Hello, and welcome to The Back Page, a video games podcast. I’m Samuel Roberts, and I’m joined as ever by Matthew Castle. Hello. This podcast is supported by Patreon. patreon.com/backpagepod. You can get up to two bonus podcasts a month from us. In fact, it is two. You get two extra podcasts if you sign up to the XL tier, which is four pound 50 plus VAT, or your local currency equivalent. Matthew, we should talk a bit about Patreon, because we addressed it briefly on the Joe episode. We’ve passed 1,400 pounds. It’s gone beyond our wildest expectations. How are you feeling about the whole Patreon launch thing? I’ve replaced my eyes with rubies. You’ll be glad to hear. So I’m augmenting myself with wealth. No, great. Yeah, I’m super, super pleased. And I hope people are enjoying the XL episode and we’re about to soon to record the XXL episode, which I’m excited for too. That’s going live on April 25th, shortly after this episode. So yes, the first XXL episode is Japanese crime fiction 101. Matthew has given me homework to read a book, which I’ve started reading. And then he will talk us through the genre. Matthew, you’re going to connect it back to games. Is that right? You’re going to like say, if you like this game, try this. That’s the plan. I thought I’d do like it. If you like this, you might like this book. I mean, there’s going to be some crowbarring because obviously these things aren’t the same. You know, they’re there. So I’m going to do my best to make it slightly game relevant and hopefully not too boring. No, I think it’ll be really good. So that’s, yeah, for people who aren’t signed up to the Patreon or have maybe missed that we’ve launched, we’ve got an Excel series of episodes which is themed around video games. So our first one is already live. That’s Best Boss Battles. The next one will be live on the second Monday of May and that’ll be a 20 Xbox Backwards compatible game worth revisiting. And then yeah, the XXL series is all pop culture related. So this month is Japanese crime fiction. Next month is Marvel movies ranked, like the MCU movies ranked. From the sublime to the ridiculous. So yeah, if you like the podcast, you want to support it, that’s a thing you can go and do. Thank you to everyone who has supported us so far. We’re really grateful. So yes, on with the show, Matthew. I would say actually, the Patreon has already positively affected the podcast because I’ve put probably more time into researching this one than any of the episodes in recent memory. I think it’s because I’m being paid for my time now, and I feel like I have to set aside allocated time for the podcast, whereas before it was a bit more ad hoc. Yeah, I’ve got guilt money now. So yeah, but no, it’s good because it’s like, well, I can absolutely justify putting like two evenings into playing these games because I’m being paid for it by people who like the podcast. So that’s good. The podcast owns your ass. Very much so. But Matthew, I thought I’d ask, how are you doing? Because I think we’ve only spoken about podcast business, really, for the last few weeks, and thought I’d just get a lay of the land with old Matthew Castle, see how he’s doing. Yeah, good. I’ve got the week off this week, so I’m finally playing some games. I sort of mentioned this in one of our Patreon posts. Sorry to keep talking about Patreon. I know this sounds like it’s mega-shill. It’s not. It’s generally relevant. We do a regular post about what we’re playing, reading, watching, and I talked in that about… Spoilers for those not on Patreon. What a disastrous segment this is, Sam. It’s going well. I’m suffering from incredible choice paralysis with games at the moment, in that I’m about two hours into 10 different games, and I’m really, really struggling to get into anything. I spent the last weekend playing another hour of a lot of those games, trying to work out, what am I going to spend my week off doing? Because I really want to actually make some headway and finish one of these damn things. I think I’ve settled on Horizon 2 is the one I’m going to try and finish. So that’s the game that has broken the stalemate. So I’m glad to be out of that. That’s good. Our next episode is a what we’ve been playing episode, I think. So I’m sure you’ll be able to talk more about it then, which is exciting. Yeah, some hot takes. Yeah, I just finished Guardians of Galaxy, actually, which I had like two hours left to go for about a month. And I was like, well, I’ve just got to fucking do this and get on my life. So I’ve done that, which is how you want to feel about a video game, isn’t it? But it was legitimately great. It was just like finding the time. Like you, I’ve started about a dozen different things and then not gone back to them. Like Sifu, I need to go back to Tunic as well. And like, yeah, there’s a grown pile of those games. Go back and try and get the shield and Tunic. Hey, I’ve had the shield for a long time now. No way. You’re fighting the last boss and with just the stick you picked up at the start. It doesn’t seem right. Yeah, it turns out the greatest player of all time. But yeah, Matthew, I also have to ask about intermezzo closing. So for those who have listened to the podcast for a long time, we are synonymous with sandwiches on this podcast, partly because we did that ranking at the end of last year. And we talk, you and I are partial to sandwiches as listeners may have noticed by now. Intermezzo is a local bath sandwich haunt. Matthew, despite living here for like 15 years or something, only just discovered intermezzo last year. Now it’s closed, Matthew. How’s it been? Yeah, it’s quite sad. I went in on the last day and told Tony that he was really good at making sandwiches. I felt like he deserved to hear it. He’s been doing it for 21 years. The man is an artisan. He was very sort of self-effacing, was like, well, you know, this, the shop’s being taken over and is going to be run like as it currently is. And I was like, well, you know, 21 years of craft, you know, you can’t just instantly kind of replace that, which he seemed to, he