that instead of a work around. My guess is it's just laziness combined with a dash of "No one's going to notice". Which, guess what people noticed?
The game that made me realize that video games could have characters and stories that are just as compelling as films or TV. That opening scene of Max walking into a home invasion is still absolutely brutal and terrifying. And it only gets worse with each nightmare sequence. I think my favorite bit of dialogue in any video game is when he's in Lupino's lair and he says "The end of the world had become a cliche. But who was I to talk? A brooding underdog out to right a grave injustice against an empire of evil. There were only personal apocalypses. Nothing is a cliche when it's happening to you." It's perfect self aware writing but it's not smug, it's sincere, it's not going too far with the tone. It fits in the world and lampshades the writing device without being distracting. So what the character is a cliche? What can the character do about it? The only thing he can do.
I love how Civvie can go on a 5 minute long rant/dissection of how trash the Borderlands movie clip looks and still somehow make it relevant to the points he's trying to cover with the rest of the video.
There IS a bit of a connection, given that Max Payne was originally [supposed to be] published by 3D Realms, where Randy worked at a long, long time ago.
As a 13yo in 2001 it didn't hit me just how ballsy it was to start a game with you seeing the bloodied corpse of your character's infant daughter; it'd be ballsy today still
I was 21 so it hit me right away. Video games just didn't do that then. At least not big name, action titles like Max Payne. Stuff like that was reserved almost exclusively for niche, PC games. It was surprisingly to see a true, NYC, noir experience being sold for XBox and PS2. :)
I remember finding a weird, minor bug in this game years ago. If you throw a grenade at one of the transit police you'll kill him with the impact triggering a game over, and if the grenade lands close enough to kill Max with the explosion during the game over camera angle the game will automatically reload your last save. And it also has some good comedic timing. "The pressure was getting to me, I made a mistake I wasn't able to fix" _Explodes, Dies, Loading Screen_
Lots of memorable bits from this, but the one that stuck in my mind was when you're fighting through the tower at the end and hear her over intercom snapping at someone. "What do you mean 'you cannot stop him'? You are better trained, better equipped, you outnumber him at least 20 to 1! Do. Your. Job." Especially because you're barely holding on most likely.
No matter how much we all collectively wish Randy go fuck himself, he still deserves more. The gag in "The Sixth Day" about the clones fucking each other could be real for Randy and he would still not be fucking himself enough.
I'm gonna be the contrarian here and say The Killer is better... Only bc I want the people who haven't seen it to watch it as well (tho I actually might like The Killer more). I shall use trolling and bait posting to spread the good word. Both moves rule, btw, watch 'em both, and both are available digital as well now.
Having played through the game so many times by this point, I actually think Dead on Arrival is a more well balanced experience than the default Fugitive mode. Fugitive's difficulty adapting only occurs if you let the full death animation play out. If you quickload BEFORE the prompt comes up on screen, the game will not lower the difficulty setting (which is a number up to 8 I think). Dead On Arrival is more fair. You're stuck on the max difficulty settings like most people on Fugitive are bound to wind up, BUT the game compensates with BIG jumps in bullet time bonuses from kills, letting you chain bullet time more effectively like in Max Payne 2. It also gives you a fair amount of pain killers and ammo relative to the difficulty and overall just feels more fair than the base game.
Finally, been looking forward to this for years. This is one of those games that earns a spot in your all-time favorites list. I'll always love it. RIP, James McCaffrey. May you make like Chow Yun Fat in heaven.
Rest in peace James McCaffrey, his legacy will always live on and his last performance as Alex Casey (aka Max Payne in a different universe) in Alan Wake 2 gave me chills and I hope to get to hear him one more time in the Max Payne 1&2 remakes
Max Payne works way better with the music turned on. The slo-mo helicopter bit at the end just banks so hard on it. I know, I know, Katie has an easier time of editing the footage without the music, but that implies Max Payne needs editing. It's perfect, and so is Max Payne's face.
"Sam Lake's constipation face." Well funny thing about that as industry rumours apparently say that that the face was inspired by the face Lake made while in the toilet...
I've played MP1 all the way through about 10 times and I've never heard of the dynamic difficulty thing. I didn't even know it was considered a "notoriously hard game"! Don't get me wrong--its tough! Most of what Civie points out are truly difficult sections but I've never seen this game as truly that punishing...but then again I was rolling ;)
Dude, I used to watch NBC's VIPER all the time as a kid. When I heard James McCaffery was voicing Max Payne, I was astonished and floored he got the part. Now, this dude is gone along with the franchises him and Sam Lake contributed with the game industry. This one hit home for me. I'm still missin' this man like I currently miss David Sanborn. Two Tickets to Paradise, I suppose. Rest in Peace, James and David. 👮♂🎷💐🪦🪦
Civvie, I want you to know how special this video is to me. For a while, I was stuck at home after high school. For like 3 years I wasn’t able to do anything. Home life really wasn’t great either. But I had Max Payne on my iPad and I played the HELL out of it. And to see you go over it in such detail, referencing things ingrained in my very memory after all this time, it really made this week better, thank you!
Fun fact: In the comic panels, Vladimir is visually portrayed by Marko Saaresto, the singer of the band Poets of the Fall (who have, I think, been involved with every Remedy game since).
only game I know of where they didn't have a song (might have acted in it) was Quantum break. There was going to be a song (that they released under their own name, not old gods of asgard) but it didn't make it into the game i think because of microsoft's deadlines.
Thank you civvie, it was a nice nostalgia trip. As a child I didn't understand much English, but now I understood the whole story of Max Payne for the first time.
A lot of people talk about Metal Gear and Half-Life changing how games present themselves, but for me, it was always this game. Nothing is ever gonna top being a kid, playing this game, and going, "Holy crap, games can be like this?!" Except maaaaybe Deus Ex and Silent Hill 2. Games are still great, but I'm not sure they've such a leap in a long time.
Right. After experiencing what the game had to offer, it made any game with a Nathan Drake, cardboard cutout protagonist, feel cheap by comparison. Sadly gaming never quite got back to the glory of the early 2000s. Now we have cash-grabs, live services, and cleverly designed slot machines masquerading as 'games'.
I'm not kidding when I say I've been waiting for Pro Payne since your early Blood 2 videos. And you... DEPRIVED US OF IT. Absolutely fantastic work as always, tho!
Blessed be the day, Civvie is covering one of the best and most impactful games of my childhood! The game that taught me that slow-mo dual wield shootouts and hard boiled noir are the coolest things in the world.
This is one of those games that had a huge impact on me when I first played it. It stands out in my memory as one of the first games that I thought had a really, really good story, something I wanted to share even with people who weren't into videogames. The deadpan sarcastic narration of Max is also so good! It does a better job of a "noire" atmosphere than something like LA noire. I think they mastered something that is actually shockingly hard in writing; making the characters sound like actual people. Think about the Finito brothers, even when they're sporting outrageous accents and stupid names, they deliver an ironic reversal of Max's rhetorical question before trying to kill him. I even think Max Payne 3 is a great game, though I respect that it makes some departures from the previous games. The New Jersey chapter especially I think does a great job of characterizing Max as a noire protagonist with one of the classic noire protagonist failings; he doesn't lay down for powerful people, and he's a sucker for a dame. When the mobster starts hitting that girl, Max pulls his gun and points it at the mobster, but the game does not actually pull the trigger. It leaves that to you, and I think it makes perfect sense as a reflexive action from an inebriated Max. Even though you haven't fired, you've just pointed a gun at a mobster, you really don't have much of an option but to kill him. But the fact that it gives you control right then, with bullet time enabled is perfect, it gives you a couple seconds to think "oh man, this was a bad idea, this is going to have consequences later"
So the side and backwards roll give you complete immunity to gunshots (but not explosions) and the shoot dodge gives you a semi-unkillable status, but not immunity to damage and as soon as the slow-mo ends you'll be on the floor and vulnerable to being insta-killed by whoever you left alive. The highest difficulty relies on you rolling into a fight to cause enemies to "miss" their first shot, followed by normally shoot-dodging back into cover/slow-mo headshotting people.
I prefer using the fact that bullet time and normal speed are essentially the same mechanically to dodge most bullets in real time. Knowing that is kind of like opening your third eye for this game.
I just replayed these games like a month ago! I can't express how happy it made me to find out that not only do Max Payne 1 & 2 stil hold up, but I actually like them better than I did when I was a kid. Max Payne 2 especially hits so much differently at 30 than it did at 13.
Fun tip about Max Payne 1, if you dodge to the left or right by pressing a movement direction and the space bar you will dodge the enemy and for some reason instead of shooting or leading their shoots they will always attack in the area where you were standing before the dodge or they will reposition to face you, makes using the pump action a lot easier since its the slowest firing weapon in game.
Collecting evidence had gotten old a few hundred bullets back. I was already so far past the point of no return I couldn't even remember what it looked like when I had passed it.
I love that they used Sam Lake for the design but I only recently realised they used his 'mocap' (well, reference) for the walk and run-cycles: You look at the videos of his running they used to make Max Payne and you realise, you're just *playing as Sam Lake*, down to the way his jacket billows.
Man, core memory unlocked. Used to play the hell out of this game, and after that with the Jackie Chan Mod that made Max have Kung Fu finishes and Martial Arts melee takedowns. It was awesome then and it is still awesome now. Looking forward to you checking out the other 2 games in the series.
my favorite part about max payne 1 is that as a finn, everyone in the cutscenes just looks extremely familiar. like i'm sure i know like five people who look exactly like this evil mob boss and they're all called sami
It's one of the last games from an era where studios basically rendered their friends and faculty from the office into the game as characters, because it was cheaper than hiring professional actors. If you played older games from studios like Origin Systems and Sierra (i.e. Ultima, Police Quest etc.), you can tell. That time had a charm to it that will never come back again. It made you feel like it was gamers making the games. Now it's just Hollywood and academics reading demographic studies from Exel sheets.
@@andypae I often think about that too when I replay turn-of-the-century games. There was enough detail by that point for characters to feel immersively human, but since they were still modeled after random folks who just happened to be available, the characters actually felt like someone you could pass on the street. It made it all feel relatable in a way games haven't really been ever since.
@@andypae welp it was a pretty idiosyncratic and retro choice in the first place to make the cutscenes in what is basically photo-comic format... that format was fairly common in the '80s but long dead by the end of the '90s... it really helps with the unique noir vibe though.
@@tarnetskygge It was the last remnants of a bygone era, maybe 3-4 years before you'd had games that implemented full motion video cut scenes with actors, but those were a thing for companies like EA at the time. By this time everything started to move on into 3D graphics and the FMV gimmick had worn out. You have to remember that having a rig that had CD drives wasn't common at the time, even having an internet connection on your PC wasn't expected. Old pixelated hand-sprited VGA graphics was the shit, it made every game look like a Renaissance painting.
5 місяців тому+33
The sound of the granade smacking into the wall has been living rent free in my brain for 23 years. When all granades up to 2001 had a throw and sound of a aluminium can filled with helium, these grande felt so much more real and dangerous.
@@WildFunguswhat remedy games are you talking about? Because I dont know anything about there being a remedy vampire game and they deffinetly did not make the suicide squad game.
I like to think of Control like "how much cooler can we make our dearest Max Payne? - Just make him FLY. While shooting guns. And also make him grow a pair of tits, that would not go amiss."
@@CopperNick1 The combat in the first one is too repetitive. I love that game but repeating the same thing over and over again gets boring. So even though the first one's combat is better, I prefer the second one for variety.
36:00 Rolling does not make you invincible, it just makes you substantially harder to hit. Enemies in this game shoot where you are, not where you're going to be. I know at some points that may not seem like it's true, because enemies will round corners and nail you, but they're able to do that because they're mid-turn. If not, they can only shoot where you are, meaning strafing is very effective. But here's the real gem: the shootdodge DOES make you invincible until you touch the ground, but there's a catch: Max can still take damage, but cannot be killed. Shootdodging also instantly reloads your weapon if you have the reserve ammo for it, so once you have the M79 grenade launcher you can do stuff like shoot a cluster of enemies, shootdodge in their direction, then shoot another grenade mid-dodge at the floor and not die. You'll be damaged as hell, but you'll be alive. Edit: Did some testing and rolling does indeed allow you to dodge projectiles with i-frames. This includes the forward roll you can do with melee weapons when pressing the shootdodge button. The only thing this doesn't apply to is explosions, which will still damage and kill you, unlike a shootdodge where they will damage but not kill you. Very helpful to know.
@@mocksuxker69 They don't stop, but rolling always has free Bullet Time on it, so rolling immediately after enemy fire can create a good amount of breathing room.
@@mocksuxker69 That's because of *MATH,* the "Shootdodge" *without bullettime* does an enormous amount. The enemies while Max's feet are not on the ground are slowed by about 40% whereas bullets are slowed by *up to 70%* in the case of the snipers. This means while they can *aim* at you, because they are slowed if they do manage to get a "raycast" (invisible bullets that hitscan so AI knows they can shoot as they are aiming at Payne or a target) they will then shoot; which because the bullets are *slowed down drastically* by the time the bullet arrives to where Max was *he's already moved out of that location.* When you *are hit* depending on difficulty it does a few things; normal doesn't allow deaths unless you are *exploded* from any source, that means barrels OR grenades with enemies being *too slow* to raycast to hit Payne. Hard Boiled *breaks this entirely* and kicks you out with the bathwater, you *can die* while shootdodging, but *not during bullettime.* The hardest removes all of those checks and *playing superhero no longer makes you immune to firearms.* This is the real reason why the game gets *"So hard during the harder difficutlies"* because they literally remove the beat-the-game button. The AI slowdown and bullet slowdown for harder difficulties is *greatly reduced* which means *every gunfight ends in a John Woo ending.* TL:DR? You might have played Max Payne 1 and 2; but you haven't beat it. You beat it on *Journalist Mode.*
@@DinnerForkTongue Did some testing and it appears you are correct. Rolling does allow you to dodge projectiles with i-frames. This includes the forward roll you can do with melee weapons when pressing the shootdodge button. The only thing this doesn't apply to is explosions, which will still damage and kill you, unlike a shootdodge where they will damage but not kill you. Edited my comment to reflect this.
This is one of my favorites from you. Max Payne is such a great game. I love the voice acting and writing so much. And holy shit did I not expect to see Randy Pitchford on set for Borderlands lol
I've been playing the Max Payne games for the first time. I thought "Hey did Civvie make a Max Payne video or two? They're kinda old games and he plays kinda old games.. sometimes." About a week later and he drops this... wonderful
I remember accidentally finding a cheese for the bat only section. I stood near the first door after picking up the bat, kept swinging thru the door, and all the mobs simply couldn't get past the door and died like lemmings. If it stayed that way, it should work in some tight corner sections like the cargo ship. Anyway, lots of fond memories from Max Payne 1&2. (edited for grammar)
I never knew that this game had difficulty scaling, when I first played it all those years ago and my dad was completely shocked that I had learned to shootdive-dodge enemy gunshots I just figured that was what the game was trying to teach me and all enemies were always devastating dealers of immediate death. Even replaying it years after the fact and going through the opening chapters while taking minimal damage I just thought "Oh haha I just got lucky." I can't even describe how it makes me feel to learn this without sounding completely insane, but at least it does explain why I always thought all the future Max Payne titles were too easy lmao.