seemed to like hearing that. So, yeah, it was, it was, you know, it was kind of a bittersweet, a bittersweet moment, had had, you know, my southern fried chicken baguette, which I really should stop eating because it’s so unholy. I think like I’m definitely, definitely like sprinting towards the grave. If I keep that up, if you have it every day, then yeah, that’s a lot. It’s not great, is it? I don’t have it every day. I should add, but I have it way too much for a southern fried chicken and a load of bread, which just… No. I like that I posted a picture of his going away poster and one of our listeners called it cursed when actually it was meant to be sweet. It was a bit cursed, the image of him though. It was also slightly generous, I would say, as an image. Well, I don’t know. Like if I was to draw a cartoon of him, I think that’s what I’d draw. You know, he’s a little guy with silvery hair. It’s like the me version of him, I guess. But slightly more off brand me. Like when you buy like a sort of like a NAFWI party game. It’s like Bandai Namco’s own in-house me system. Like Carnival Games energy to it. But yeah. Yeah. So I actually avoided it on the last day because I didn’t want it to be like a big deal that I was buying a sandwich on this last day. And it could be bothered to like, I didn’t know if there was a discussion I’d have to have. But the discussion you just had then, I don’t want that level of personal relationship with a guy who makes sandwiches for me. I’m happy for it to be transactional. So I deliberately avoided it on the last day. So yeah, that’s just me. This is just how we differ as people. Yeah, I’m not that sentimental as a person really. I’m hugely sentimental. You kind of went in like, I don’t know, it’s just, yeah, that’s like, I don’t know, you have to go in and tell him you respected his craft and stuff. And I feel like the, you know, five pounds each time I bought a sandwich was an implicit sort of endorsement of his craft. So I didn’t feel the need to like vocalise it. This is fair. This is fair. So I went and had a lovely egg mayo baguette from Whole Bagel instead. But I’m a big egg mayo guy of late. That’s like one of my pillars of my personal grandage. It’s not like the sexiest thing to be associated with. Like saying I’m an egg mayo guy doesn’t sound great. I wouldn’t put it on like a Tinder profile or anything. Like that’s not what I’m all about as like a person. But yeah, it’s one of those things that’s very cheap, but like when done well, it can be exquisite. Never tried this Whole Bagel one before and I’m blown away. But yeah, I’m curious to see what the post Tony age of Intermezzo will bring us Matthew. Did you also find it funny when John Denton posted that picture of Intermezzo and it looked like the least impressive shot of all time? Yeah, I mean, that is what it looks like. Like I’m not saying you don’t go there for the store. I’m not saying it’s not like a big experience. It’s not like these new shops where it’s all about the shop being very Instagrammable. That isn’t really what Tony was going for Intermezzo. Yeah. The man, he cut the chicken fresh. He mashed the egg fresh for an egg mayo baguette. Like the guy’s craft was beyond the shop front. Yeah. I actually had your favorite baguette for the first time on his last week. Oh, don’t tell me you hated it. No, it was rock solid, actually. I thought it would be a bit more like oven, out of the freezer kind of fried chicken. But it was actually like legit. I thought it was pretty tasty. So, yeah, I was not bad at all, Matthew. But yeah, I’ve been curious to see what this new age brings. At the moment, I’m going to stick with the whole bagel. I’m going to let the new Intermezzo owners hone their craft a little bit till they’re in the ballpark of what Tony is capable of. And then I will resume my patronage. That’s going to take 21 years. By which point, they’ll retire and be replaced with someone else. Maybe they’ll be replaced by like Cyborg Tony. We can but hope, yeah. Yeah, so that’s that’s good. A little bit of a sandwich kind of recap there. Do you know what, actually, Matthew, I was in Bristol recently and I went past for the first time, Sandwich Sandwich. Now, that place definitely seems more Instagrammable. It’s like a nice sort of storefront and stuff. But I felt like I’d uncovered like a key part of Matthew Castle lore I’d only ever heard about. I was like, this is the shop right here. This is the shop where Matthew would get a big fat sandwich and a big fat baguette and then get mocked by Yogscast viewers on Twitch. Yeah, but sadly it was closed. So we’ll have to wait for another day, Matthew. Do you ever miss it? That sandwich shop is elite. That’s the greatest sandwich shop of all time, I think. Does it make Intermezzo look like, I don’t know, GCSE sandwiches or something? Yeah, I guess. Okay, very good. So we come to the subject of this week’s episode, seamlessly. Max Payne. We decided to do an episode about the Max Payne games because the timing seems spot on. We actually just did the best games of 2012 before the remakes were announced. So there were remakes of the first two Max Payne games coming from Remedy, the original developers, financed by Rockstar, published by Rockstar. This was announced in like a letter to shareholders, I think. I think Remedy is like a publicly listed company, so they have to kind of disclose this stuff super early, I think. So that’s part of the reason why it was announced in the way it was. And we had just talked about Max Payne 3 on the best games of 2012. So it seemed like a good way to try to tie it all together in like one episode. So me and Matthew have been like going through the series again. And we put together quite a nice little episode here about the trilogy. The first two games by Remedy, of course, the third game was by Rockstar Studios, mostly Rockstar Vancouver, it seems like, but quite a big variety of people at Rockstar worked on this very lavish 2012 game. And yeah, there’s been a lot of discussion about this series recently on social media as a result of the announcement. So Matthew, I’ve got to ask, how are you feeling about revisiting this trilogy of games? A little bit sheepish, to be honest, because having just absolutely curb-stomped Max Payne 3 in 2012, you know, we tried to be a positive podcast and it’s rare that we out and out say like we don’t like this thing. And I did say that going back to it and kind of hoping it was what I said it was and then discovering what it actually is, maybe maybe there will be some eating of words. But otherwise, yeah, like a chance to return to definitely the first two games was super, super important growing up. This was back when the very brief period we had a good PC at home and could play things. There’s like a little three, four year window where, you know, I was a quote unquote PC gamer. And yeah, these were like two of the most important games of that period. So yeah, fun to return to them. Yeah, for sure. I think my experience Tally similarly where my dad had two occasions where he had a decent gaming PC. And then that those period lasted for about two years because he bought them off, he bought the PC off someone else, and then eventually be installing a more demanding game and it would crawl to like five frames per second and you’re like, well, that’s me done with PC gaming for another five years. Very good. But yeah, I very much agree. So what we’re doing in this episode is section one is about Max Payne 1 and 2. We’re going to talk all about Remedy’s games, break those down in fairly granular detail, I would say. Section two is Max Payne 3 reappraised. Me and Matthew have both been playing that this week and have lots to say about it, as Matthew alluded to there. Maybe we’ve come out more positively than we were on the 2012 games episode. I liked it more than Matthew. I almost put it in my top 10. But yeah, lots to say about Max Payne 3, I think. And I think if you’re kind of curious about hearing that game sort of re-litigated, we’ll definitely do that on this podcast. Talk about it in some good detail. And finally, in section three, an ill-advised comedy bit that’s going to blow up in our faces, and we may want to cut to the episode if it goes wrong. So we’ll talk about that when we get to it, Matthew. So let’s start with Max Payne 1 and 2. What do you remember about your first encounter with Max Payne, Matthew? One of the things that happens a lot with this game when you’re reading about it is people talk about, like, it was long just stating and went through lots of changes. I must admit, I encountered Max Payne when it was fully formed. Like I don’t think I was particularly aware of it until I read a review of it in PC Gamer and was instantly like, oh, I definitely want that. I think the appeal back then, if I remember correctly, was just as simple as, oh, I like The Matrix and so I want to play the Bullet Time game. I was obsessed with Bullet Time. If anything had Bullet Time, it was interesting to me, regardless of how many alarm bells sounded around the rest of it. Any kind of talk about that. And I guess this goes after Max Payne as well. So many ill-advised things that I’ve played, just because I was so obsessed with the idea of slow motion and shooting someone in the head in slow motion. So I think that’s like my first kind of interaction with it was, yeah, probably through that review. I mean, were you aware of this before it came out? So I wasn’t, but like you, I think it got 94 in PC Gamer, something like that. And it was like the hot game when I was starting reading PC Gamer again in 2001 or 2002. I think it was the end of 2001 I started reading it again. And yeah, there was just a sense that this game had come along and just managed to capture the magic of the matrix as shootout sequences in game form, and had this very striking noir aesthetic around it. So it just seemed like this hot as hell PC game, you just had to play. And then I actually can’t remember exactly what the context was, but I played it in around like release time before it came to consoles. A mate of mine down the road had a much nicer PC than we did. And so I would play all the PC games from around this time on his PC, like Jedi Outcast and Max Payne. So I played it there for a little while. I don’t think I finished it. And then I came to Max Payne again in 2006 when I was working at a convenience store. We had this weird kind of point of sale display that had a bunch of like shit DVDs on it and then like three Xbox games. It was like, I think Project Gotham and Max Payne 1 and 2. And those are the three games on there. And we kept the discs behind the counter in like these plastic sleeves because like we didn’t want people nicking the boxes and stuff. But I ended up just taking those sleeves home and playing them. You’ve got another game you just took home and played. I think I’ve already said this before in a previous episode. So this isn’t like new news. But that’s something I remember. I remember finishing Max Payne 1. I don’t think I finished Max Payne 2 until 2010. But the second one passed me by a little bit because I didn’t have a PC at the time. I was a big PS2 player at the time. And the PS2 port of Max Payne 2 was notoriously quite bad, I think. So that kind of passed me by. So, yeah, I played it at the time. But then later on, I probably became most obsessed with Max Payne around the time that Alan Wake came out. That was when I replayed both of them on Xbox. You could buy them on 360 backwards compatible. And that’s where I sort of re-rediscovered them. But yeah, I first played them variously throughout the Northeast, basically. But a meaningful series to me, too, Matthew. I think this was the only time in my life I’ve been PC snobby about a game in that I remember thinking, yuck, who would want to play these on console? Because the control of it seems so tied to the mouse. I couldn’t even comprehend playing Max Payne. I think I’d seen pictures or DVD footage of Max Payne 1 on PS2 and thinking, this is such a step down. Because this isn’t like now where lots of things are much of a muchness. There was