@@misterkefir The exchange between BB and Max is one of the most memorable scenes for me. Simple and direct, but badass. "You can't win this one, Max." "No, but I can make damn sure none of you do either." Never threaten a man with nothing to lose.
This game is one of a handful that basically confirmed me as a lifelong gamer - along with Starcraft, Turok, Red Alert and naturally DOOM. Stoked to see you covering it.
35:12 Lara Croft: _”Helheim,_ Civvie. Various myths use different names but they all refer to the same remnants of the ancient world.” That’s a millennial ass reference if I ever made one. Fittingly Tomb Raider Underworld is also Norse mythology with guns complete with a burning building and platforming on narrow platforms over an abyss expect Tomb Raider’s are stone instead of blood, and the valkyr is blue nanite water that basically turns whoever falls in it into the husks from Mass Effect. You even get to see the Midgard serpent! It’s basically the Duke Nukem 3D aliens’ mining drill and the bad guy’s plan is the same as Doctor Who: Inferno.
Comes for Max Payne, gets a 6 minute sidebar about how shit the Borderlands Movie is gonna be. I was so invested into this rant, I forgot what the video was about until the shifted gears.
Great video, Max Payne was the bomb when I was a kid. I've even met Sam Lake briefly, he seemed very nice. Woden is Odin BTW. Same root word that got us Wednesday.
I MUST mention a really cool thing you past over, Civvie, at 29:41 you can toss a grenade down the dumbwaiter shaft and it blows up the guards down the stairs, it was such a cool moment when I discovered that.
Legendary game indeed! I recall a PS2 playthrough on New York Minute where the save was stuck with ten seconds in the foundry furnace. In between shoot dodge mine detonation and shooting up the leg of the goon coming through the opening door with five seconds left to buy enough time to keep going, I was only able to make it to the beginning of the Aesir building in that run before the five day Blockbuster rental was up.
Funniest bit for me when I played the game back in the day was how painfully obvious it was that every person in the game cut-scenes was an ethnic fin. Nobody looks like a proper Guido mobster. They fixed it in the sequel.
I saw "Norse Mythology with Guns" and was immediately worried that Civvie had decided for some unearthly reason to play "Too Human" and I was concerned for his health.
"Civvie, the Department of Special Corrections isn't real." Also, Civvie forgot about the shotgun you can find in the cabinet near the front door to Max's house in the prologue.
You know Max Payne is a different kind of beast when you can call it "funny" and "fun," despite the fact that a baby and her mother get fucking murdered in the opening chapter.
It's really hard to make such tonal differences work with each other. The gang at Remedy are masters at it.
as a kid i had max payne on PC. those nightmare sequences when you have to follow a bloodtrail in the darkness. not gonna lie i had my older brother do that part for me as i watched.
the crying baby man idk why but that shit still makes goosebumps form.
Ya gotta start somewhere. And it helps to give the protagonist some sort of motivation. What would you have preferred? Max gets rolled after a heavy night of drinking for $27 and his late father's pocket-watch?
@@phydeux
Don't get me wrong, I love this game.
But it could have been a tone deaf disaster.
(btw you described Max Payne 3's tone almost perfectly)
@@CsubAzUrmedve Max Payne 3 is still a good game. Just...different.
Rest in Peace James McCaffery
May the coffee he drinks in heaven give him wings.
He's "A bit closer to Heaven" now...
Yeah, he was the GOAT, shame that he passed so young
I hope the remakes reuse the audio instead of recasting
AND RANDY, KING OF THE OLEAGINOUS THIEVING DORKS, LIVES.
My dad played this game a lot when I was growing up. I'll never forget the time he incidentally saved his game the instant before a mook fired a shotgun into his forehead, dooming his entire playthrough. I learned a _lot_ of new bad words that night. Good times.
certainly sounds like he was going through some max *pain* that night
Can't you go back to an older autosave?
@@digitaldiablo1653Autosave? This was PC gaming in the 90s, my friend.
My dad would watch me play alot. He loved pulps and thought hard boiled was the greatest gift God gave us since fire.
He always said Horne looked like Hillary Clinton lmao
@@digitaldiablo1653 No, autosaves were not common in games like this one at the time, mostly due to the hardware limitations of consoles. If you didn't save or quick-save often enough you'd have to face restarting all the way back to the last time you did save, or even start all over again from the beginning.
Another fun fact - in Max Payne 1, Vladimir Lem is modelled after Marko Saaresto, the vocalist for the band Poets of the Fall, which made the song "Late Goodbye" which is heavily featured in Max Payne 2. It's the band's first ever song. Talk about an amazing start
And then went on to make banger songs for AW1, AW2 and Control. That Remedy has essentially their own house band that makes cool songs for them to incorporate in creative levels is one of the things that makes Remedy so unique in this industry. Nobody does it like them.
@@EldritchAugur And I absolutely love them! Amazing band, amazing studio
POTF is criminally underrated. So glad people are paying more attention to them now, after AW2 and their performance at the Game Awards.
Saaresto also worked on MP1 as an artist too- he made the Captain Baseballbat-Boy comics. Just in case anyone wasn't convinced on how awesome this guy is.
@@EldritchAugurTAKE! CONTROL! TAKE! CONTROL!
Funniest detail to me in this game is that Max is played by Sam Lake in the graphic novel cutscenes and Nicole Horne is played by his mom.
"Hey mom we need you for a photo shoot, here hold this Uzi"
Family goals 😂
and Alfred Woden is played by his dad, think my guy was working some stuff out lol
@@SleepyMook lmao WHAT
@@LudusVan Supposedly the mooks are played by random devs and janitors they found. They didn't have money to hire professional actors so they just kinda used whoever would return their calls lol
@@Catonator I mean if you have the people around why not use them
Props to Katie. You know what's good.
Bottoms up for James McCaffrey. You gave the performance that made Remedy.
A few gameplay tips for new Max Payne players:
1. Use the roll. You're gonna need it. You can use it by running sideways and pressing the jump button. Enemies have a harder time hitting you.
2. Bullets are not hitscan in this game, so you can dodge bullets even without bullet time by just running. Knowing when to run and shootdodge will supply you with way more bullet time when you kill enemies.
3. Shootdodge sideways or away from enemies, you dodge more bullets this way. This is especially useful if you're shooting out of cover or to reach cover.
4. Shootdodging reloads your currently equipped guns, so you can use this to your advantage right when your magazines are empty. You can also bypass reloads by switching guns.
5. The deseet eagle has nearly no recoil, even while shootdodging, so this is incredibly useful at long distances.
6. Don't underestimate the dual berettas, they are consistently useful for most of the game and are very useful for saving up on other ammo.
7. If you are one more gunshot away from being dead, shootdodging while getting hit by a bullet will actually save you from death. It can be a cheap move, but you'll have to act fast since you can still die as quickly.
8. The pump-action on the shotgun can be bypassed and it's totally a broken mechanic. Right after you fire a shell, shootdodging will bypass the pump so can you can immediately fire another round. If you do it right, you can fire up to 3 rounds by the time you've finished.
I've played this game since I was 10 years old, so hopefully this will aleviate some of the seemingly unfair gunfights. Love this game still to this day. Good luck and have fun 👍
I've actually done a no bullet time and shootdodge run for the first two games and that roll really carried me through out the entire games.
It's basically a free shootdodge cept it doesn't you anything and you get more control.