such a huge, huge gulf. And this felt like such a powerful PC game. It really felt cutting edge and looked cutting edge. The idea of any kind of rougher version was sort of like laughable to my teenage mind. Yeah, I think I agree with you. Because a lot of this game is about like particle effects. And just the kind of the overall spectacle of when you jump into a room, go into a slow motion, shoot a load of dudes. And then like the kill cam kicks in and stuff like that. It was definitely like cutting edge, like you say. So, yeah, I kind of got you on that. But I understand you have played the Xbox versions this week for your research. Is that right? Yeah, yeah. And, you know, I don’t know what sort of magic they’ve done, but they look great. I mean, they’re super sharp. I think these were like up res, right? These were just, I don’t think they have the FPS boost or anything. I think they were just good ports at the time, Matthew. Oh, right. Well, in which case, yeah, I’d say there’s a few control niggles which are a little odd in that I don’t think you can invert the aiming in Max Payne 1, I don’t think, on Xbox. And it’s a bit of a faff because of that. But otherwise, they kind of, yeah, they look and move how I remember the PC games looking and moving. Like they’re a pretty smooth and easy way to play those games now, particularly as the games are a bit of an ass on PC. Like there’s weird stuff with some of them and, you know, you’re only a YouTube video away from working out how to fix a lot of these things. But in terms of like, buy it, play it, no fuss, in a way I think the Xbox versions are almost like the easiest way of playing them now. I agree with you. As someone who last played through Max Payne 1 and 2 in 2016 and I had to, I think, run them in compatibility mode and then I had to run them like in windowed rather than full screen because otherwise it wouldn’t display properly. So yeah, like it was a faff. It’s why it’s kind of a bummer that these games aren’t on GOG actually because I would appreciate someone going in and just making them super easy to play on PC. But yeah, like you say, Xbox version is really good. I think Max Payne 1 in particular like just looks super, super smooth on Xbox. Like you know, it feels like it has parity with the PC version really. Max Payne 2 is maybe slightly nicer on PC because it’s even more cutting edge with some of the stuff it does. But we’ll get into that. So Matthew, playing The Back, what did you think of them and did you notice any kind of meaningful differences between the two games playing The Back? In my head, Max Payne 2 was always the superior game. Like snazzier in so many ways, I much preferred the story, I remember it having a lot more variety to it. I actually wonder, having replayed both of them, if Max Payne 1 is maybe the better or the fuller action game in a way. Max Payne 2 has a lot more of what Remedy would become, in that it’s a blend of an action game and an in-game narrative experience. There’s bits of that in Max Payne 1 too. But in the second game, there’s a lot more stuff going on in levels that isn’t just shooting people, and because of that, there are quite long stretches where you’re not doing much action, and it’s also the fact that it is a shorter game, or it felt like a shorter game to me, than Max Payne 1. It actually feels a little lighter on the action than the first game altogether. The first game is a bit more simplistic, it’s policemen, family were killed, and years later he’s still in recovery and ends up going on a kind of roaring rampage of revenge against some people who are trying to set him up, and it’s dead simple, you go to each location basically hunting the next breadcrumb that will lead you to the next location, you shoot loads of goons and repeat, but because of that it certainly feels like you do more traditional playing in the first game, which isn’t how I remembered it at all. Yeah, I think that a key thing is in the first game, Max is more anonymous than I maybe remembered him being when I first played it, like, he’s kind of like he has the monologues, you have this, you know, it’s a third person, you know, shooter, where you can activate bullet time at any point, you can replenish that bullet time by killing enemies, and then like, the story is all told with these photoshopped photos that are kind of presented in a graphic novel style with like, you know, sort of thought bubbles and speech bubbles and all that stuff with voiceover by actor James McCaffrey and a variety of other cast members. So it doesn’t try and tell the story in game, which is a good idea because the character models are fairly simplistic, they use kind of like photo faces in quite an infamous way, they’re kind of like mapped onto these like fairly blocky polygonal sort of models. And of course, everyone knows that the creative director at Remedy, Sam Lake, his face was used for the model of the first Max Payne. But like, what I thought was really interesting, and you and I both use this edge making of piece on Max Payne 1 and 2 as a kind of primary source, I think, for some of our research, is that the script for Max Payne 2 was something like 600 pages, whereas the first one was like 150 pages. And I think that’s kind of like reflected by, like you say, the lack of in-level niceties versus the first game, but also in things like Max’s story being much more fleshed out in the second one, whereas here he’s a bit more of a straightforward, kind of like revenge cop kind of storyline, where you don’t get like, he monologues a lot, but you don’t get massively into a psychology, but you do more so in the second one. And so yeah, I think, like you say, that maybe allows the first one to be a pure action experience. But I think a lot of it does come down to length, you know, like you say, it’s like about two hours shorter, I think, Max Payne 2. And they seem to like be a bit more, they cut some stuff according to that interview with Edge. So yeah, I wonder if that maybe affects it. I also think Matthew, maybe you don’t agree with this, and