Making use of the roll is the difference between enjoying this game and screaming at the monitor because of how unfair it feels.
Damn some of these I didn't know at all. Thanks for sharing
Also be sure to go into the options and assign a key to bullet time without dodging!
I forgot to add: the roll doesn't just move in one direction. By that, I mean you can roll around corners and cover, which is very useful for ambush scenarios. The only drawback is that you'll have flick your aim back on your targets. This is easier on mouse than controller, but I have been able to achieve this maneuver for both.
A cool fact for those of us who are even bigger dorks: in Europe there's something called the "demoscene" which is all about using as little space as possible and pushing computer hardware to its limits, we're talking like full realtime 3D on old Amigas. Remedy originally got their start making demos for the demoscene, I think you can still find some of their original demos on UA-cam.
If it weren't for the Euro demoscene crackpots, I think the video game industry would have looked a lot different. There were a lot of wild, hungry men back then, and they were doing things they probably ought not to have been doing... simply because they could.
It was a glorious time, glorious.
Future Crew - Unreal and Second Reality 🎉
that is because you guys got the awesome Amiga. We had the Commodore 64 everywhere in America at that time, but never have I once seen an Amiga in real life as a kid growing up in the 80's and 90's in Midwest, USA. NEVER. I always saw it in Magazines, it looks so cool and had so many cool games, but no one I knew owned one, and I have still never seen one at age 38.
I remember having a old demo disc from "Godgames" I think.
It had a trailer for max Payne on it and alot of things looked really different. So much so I wonder if remedy didn't just use assets for a Ad
Either way I really miss the demoscene
Wasn’t the artist who produced the looping music for Ragnarok part of demoscene?
The health meter thing "you can do better" before reloading is ABSOLUTELY what I did in Max Payne.
I felt I was the only one. Thanks for making me feel less crazy Civvie.
There's a reason for that; Once you end up in "The Land of Low Health and One-Shots" every pixel of health ends up worth more then gold. You don't ever wanna go back to that land. You can redo what you just learned now and do better, or *have to do better* when your luck and focus dwindles.
I been doing SELACO like that and its a blast
I do that in a ton of games.
It's less "I can do better" and more "if I no-hit this fight, a future fight might be easier"
This game is ridiculous in the later levels
"You're in a UA-cam comment section".
The truth reveals itself through a green haze: before me were descending walls of text, containing scant spam messages or witty observations for the current video. With each new comment, my own thoughts become dwarfed and lost in this digital ocean.
I was in a UA-cam comment section. Funny as hell, it was the most horrible thing I can think of.
Ok this made me laugh
@@LaNoLaCola Fantacular. 👍
@@LaNoLaCola Well done!
I've read that with James McCaffrey'd voice in my head
blawg thinks he is maximum pain
I love how Max Payne can have some of the funniest comic panels with something sobering and profound in between guys doing their best trollface impression.
Remedy wants me to play this serious Noir Crime Drama with a protagonist that's constantly trollfacing through the entire game and they are fucking right I will
And everyone is doing a bad job at disguising how they still look Finnish
The writing in Max Payne was in a whole new level. We have never seen anything so poetic and refined in a video game ever. There was nothing like it. It turned what could have been boring comic book panels into something extremely entertaining.
It didn't take itself too seriously, but it felt dead serious. I don't think i've played another game that had quite the same feel, it gave me some type of emotions I haven't felt in a game since. Thief almost had it, I can't put my finger on what it is. Some flavor of surreal.
Legacy of Kain? 😢
Max Payne came out two years after Planescape: Torment and The Longest Journey... Maybe try playing games other than shooters one day.
@@thecandlemaker1329 No. Shut up.
@@thecandlemaker1329 you mean random games nobody's heard of? Sure bud
"I have tasted the flesh of fallen angels... This can't be good for me, but I feel great."
-Dude Lupino
The fleeesh... of fall-en ang-ells...
"She is coming, and Hell follows with her! This is the twilight winter! I am ready to be her son! Her time is now, and all who stand in her way MUST DIE!" That delivery is killer.
Jack
It's been 20 years, but I still vividly remember how I almost shat my pants before Lupino's fight when I heard his howling.
*dua lipa
Katie crushing on OG Max Payne is the kind of character development that makes this channel stand above the rest of the inmates--I mean "content creators."
I don't care what Civvie says, Katie is real to me.
@@hansknickerbocker9202 The worst part is the channel's lore makes so little sense that even when Civvie straight up says Katie isn't real... I'm not sure I actually believe that or if that claim was also a bit.
@@hansknickerbocker9202 you beat me to it
@@Brucifer2 I always assumed that was a bit, this is the first time I've considered the possibility that Katie doesn't actually exist... huh.
Of course she exists. I was talking to her just now.
You threw a second grenade in the rat hole.
Because if it was the first, a text would appear, saying "You declared war against the rats".
It also appears as a secondary mission objective.
Gary Coleman, god rest his soul, screamed on G4 about how much he hated the dream sequence level in this game. Civvie, you MUST find that clip.
That's because Gary was a pint-size chad. Gone too soon.
He was hired by Running with Scissors team for Postal 2!
@@graphicsgodyep
@@malcontender6319 Look up Penn and Teller "Brown Dwarf Star". Funniest shit you'll ever see.
I didn’t realize Gary Coleman was a gamer and he had good taste in games! I just assumed he did Postal 2 (which is underrated) because they offered him a lot of money.
I didn't expect us to open with Civvie absolutely shredding Eli and Borderlands, but I'm always here for when "extreme hatred" and "surgical precision" overlap
And like Cassandra....... Civvie was fucking right
Just a fun fact I figured out, Max Payne isn't the only person in Sam Lake's family to have a likeness used in the game. Sam's mother's face was used for Nicole Horne, and his father's face was used for Alfred Woden. The whole family's probably in there, somewhere. I miss using real human faces for game characters. By the way, your Vinnie Gognitti impression was so good I didn't even notice he wasn't the one talking after he got shot. That was probably the single best impression you ever did on this channel, not kidding at all. PERFECT.
And Max Payne was already at the later end of that. Where you have a low poly model, but you put a high resolution texture over it and it looks surprisingly good.
Morrowind also did it and didn't disappoint.
Before that you didn't have the memory for decent quality facial textures and later on games would just model the details. Even Half Life 2, which famously used real peoples' faces, used complex models and didn't just stretch a photo over a vaguely pear shaped blob.
"Civvie, you're in an underground containment facility"
Funny as hell, it was the most horrible thing I could think of.
@@Civvie11 When I suggested that the subgun in "Shogo: Mobile Armor Division" might have been a mac-11 and not a mac-10 in the comments. I didn't think it'd be snidely referenced five years later, let alone three times, lmao.
@@7.62x39mmVTwo that made two of us
@@7.62x39mmVTwo I think its been more than 3 at this point 😅 its been a recurring joke
@@Player-10 I've only seen the reference three times. The first was in the "Terrawars: New York Invasion" Christmas video, and I didn't have an active account to comment on it then.
I love how in this Max Payne review Civvie spends the first 7 minutes talking about a terribly cut trailer fight for the inevitably going to be shit Borderlands movie. I love it because it's clearly just a long ass tangent that he left there for shits and giggles and i am all for it
As krieg fan it was very disheartening to learned that they dragged him into this fustercluck of a movie, but i will take solace in the fact that his fight scenes are going to be the only good ones cause you can't fuck up a berserker using a buzzsaw axe to rip and tear everyone, even in a pg13 film.
@@Sonichero151
Even though I love everything Borderlands up to original Tales, and Borderlands 3 is fun to play.