maybe people wouldn’t agree with this generally. I don’t think like the combat is vastly improved between one and two. I think like what is basically there in one is still there in two, but with more visual niceties. Did you agree with that? Bullet time is the one thing that does sort of change between the two, in that in one when you’re going to bullet time, when you’re not shoot dodging, Max is also slow. You can still aim fast, but you move slow, where in two, you move faster, it’s like the world that goes slower. And as you kill people and sort of combo them, you enter like an even, you get like faster or the world gets slower. I don’t really know which way round the effect is working. I think two is much easier because of it. Two feels less about shoot dodging and more about you just whack the world in slow motion and like run a lap of the room, gunning everyone down and it almost leans into like how visually impressive the technique is because, you know, seeing a room in slow motion while things are pinging off and bodies are flying through the air and everything, you know, that’s kind of why the effect exists. You know, you want to see stuff move in slow motion where the first one is almost like a little stingy with it. There are very few opportunities to just run, run, run in slow motion and interestingly, I think they kind of revert to that a little bit in Max Payne 3 as well, but I think two is the one where they’re just like, yeah, have fun, isn’t slow motion cool? But the downside to that is it makes it very, very easy. If that is a downside, I don’t know, maybe you just want to see the game looking cool and that’s enough. Oh, well, maybe it’s like a lot trickier on harder difficulties as well. Like I think to get the true ending, you do have to be the hardest difficulty in Max Payne 2, but I’m always a kind of like medium kind of guy when I play these games. Side note, the true ending is dumb, I think. Oh, yeah, it’s really brief as well. It’s like one panel that’s changed basically. But it like undermines the whole thing. Yeah, but like, I don’t know, it’s just a nice extra, I think. I think the canonical ending is that, you know, it’s dead and stuff, but yeah, I just think going from like a tragedy to not a tragedy seems like a weird unlockable. Yeah, sure. So I think like the key difference between the two is like upgrading production values, like the second one just feels much more lavish. Like the cut scenes in the kind of graphic novel style are much better presented. They replaced Sam Lake with actor Timothy Gibbs. So they and the kind of Photoshop job they’ve done on them looks a lot nicer. Just like a big benefit of obviously having more money and time behind them. Like I mentioned, a massive havoc physics kind of element to this game where it’s like kind of that Max and that Half Life 2 era of like, we can make shit move across the environment now to do different stuff. So there’s like part paths emerging by things exploding and collapsing and like, you know, just a path opening up from some like physics explosion kind of bullshit, which I think is like, it’s quite, it’s like definitely like novel, I would say. But it like is quite a fun reminder of that time when you play Max Payne 2 back. Did you notice that when you were playing it? Definitely. I love how Max Payne’s got this mechanic where the last person you shoot in a busy encounter, that’s you get the kill cam for them, where you sort of follow them in slow motion. And often it’s someone positioned just so that they’ve got a lot of physics enabled objects around them. So it would be like you shoot a guy off a balcony and he’ll fall through like some planks, which will flip some paint cans that are balanced on the other end or something. Like that people are, all these little things are sort of set up for people to kind of crash and careen into. The more stuff that moves in slow motion, the better slow motion looks. So I kind of completely get it. I sort of completely understand. Like if anything, I think replaying all three of these games, I’m surprised by how restrained they all are. I think if you made this game now, and maybe we’ll talk about this, there’s a version of this which is like a lot more hectic and maybe a lot more visually satisfying. The kind of genuine self-made wow moments are actually a little few and far between in all three of these games, I think. And that’s partly, I think, because they don’t want you to kind of like get caught up with anything other than the shooting. I think that getting the shooting right is just always more important to them than like showing off or whatever with spectacle. Maybe that’s not true, but I think it is. The other thing that the second game does, like I say, is it kind of like Max is a slightly more anonymous character in the first game, but then like the doomed noir love story element brings more personality out of him. It dials a bit more in on him as a character. You play as Mona briefly as well, which is quite interesting as a kind of like perspective shift. Mona trying to save Max, which I quite like. And like you say, a lot of it comes down to like how the world is presented and the overall fiction of the game is built out in a way that is, yeah, like, well, maybe I should dig into that more now with you, Matthew. But like, were you not as into those kind of like in-environment non-combat bits that were designed to sort of like flesh out the world and Max more? Were they not to your liking on a replay? I liked them at the time because I’d never seen anything like it. I think playing it now, it’s become such a trope, you know, where people go, we’re going to withhold the kind of action loop and we’re going to be more about like interacting with the environment or a little kind of in-game character beat. We’ve talked about this before in relation to Uncharted. It’s a bit like where it has a, you know, we’re going to pat the ox or whatever the fuck it was. You know, this is almost the first original version of that in that, you know, here’s a level where you’re walking