I just can't walk into watching the movie, ever.
It's clear they don't care about the brand both with the casting and character selection, just a cash grab and Randys personal chance to meet his stars.
When the movie was first announced, like what, r years ago? Oboeshoe Game made a clip of what he thought the movie would be like. It’s pretty good, and Ill watch the movie just to compare the two.
I can tell just from the snippet of the trailer, that whole, 'claptrap pooping bullets' bit is going to go on for WAY beyond it being funny in the final movie.
I don't remember the Siren character being 60, what the fuck?
jesus christ civvie that gognitti impression was so good and seamless i cant even
Time?
@@kevinberg4623 20:04
@@kevinberg462320:04
@@kevinberg4623 19:43 (scene start) 19:58 (transition). Also turn on subtitles.
@kevinberg4623 20:00
"Hey!"
"Hohld it!"
-slomo machinegun fire
"AHHHHHhhhhhhhh"
Those enemy voice lines have been burned into my brain for 23 years.
Goon before he sees Max: "I hate to be stereotyped. I'm not a cold blooded killer. I'm a nice guy. I love my wife and have two boys I'm very proud of. You just have to make ends meet..."
Goon as soon as he sees Max: "KILL THE BASTARD!"
"What the?!"
Boom.
"UuuaaahhhOoohhhhh!"
@@ASpooneyBard I still do that happy whistle that goons make when they're patrolling. I do it from time to time when I'm going somewhere.
It's Payne!
"WAHT DAH?!"
"aHhhhh"
Hearing Max saying "Thank you" after shooting down the siren/speaker in the vault is something I will probably never forget. No, thank you, Mr McCaffrey, Max, and Civvie.
I also love how back in the day game basically communicated "Look at me, I can be an action game, I can have a story and it doesn't have to be stupid story."
It's a genius game with a genius story and gameplay.
He says it when you shoot the speaker in the lift playing muzak too
@@Sheridan2LTI love Max Payne but it's not a genius story lol, it's entertaining and fun but nothing really complex.
Now Max Payne 2 on the other hand...
@@nisnast the genius is in its simplicity and execution
@@nisnastNo way in hell you can say Max Payne 1's story is not a genius one but then point to the second game and say that this one is. First game's story is so much superior to second one it's not even close.
The Junkie line, "I think I'm dying. I think I'm dead." has been stuck in my head for roughly a quarter century. There's a hidden level/Matrix tribute that's pretty brutal
My biggest gaming flex to date is that I beat the mobile port of Max Payne on the highest difficulty, all without the ability to crouch or zoom in your sniper scope, because they didn’t give you screen buttons for those actions.
It took me a week, but I did it.
I don't remember how to crouch in the mobile port, but to zoom with the sniper scope you had to press and hold that scope button, just like how you hold E to do that in PC.
@@pasha_0791 I’m aware that the wiki said this, but it never worked for me.
Nah. You skipped the dream sequence didn't you?
How the fuck is that even possible
@@0962544 how would you? besides, even if they did skip it, it's not really a difficult part of the game
Max Payne is the game that taught me to quicksave every ten seconds.
It's also the game that taught me that doing that sometimes puts you in a situation where you have 1 hit left and you're 3 seconds away from being killed and now you're stuck in a Groundhog Day-like death loop unless you can either think real fast or get real good.
At 15:40, it's funny how you can see the face on the model of the mysterious person who kills Alex, because this was originally 4:3 like everything in 2001 and he was previously out of frame.
Ah, so that's why I was so weirded out. I used patches but never played Max Payne on widescreen.
Indeed, i thought it was B.B who shot Alex when I could use my imagination but B.B's trenchcoat is black with the henchmen having an light brown one.
Max Payne and even more Max Payne 2 might be the first games I played that really made me care about the protagonist as a character. Max Payne 2 still has one of my favorite endings in any game I've played. "I saw my wife and daughter. They were dead. But it was alright."
"I had a dream of my wife. She was dead, but it was alright."
*Late Goodbye starts playing*
To me it was Max Payne 3 that really showed an old man living on the edge and ready to die. So good!
@@graphicsgod3 I think is underrated, yeah it probably sold decently but that’s because of R*, Civvie’s dig at rockstar and 3 shows that he’s probably not a fan of it and I feel like that’s how most people are when it comes to 3, it’s got decent stuff but compared to MP1 and 2, eh 6/10 is what i think most would give it, but i still think it’s one of the best shooters Rockstar has made, it gets a 9/10 from me.
@@derpstick5467 I admit i never played 3 because I never liked the idea of it. Part of telling a good story is having a good ending and when you reach the right ending, that's where the story should stop. Continuing the story for the sake of having more will make the story worse, even if the game is still fun. Max Payne 2 ended where this story should end, I don't think there should be more.
@@josephlikely3849 you know how fans of halo 3 feel and I disagree with both camps, I liked halo 4 and max payne 3, though now I definitely feel how you and H3 fans feel but it’s halo 4 for me, at least with the master chief/Cortana thing, they should’ve had halo 5 and infinite focus on something else.
Another CV-11 banger.
Fun fact: there's a game called El Matador which is basically Max Payne meets slavjank, good stuff, it's on Steam I think.
Though it has a British voice cast with Kerry Shale and Laurel Lefkow (both being in Pursuit Force).
@@sharpfalcon6196 Gotta love when media goes for Brits to play Americans and vice versa lol. I only played the game with Czech dub which i remember being campy as all hell
Fun Fact: The Steam version is actually a crack from a group (who also does demoprods) called Razor 1911.
Remedy must've been impressed in their work then, considering it's legit.
Can't tell you the number of razor 1911 cracks I've used over the years, legit indeed
It was less a Remedy thing and more of Rockstar not caring when it came to porting. The same thing can be seen in the PC port of Manhunt which, thanks to the way the crack works, still triggers the anti piracy anyway.
There's a great video about Manhunt's bizarre anti piracy measures by Vladim M just talking about it. It's worth a watch.
@@TheAdmantArchvile oh, why didn't they just port the game, it's not like they couldn't afford to
@@icravedeath.1200 It's more common than you think. For the longest time, the Steam copy of Rainbow Six Vegas had a crack Ubisoft took from GameCopyWorld and just used that instead of a work around. My guess is it's just laziness combined with a dash of "No one's going to notice". Which, guess what people noticed?
The game that made me realize that video games could have characters and stories that are just as compelling as films or TV.
That opening scene of Max walking into a home invasion is still absolutely brutal and terrifying. And it only gets worse with each nightmare sequence.
I think my favorite bit of dialogue in any video game is when he's in Lupino's lair and he says "The end of the world had become a cliche. But who was I to talk? A brooding underdog out to right a grave injustice against an empire of evil. There were only personal apocalypses. Nothing is a cliche when it's happening to you."
It's perfect self aware writing but it's not smug, it's sincere, it's not going too far with the tone. It fits in the world and lampshades the writing device without being distracting. So what the character is a cliche? What can the character do about it? The only thing he can do.
I love how Civvie can go on a 5 minute long rant/dissection of how trash the Borderlands movie clip looks and still somehow make it relevant to the points he's trying to cover with the rest of the video.
Only Civvie could find a way to mock Randy in a video about Max Payne.
Please. Civvie could find a way to mock Randy at funeral.
@@hoilst265 At Randy's funeral no less. Hell, he could do it at his OWN funeral probably.
@@hoilst265Randy's funeral, perhaps? :p
Randy is to civvie what Peter molineaux Is tò guru larry
There IS a bit of a connection, given that Max Payne was originally [supposed to be] published by 3D Realms, where Randy worked at a long, long time ago.
As a 13yo in 2001 it didn't hit me just how ballsy it was to start a game with you seeing the bloodied corpse of your character's infant daughter; it'd be ballsy today still
The valkyre sequences gave me nightmares when I was a kid playing this lol
Same. I replayed it now many years later and like, "shit, man. This hits hard"
I was 21 so it hit me right away. Video games just didn't do that then. At least not big name, action titles like Max Payne. Stuff like that was reserved almost exclusively for niche, PC games. It was surprisingly to see a true, NYC, noir experience being sold for XBox and PS2. :)
you are 36 year old and still use furry profile picture?
@@Drunde and how old do you have to be before it's socially acceptable for you to start publicly shaming people for just, enjoying things? -_-
I remember finding a weird, minor bug in this game years ago. If you throw a grenade at one of the transit police you'll kill him with the impact triggering a game over, and if the grenade lands close enough to kill Max with the explosion during the game over camera angle the game will automatically reload your last save.
And it also has some good comedic timing. "The pressure was getting to me, I made a mistake I wasn't able to fix" _Explodes, Dies, Loading Screen_
Lots of memorable bits from this, but the one that stuck in my mind was when you're fighting through the tower at the end and hear her over intercom snapping at someone. "What do you mean 'you cannot stop him'? You are better trained, better equipped, you outnumber him at least 20 to 1! Do. Your. Job."
Especially because you're barely holding on most likely.
"f**k you Randy" I never get tired of hearing this.
Amen to that.
We need a Randy insult counter
Civvie's eternal hatred towards Randy is always a joy to listen to.
Greasy...
No matter how much we all collectively wish Randy go fuck himself, he still deserves more. The gag in "The Sixth Day" about the clones fucking each other could be real for Randy and he would still not be fucking himself enough.
I appreciate that Civvie continues to use “goon” in its proper definition
"I released my finger from the mouse. And then it was all over. Civvie seemed to lose his frenzy. The ragged clouds gave way to the stars above."
"I was in a UA-cam comment section. Funny as hell, it was the most horrible thing I could think of."
I had a dream where I read a comment.
It was cringe.
But it was all right...
Haikus are easy
But sometimes they don't make sense
Refrigerator
Every time Civvie mentions Hard Boiled, I have to stop watching the video and go watch Hard Boiled again. The man ain't wrong about it being the best.
I found a copy on vhs for my collection. Fantastic film!
I'm gonna be the contrarian here and say The Killer is better... Only bc I want the people who haven't seen it to watch it as well (tho I actually might like The Killer more). I shall use trolling and bait posting to spread the good word. Both moves rule, btw, watch 'em both, and both are available digital as well now.
@@TheDrLeviathan tbh I think a better tomorrow is the best. especially the beaver version
@@TheDrLeviathan A Better Tomorrow, The Killer, Bullet in the Head and Hard Boiled are all good.
Does it work if someone else says it?
Hard boiled.
Having played through the game so many times by this point, I actually think Dead on Arrival is a more well balanced experience than the default Fugitive mode. Fugitive's difficulty adapting only occurs if you let the full death animation play out. If you quickload BEFORE the prompt comes up on screen, the game will not lower the difficulty setting (which is a number up to 8 I think).
Dead On Arrival is more fair. You're stuck on the max difficulty settings like most people on Fugitive are bound to wind up, BUT the game compensates with BIG jumps in bullet time bonuses from kills, letting you chain bullet time more effectively like in Max Payne 2. It also gives you a fair amount of pain killers and ammo relative to the difficulty and overall just feels more fair than the base game.
Finally, been looking forward to this for years. This is one of those games that earns a spot in your all-time favorites list. I'll always love it.
RIP, James McCaffrey. May you make like Chow Yun Fat in heaven.
Rest in peace James McCaffrey, his legacy will always live on and his last performance as Alex Casey (aka Max Payne in a different universe) in Alan Wake 2 gave me chills and I hope to get to hear him one more time in the Max Payne 1&2 remakes
Max Payne works way better with the music turned on. The slo-mo helicopter bit at the end just banks so hard on it.
I know, I know, Katie has an easier time of editing the footage without the music, but that implies Max Payne needs editing.
It's perfect, and so is Max Payne's face.
I have been hoping for this video for years. Thank you Civvie.
RIP James McCaffery.
"Sam Lake's constipation face."
Well funny thing about that as industry rumours apparently say that that the face was inspired by the face Lake made while in the toilet...
MAX STRAYNE
Max Ayn-al contractions
Max Painal
"Ladies and gentlemen it's the Payne in the butt."
"Payne to the max!"
There's a mod for Max Payne 2 that brings back Max's original face, it even puts him into the comic cutscenes. Highly recommend
6:45 I love that Civvie was still miffed about Druckman talking about AI as a substitution for writers when writing this.
Trying to dispose the last enemy in a gunfight in the most dramatic way possible is an art, in these games.
I've played MP1 all the way through about 10 times and I've never heard of the dynamic difficulty thing. I didn't even know it was considered a "notoriously hard game"! Don't get me wrong--its tough! Most of what Civie points out are truly difficult sections but I've never seen this game as truly that punishing...but then again I was rolling ;)
should have called this video " Propayne: Set the world on fire "
Propayne and pro pain accessories
kek
"Taste the meat AND the heat!"
Should wait to comment until after watching the video.
Them last few levels are a clean burnin' hell, I tell ya wut!
Man this game blasting out of a CRT at like midnight was such a good time back in the day. I gotta play through this game again
Dude, I used to watch NBC's VIPER all the time as a kid. When I heard James McCaffery was voicing Max Payne, I was astonished and floored he got the part. Now, this dude is gone along with the franchises him and Sam Lake contributed with the game industry.
This one hit home for me. I'm still missin' this man like I currently miss David Sanborn. Two Tickets to Paradise, I suppose.
Rest in Peace, James and David. 👮♂🎷💐🪦🪦
Civvie, I want you to know how special this video is to me. For a while, I was stuck at home after high school. For like 3 years I wasn’t able to do anything. Home life really wasn’t great either. But I had Max Payne on my iPad and I played the HELL out of it. And to see you go over it in such detail, referencing things ingrained in my very memory after all this time, it really made this week better, thank you!
I never knew Max Payne was developed by a Finnish studio and suddenly the tone, writing and themes makes a lot more sense.
Fun fact: In the comic panels, Vladimir is visually portrayed by Marko Saaresto, the singer of the band Poets of the Fall (who have, I think, been involved with every Remedy game since).
only game I know of where they didn't have a song (might have acted in it) was Quantum break. There was going to be a song (that they released under their own name, not old gods of asgard) but it didn't make it into the game i think because of microsoft's deadlines.
Only after watching this video did I realise the similarity between Vladimir and Marko, and wondered if that was actually the case.
I discovered Poets of the Fall before Remedy games, so was pretty surprised to see him in a video game that's more than 20 years old
Also the credits song in Max Payne 2 is Late Goodbye by Poets of the Fall
And Nicole Horne is portayed by Sam's mom, lol
Thank you civvie, it was a nice nostalgia trip.
As a child I didn't understand much English, but now I understood the whole story of Max Payne for the first time.
A lot of people talk about Metal Gear and Half-Life changing how games present themselves, but for me, it was always this game. Nothing is ever gonna top being a kid, playing this game, and going, "Holy crap, games can be like this?!" Except maaaaybe Deus Ex and Silent Hill 2. Games are still great, but I'm not sure they've such a leap in a long time.
Right. After experiencing what the game had to offer, it made any game with a Nathan Drake, cardboard cutout protagonist, feel cheap by comparison. Sadly gaming never quite got back to the glory of the early 2000s. Now we have cash-grabs, live services, and cleverly designed slot machines masquerading as 'games'.