around a police station for 10 minutes and before the action kicks off, you know, you’re going to be able to overhear conversations or you’re going to be able to, like, interact with some props and get a little bit more colour. And at the time, I hadn’t seen anything do that. In fact, I was really racking my brains for, like, had anyone done this kind of stuff before? I’m not sure that they had in this kind of space. I mean, like, maybe I’m wrong, but I really think, like, that is an area where it is cutting edge. It’s the, you know, remedies of definitive in-house style. But I do think if it has influence anywhere, it is that. That feels like the thing which we now run with a lot in games, where it does feel sophisticated to kind of resist being the dumb shooter that you actually are. And we’re like, how high braille. But I’m kind of sick of it as a trope. Playing it now, I’m like, ugh, this. Like I’d much rather be shooting stuff in slow motion. I don’t hold that against this game, because it was a trailblazer, let you say, in this regard. Like, they were ahead of the curve on this. And also, there are no other games with Max Payne’s specific style. Like, this kind of like mixture of like, you know, kind of going with film noir as a sort of base point, but then layering on these kind of like different elements, like, sort of Norse mythology, Scandinavian influences, like, you know, in the first, this is the first game, but like, the V drug, the Valkyr drug made by Acer Corporation, all that stuff. And the kind of the fact that it’s always snowing makes it feel like you’re in this kind of like mythical version of New York. It’s a bit, you know, and like in the second game, those, the conversations that kind of play out between characters are a bit more, they’re not quite the same as you see now, which is, look how funny it is hearing these two characters interact, look how cute it is. It’s much more like we want to just enhance the feeling of the setting, the credibility of the setting by putting this stuff in there, you know? Yeah, that’s true. The second game has got a really weird habit of giving you AI characters who can die quite quickly and it isn’t like a fail state. It’s like this person being with you was just like a bonus and you think, were they meant to die? Could you keep them alive? Like, what? You know, I’m just not good enough at the game to keep them alive in most cases. But there is this sort of interesting sense of like, how long can this guy feasibly last if I was just a little bit better at this game and am I missing story content or does something play out differently if you keep them alive? I don’t know. I maybe shouldn’t look that up. Well there’s other other elements to it as well, like in terms of how that stuff is presented. You hear Mona in the shower at one point is like humming the theme tune to the game, Late Goodbye by Poets of the Fool. You will also come across a cleaner who is humming it to himself in like a corridor and you’ll come across like a room full of enemies where one guy is playing like a piano version on the, you know, just he’s just on a piano like an NPC then when you go in there he’ll pick up a gun and start shooting at you and I don’t know it’s a level of detail to that sort of thing that was just kind of unprecedented at the time. And it’s a kind of it’s a way of building on the sort of like fiction that I really like it’s like a slight element of self-awareness to it that Remedy’s work kind of has. I’m not putting down like that tone. There’s definitely bits of the execution I absolutely love. Like, you know, I love all the hoodlum conversations. Basically, this is a game where you walk into a lot of rooms, people having a funny conversation and then you get to decide when you jump out from behind some boxes and murder them. And, you know, it’s often guys just talking about like what they’re watching on TV and it’s all, you know, it’s laced with like pop culture references. The first game’s got loads of like John Woo references because I think more than The Matrix, John Woo seems to be the kind of the big sort of inspiration point. And you almost sort of feel bad because all these characters are quite kind of, they’re all quite characterful and fun. And then you just get the drop on them every single time and blast them in slow motion. But I do like that. You know, I like that stuff. I think the kind of gangster writing is really goofy and fun. Yeah, it’s a bit more fun than say like the equivalent of that in Arkham, the Arkham games, for example, where they’re a little bit more interminable to listen to. So yeah, I’m fond of that. Yeah, so Matthew, I suppose that feels like a good point to talk about the kind of like Twin Peaks style in-universe fiction element, which is a massive part of these games. Two has a lot more of this than one does. And I think that’s kind of like partly what you’re alluding to there was stuff in the environment that this kind of non combat related. But one definitely lays the sort of groundwork. You have numerous allusions to the story itself. And like in the in-game TV shows like Lords and Ladies, the Adventures of Captain Baseball Batboy, and then Address Unknown, which is a cancelled TV show, airing a marathon throughout Max Payne 2, featuring a doppelganger serial killer called John Mirror. And then a protagonist clearly portrayed by Sam Lake, the original face of Max Payne. And then the game’s theme song Late Goodbye references the John Mirror character in one of its lyrics. And Lords and Ladies clearly stars Marco Cereso from Poets of the Fall. So like a lot of these things kind of wrap in on themselves in a way that feels quite deliberate. There’s a lot of like Max and Mona stuff like alluded to in the different TV shows in the game. I was curious how you felt about this stuff because when I first saw this, I felt like I’d never seen this sort of thing done before. And it very much felt inspired by the invitation to love element of Twin Peaks, where there’s like a soap opera that the characters are watching that’s clearly meant to reflect the events of what’s going on in Twin Peaks itself. So what do you make of this as a kind of like a storytelling technique? I really loved it at the time as well. I still love it now. I think like the idea of stopping to play to watch TV and it had always like mad jokes in it. Definitely ramp it up in Max Payne 2. Like in 1, there’s only like a single episode of a couple of shows, I think. Where in 2, there are sort of entire series playing out across the levels. So as you make your way through the game, it’s like you’re also watching a season of an entire TV show. I really like the world building between the two games. You know, there’s a substantial set piece in Max Payne 2, which is set in like an amusement park based on a dress unknown from the first game. That stuff kind of always tickled me at the time. It’s very similar to like, you know how you had the kind of Tarantino verse, where there were like fictional brands that existed between the Tarantino films. And I was really, really into all that kind of stuff. I don’t know if that sort of just speaks to a sort of teenager, you feel like, oh, this is really like clever. And you know, this is like next level. I really get this. This really, this is really on my kind of wavelength. But this idea that there are all these kind of connections I really liked, obviously that’s something that they’ve really lent into now with their extended remedy universe. Something like that, yeah. Like they’re basically trying to kind of tie all their different games together. And I think there were always hints, you know, like there’s the Flamingo appears in Address Unknown, which is kind of like a Twin Peaks send up, but then the Flamingo is also quite a key object in Control, for example. And like there’s always stuff they’re kind of riffing on and these kinds of ties. I think they’re now trying to formalize it a bit more by like directly linking, you know, Alan Wake to the Control games, for example. And I do wonder if they’re like remake projects, you know, the fact that they’re remaking one and two is going to give them an opportunity to weave that further into the universe as well in a more formal way. Yeah, I think that, I think they’re just really effective. The other thing is that I think referencing Twin Peaks or discussing Twin Peaks has become a bit passe now, but there was like definitely a pre-streaming service moment where Twin Peaks was not in vogue at all. And like it should, shortly before they released that Gold Box DVD and like the late noughties, that was when I got into Twin Peaks. And like the groundswell of people being interested in it didn’t really exist in the same way. It was kind of like a faded show that was cited as influential sometimes, but like wasn’t, you know, the kind of obsession built up enough that they managed to bring it back from the dead at one point. I would say that seeing kind of Twin Peaks style, like either references or illusions or borrowing techniques in a game at this point was like really, there was really nothing else like it. And yeah, I find it very effective. I agree, you only kind of need to watch that stuff once, but as a kind of like an element to build out the world, it works really well. And I like that certain like NPCs are invested in different TV shows if you stop and listen to them and stuff. And yeah, people properly care about them. That’s really cool. I like that because in the first game, Lords and Ladies is sponsored by like the big evil corporation at the heart of the game. And in the second game, it’s sponsored by different people because you’ve obviously murdered everyone at that company, which I think is a cute little touch. Yeah, for sure. So yeah, very fond of that stuff. Okay, other stuff Matthew. So what influence do you think Max Payne had on other games? You mentioned there that the presentation of cinematic storytelling in 2 may be carried over to the likes of Naughty Dog games and stuff like that. But more broadly, how do you kind of chart the influence of Max Payne and other games? It’s so hard because I don’t think there are many games like it, to be honest, which is maybe a bit of a bust of an answer. And I don’t know if this comes down to the fact that this is just before cover shooters become the norm. And as an actual mechanical action game, Bullet Times hasn’t got, I don’t know, it almost didn’t have the legs or didn’t have much depth to it. It’s kind of hard to do much with it beyond you can jump behind boxes. I’ve been reading a lot about Max Payne these last couple of weeks. A lot of retrospectives. And it is kind of interesting to see people go, well, you know, it felt nice and it looked cool. I’m not sure there’s like much more you can do with it. Like there’s not a huge difference between Max Payne 1 and 2 and even 3, you know, doesn’t have much more to say on the topic. I was actually struggling to see the direct lineage of this game. Well, surely you have to like say that this unlocked the idea of bullet time in games generally. And slow motion, you know, popped up in everything from like True Crime Streets of LA, to the games that were based on The Matrix. Yeah, Die Hard Vendetta. That’s one of the terrible games that we got because it had bullet time in it. Yeah, I actually think it benefited like True Crime Streets of LA. Like one of the shooting in that game was one of the best things about it. And so the idea of a GTA style game that had some slow mo and it was quite novel. And certainly one of the reasons I picked it up at the time, otherwise, you know, very flawed, of course, and not well remembered, but still. And then right up to things like games have slow mo mechanics like Fear, for example. Fear very much feels like it’s in the Max Payne lineage, I would say. So yeah, I think like it does have influence and then like slow mo is everywhere for a while. I think that it’s a fair point about like, maybe there is a ceiling on how much you can do with it. Gonna present my grand theory to you here, Matthew. Is that the Max Payne games are as much