@@neill6585 Nice cherry picking.
"Have no fear, Vlad is here
Max, Dearest of all my friends." Will be only a matter of time then
I'm not kidding when I say I've been waiting for Pro Payne since your early Blood 2 videos.
And you... DEPRIVED US OF IT.
Absolutely fantastic work as always, tho!
Blessed be the day, Civvie is covering one of the best and most impactful games of my childhood! The game that taught me that slow-mo dual wield shootouts and hard boiled noir are the coolest things in the world.
Apparently the painkillers were going to be Valkyr. Yes, originally Max got addicted to the very drug that inadvertently got his family slaughtered.
honestly, it'd fit the genre
That would be horribly ironic, thank God they changed it. Would justify why he is so durable though.
I began analyzing every piece of media I consume after I started watching civvie and that is a gift I never knew I needed
This is one of those games that had a huge impact on me when I first played it. It stands out in my memory as one of the first games that I thought had a really, really good story, something I wanted to share even with people who weren't into videogames. The deadpan sarcastic narration of Max is also so good! It does a better job of a "noire" atmosphere than something like LA noire.
I think they mastered something that is actually shockingly hard in writing; making the characters sound like actual people. Think about the Finito brothers, even when they're sporting outrageous accents and stupid names, they deliver an ironic reversal of Max's rhetorical question before trying to kill him.
I even think Max Payne 3 is a great game, though I respect that it makes some departures from the previous games. The New Jersey chapter especially I think does a great job of characterizing Max as a noire protagonist with one of the classic noire protagonist failings; he doesn't lay down for powerful people, and he's a sucker for a dame. When the mobster starts hitting that girl, Max pulls his gun and points it at the mobster, but the game does not actually pull the trigger. It leaves that to you, and I think it makes perfect sense as a reflexive action from an inebriated Max. Even though you haven't fired, you've just pointed a gun at a mobster, you really don't have much of an option but to kill him. But the fact that it gives you control right then, with bullet time enabled is perfect, it gives you a couple seconds to think "oh man, this was a bad idea, this is going to have consequences later"
So the side and backwards roll give you complete immunity to gunshots (but not explosions) and the shoot dodge gives you a semi-unkillable status, but not immunity to damage and as soon as the slow-mo ends you'll be on the floor and vulnerable to being insta-killed by whoever you left alive.
The highest difficulty relies on you rolling into a fight to cause enemies to "miss" their first shot, followed by normally shoot-dodging back into cover/slow-mo headshotting people.
I prefer using the fact that bullet time and normal speed are essentially the same mechanically to dodge most bullets in real time. Knowing that is kind of like opening your third eye for this game.
@@plswhy Yeah, slow-mo is mostly useful for giving the player time to aim headshots to better kill or stunlock enemies.
I just replayed these games like a month ago! I can't express how happy it made me to find out that not only do Max Payne 1 & 2 stil hold up, but I actually like them better than I did when I was a kid. Max Payne 2 especially hits so much differently at 30 than it did at 13.
I remember just unloading the uzi into a couch in Max Payne just to see the awesome particle effects and little tufts of fluff and stuff.
Me but the tile walls in the subway
Fun tip about Max Payne 1, if you dodge to the left or right by pressing a movement direction and the space bar you will dodge the enemy and for some reason instead of shooting or leading their shoots they will always attack in the area where you were standing before the dodge or they will reposition to face you, makes using the pump action a lot easier since its the slowest firing weapon in game.
Yeah, he mentions it later in the review. It's downright critical knowledge for about the Gognitti fight all the way to the end.
So we're really not going to talk about how smooth Civvie's Gognitti impression was at 20:05 ?
....I guess not
Collecting evidence had gotten old a few hundred bullets back. I was already so far past the point of no return I couldn't even remember what it looked like when I had passed it.
Despite the warmth of the summer evening, the chill of nostalgia hit me like a sniper round from a dark window.
I love that they used Sam Lake for the design but I only recently realised they used his 'mocap' (well, reference) for the walk and run-cycles: You look at the videos of his running they used to make Max Payne and you realise, you're just *playing as Sam Lake*, down to the way his jacket billows.
_"It was time for some R&R the only way I knew how."_
Max Payne (James McCaffery)
IT'S PAYNE!
WHACK HIM
Heh, Payne to the Max!
WACK HIM
GET HIM
PAYNE IN THE BUTT
Man, core memory unlocked. Used to play the hell out of this game, and after that with the Jackie Chan Mod that made Max have Kung Fu finishes and Martial Arts melee takedowns. It was awesome then and it is still awesome now. Looking forward to you checking out the other 2 games in the series.
my favorite part about max payne 1 is that as a finn, everyone in the cutscenes just looks extremely familiar. like i'm sure i know like five people who look exactly like this evil mob boss and they're all called sami
It's one of the last games from an era where studios basically rendered their friends and faculty from the office into the game as characters, because it was cheaper than hiring professional actors. If you played older games from studios like Origin Systems and Sierra (i.e. Ultima, Police Quest etc.), you can tell.
That time had a charm to it that will never come back again. It made you feel like it was gamers making the games. Now it's just Hollywood and academics reading demographic studies from Exel sheets.
@@andypae I often think about that too when I replay turn-of-the-century games. There was enough detail by that point for characters to feel immersively human, but since they were still modeled after random folks who just happened to be available, the characters actually felt like someone you could pass on the street. It made it all feel relatable in a way games haven't really been ever since.
@@andypae welp it was a pretty idiosyncratic and retro choice in the first place to make the cutscenes in what is basically photo-comic format... that format was fairly common in the '80s but long dead by the end of the '90s... it really helps with the unique noir vibe though.
@@tarnetskygge It was the last remnants of a bygone era, maybe 3-4 years before you'd had games that implemented full motion video cut scenes with actors, but those were a thing for companies like EA at the time. By this time everything started to move on into 3D graphics and the FMV gimmick had worn out.
You have to remember that having a rig that had CD drives wasn't common at the time, even having an internet connection on your PC wasn't expected.
Old pixelated hand-sprited VGA graphics was the shit, it made every game look like a Renaissance painting.
The sound of the granade smacking into the wall has been living rent free in my brain for 23 years. When all granades up to 2001 had a throw and sound of a aluminium can filled with helium, these grande felt so much more real and dangerous.
That intro, what a soundtrack, I forgot how legendary the OST was
I still hear that menu theme piano
Civvie doesn't often cover 3rd person games, but Max Payne is undeniably massively influential to the FPS genre. He has to.
I mean, if you can call COVER style game one that not only doesnt include any cover system but even doesnt allow you to move while crouched...
@@huru2guru Uumm... You might wanna read what OP wote again. (You got the meaning of 'cover' wrong.)
@@huru2gurulol what
Max Payne is possibly the only video game movie that excels at being a game, a comic, and a movie at the same time.
There's a movie? If it doesn't feel like the comic strips in the game i'm gonna be really disappointed. Or did you mean the game itself?
@@Pax_Mayn3 I mean the game. It managed to be a great comic, game and noir movie at the same time.
I like how Civvie11 randomly became "Every Frame A Pause" for a little while in the beginning.
Shoutout to Remedy for still making weird but good games.
Thank to the Finnish Coffee because they've been putting something into it
@@WildFunguswhat remedy games are you talking about? Because I dont know anything about there being a remedy vampire game and they deffinetly did not make the suicide squad game.
Last time they made a good game was alan wake. Second part is an absolute slop
I like to think of Control like "how much cooler can we make our dearest Max Payne? - Just make him FLY. While shooting guns. And also make him grow a pair of tits, that would not go amiss."
@@CopperNick1 The combat in the first one is too repetitive. I love that game but repeating the same thing over and over again gets boring. So even though the first one's combat is better, I prefer the second one for variety.
36:00 Rolling does not make you invincible, it just makes you substantially harder to hit. Enemies in this game shoot where you are, not where you're going to be. I know at some points that may not seem like it's true, because enemies will round corners and nail you, but they're able to do that because they're mid-turn. If not, they can only shoot where you are, meaning strafing is very effective. But here's the real gem: the shootdodge DOES make you invincible until you touch the ground, but there's a catch: Max can still take damage, but cannot be killed. Shootdodging also instantly reloads your weapon if you have the reserve ammo for it, so once you have the M79 grenade launcher you can do stuff like shoot a cluster of enemies, shootdodge in their direction, then shoot another grenade mid-dodge at the floor and not die. You'll be damaged as hell, but you'll be alive.
Edit: Did some testing and rolling does indeed allow you to dodge projectiles with i-frames. This includes the forward roll you can do with melee weapons when pressing the shootdodge button. The only thing this doesn't apply to is explosions, which will still damage and kill you, unlike a shootdodge where they will damage but not kill you. Very helpful to know.
i'm pretty sure goons just stop shooting when you roll around, i never got hit during my playthrough (even when i rolled right under their noses)
@@mocksuxker69 They don't stop, but rolling always has free Bullet Time on it, so rolling immediately after enemy fire can create a good amount of breathing room.
@@mocksuxker69 That's because of *MATH,* the "Shootdodge" *without bullettime* does an enormous amount. The enemies while Max's feet are not on the ground are slowed by about 40% whereas bullets are slowed by *up to 70%* in the case of the snipers. This means while they can *aim* at you, because they are slowed if they do manage to get a "raycast" (invisible bullets that hitscan so AI knows they can shoot as they are aiming at Payne or a target) they will then shoot; which because the bullets are *slowed down drastically* by the time the bullet arrives to where Max was *he's already moved out of that location.*
When you *are hit* depending on difficulty it does a few things; normal doesn't allow deaths unless you are *exploded* from any source, that means barrels OR grenades with enemies being *too slow* to raycast to hit Payne. Hard Boiled *breaks this entirely* and kicks you out with the bathwater, you *can die* while shootdodging, but *not during bullettime.* The hardest removes all of those checks and *playing superhero no longer makes you immune to firearms.* This is the real reason why the game gets *"So hard during the harder difficutlies"* because they literally remove the beat-the-game button. The AI slowdown and bullet slowdown for harder difficulties is *greatly reduced* which means *every gunfight ends in a John Woo ending.*
TL:DR? You might have played Max Payne 1 and 2; but you haven't beat it. You beat it on *Journalist Mode.*
Are you sure? I remember seeing bullets whiz straight _through_ Max when I dodge-rolled, like his hitbox is disabled.
@@DinnerForkTongue Did some testing and it appears you are correct. Rolling does allow you to dodge projectiles with i-frames. This includes the forward roll you can do with melee weapons when pressing the shootdodge button. The only thing this doesn't apply to is explosions, which will still damage and kill you, unlike a shootdodge where they will damage but not kill you. Edited my comment to reflect this.
This is one of my favorites from you. Max Payne is such a great game. I love the voice acting and writing so much. And holy shit did I not expect to see Randy Pitchford on set for Borderlands lol
I've been playing the Max Payne games for the first time. I thought "Hey did Civvie make a Max Payne video or two? They're kinda old games and he plays kinda old games.. sometimes." About a week later and he drops this... wonderful
I remember accidentally finding a cheese for the bat only section.
I stood near the first door after picking up the bat, kept swinging thru the door, and all the mobs simply couldn't get past the door and died like lemmings.
If it stayed that way, it should work in some tight corner sections like the cargo ship.
Anyway, lots of fond memories from Max Payne 1&2.
(edited for grammar)
I never knew that this game had difficulty scaling, when I first played it all those years ago and my dad was completely shocked that I had learned to shootdive-dodge enemy gunshots I just figured that was what the game was trying to teach me and all enemies were always devastating dealers of immediate death.
Even replaying it years after the fact and going through the opening chapters while taking minimal damage I just thought "Oh haha I just got lucky."
I can't even describe how it makes me feel to learn this without sounding completely insane, but at least it does explain why I always thought all the future Max Payne titles were too easy lmao.
“I don’t know about angels, but it’s FEAR that gives men wings.”
I fucking love the pulpy writing of this game so much.. It's amazing.
@@misterkefir The exchange between BB and Max is one of the most memorable scenes for me. Simple and direct, but badass. "You can't win this one, Max." "No, but I can make damn sure none of you do either."
Never threaten a man with nothing to lose.
This game is one of a handful that basically confirmed me as a lifelong gamer - along with Starcraft, Turok, Red Alert and naturally DOOM. Stoked to see you covering it.
35:12 Lara Croft: _”Helheim,_ Civvie. Various myths use different names but they all refer to the same remnants of the ancient world.” That’s a millennial ass reference if I ever made one.
Fittingly Tomb Raider Underworld is also Norse mythology with guns complete with a burning building and platforming on narrow platforms over an abyss expect Tomb Raider’s are stone instead of blood, and the valkyr is blue nanite water that basically turns whoever falls in it into the husks from Mass Effect. You even get to see the Midgard serpent! It’s basically the Duke Nukem 3D aliens’ mining drill and the bad guy’s plan is the same as Doctor Who: Inferno.
One of a handful of games that will tattoo the inside of your skull the first time you play it. Unforgettable, 20 years later.
I'm stating the obvious here: Jack Lupino is clearly a reference to the Fenrir Wolf.
And Alfred Woden = Wotan, i.e. Odin.
@@MosoKaiser Legitimately bothered me that Civvie mentioned all the references... Minus this one. I wonder if he actually didn't make the connection.
Comes for Max Payne, gets a 6 minute sidebar about how shit the Borderlands Movie is gonna be.
I was so invested into this rant, I forgot what the video was about until the shifted gears.
Great video, Max Payne was the bomb when I was a kid. I've even met Sam Lake briefly, he seemed very nice. Woden is Odin BTW. Same root word that got us Wednesday.
I like how he even has the missing left eye
I MUST mention a really cool thing you past over, Civvie, at 29:41 you can toss a grenade down the dumbwaiter shaft and it blows up the guards down the stairs, it was such a cool moment when I discovered that.
Legendary game indeed!
I recall a PS2 playthrough on New York Minute where the save was stuck with ten seconds in the foundry furnace. In between shoot dodge mine detonation and shooting up the leg of the goon coming through the opening door with five seconds left to buy enough time to keep going, I was only able to make it to the beginning of the Aesir building in that run before the five day Blockbuster rental was up.
Funniest bit for me when I played the game back in the day was how painfully obvious it was that every person in the game cut-scenes was an ethnic fin. Nobody looks like a proper Guido mobster.
They fixed it in the sequel.
Not that I mind the strange looks though.
I saw "Norse Mythology with Guns" and was immediately worried that Civvie had decided for some unearthly reason to play "Too Human" and I was concerned for his health.
I’ve only heard whispers of that horror
"game overs are a failure of the game designer" - a quebec douche
I never thought I'd be jumpscared by a UA-cam comment, but you just re-wrinkled a traumatic memory right into my brain.
YTWNGO.
Thank you Civvie, I was waiting so long for you to cover it
"Civvie, the Department of Special Corrections isn't real."
Also, Civvie forgot about the shotgun you can find in the cabinet near the front door to Max's house in the prologue.