puzzle games as they are shooters. Like when you dive into a room, it’s about optimizing and like using your bullet time perfectly. And like the reason you have that kind of like reset the quick save mechanic on PC, is so you can instantly go back in and do it again and like correct and correct and correct. And I think that it’s kind of like core loop is more puzzly than shootery because it does feel like you’re looking for the perfect solution to like one problem, which is a room full of enemies. Then you are like fighting a war of attrition, I would say. Like the action is commonly over in like a very, very quick burst. And I’ve always thought it feels maybe more like a puzzle than something like a much more like a puzzle than Gears of War does, for example. Thoughts on that Matthew Castle? Yeah, so almost like a kind of precursor to like Hotline Miami. Yeah, yeah, I guess, yes, I could sort of see that, yeah. You know, in that it’s like, you go into this room, here’s the deal, you kind of know the set up, there’s some reactions involved, but you also kind of know what lies in wait to you. I definitely think it’s a trial and error game that simply doesn’t work without quick save and quick load. I agree with you 100% on that. I just don’t know, to get really granular about it, if like the enemy placement and the actual design of the environments is like complex or interesting enough to kind of draw out that kind of puzzly element to it. Well, I mean, maybe, but maybe they’re simple puzzles, but like it is like learning where the placements are and then like kind of rolling out a solution based on where you know the placements are. Yeah, it’s tricky because the actual shoot dodge itself is like incredibly flawed as a maneuver because it launches you really far. You have to have a space to go. You’re also sort of stuck at the end of it. Basically, if you haven’t killed everyone by the end of your shoot dodge and you’re not in cover, you’re fucked because everyone just like empties their shotguns into you while you’re on the floor. That’s definitely the case in Max Payne 1, which is a little bit clumsy where Max Payne 2, like you can carry on shooting when you’re on the floor, which you can do in Max Payne 3 as well. I think you’re right in terms of that is what’s interesting and that is the kind of depth of this system. But I think, like you said, the roof is like super, super low on it. I think bullet time is fundamentally a power fantasy and I don’t think anyone’s really worked out what to do with that power fantasy that doesn’t just completely overwhelm the enemies. It’s very hard to give you the power over time and still make it a challenging, interesting game. I think one of the more successful versions of it is Stranglehold in that it’s quite crass and clumsy in lots of ways, but they almost kind of work bullet time into a kind of Tony Hawk style kind of combo system. It’s a lot more about motion and movement and momentum and you are a lot more powerful in that game. You don’t die as easily as you do in Max Payne and so it balances that by just throwing like shit loads of stuff at you. And I almost think there’s like some, you know, I almost think that makes that finds like something more to do with it in a way that a lot of other games haven’t. Yeah, okay, I can kind of see that. What I will say is that I, when it comes to like bullet time versus cover shooting, like bullet time disappeared very quickly, whereas like cover shooting we’ve had now for like 16 years since Gears of War was released, we’ve kind of stuck with it forever. And I think that like bullet time got ripped off too much too quickly. And I think that it was partly tied to the matrix as a concept. And so when the matrix became a bit passe when the films did in like 2003, I think maybe like interest in it burned out a little bit. I would argue that cover shooting is not more fun than bullet time to me. I think it like made third person shooters too defensive rather than offensive. I think that’s what’s great about Max Payne is that it’s about diving into a room and being aggressive. And the reason that we all like vanquish is because we were all dying for a third person game that was a more aggressive version of a cover shooter. And so Platinum Games made that and it worked really well. But I think there was just a way too much sitting in cover, blind firing, throwing grenades and hoping for the best going on with third person shooters after years. I think that’s true. So I was always curious like why one just burned out so quickly and one stuck around forever. I think Gears is very mechanically sophisticated. But I don’t know, like they both feel like solutions to the same thing, which is how do you frame the logic of a shootout in third person? Yeah, yeah. Maybe this Gears lasts or cover lasts because it has, like you say, defensive and offensive. It has two sides to it. Bullet time is only ever offensive. There isn’t much you can do with it outside of, you have this brief advantage and it’s kind of about efficiency to just like pop people in the head. By the time you get to Max Payne 3, we’ll talk about this. That is such a strange game in that it’s a game about basically trying to kill a room full of people with headshots or you die and that is all you can really do with bullet time is that. I think it is an inherently flawed mechanic in that it just has nowhere to go. It is just what it is the first time you use it forever. There’s no variation in it. I have the same problem with Red Dead Redemption 2. By the end of that game, it’s just a game about me shooting one bullet into 10 heads in slow motion and then going into the next room shooting one bullet into 10 heads. You think, well, this is just, there’s just nothing here. What more can you possibly do with this? None of this occurred to me when I first played these games. When I first played these games, it was just everything I wanted. It was going into a room and watching like splinters of wood from a table in slow motion and getting friends to come round or getting my brother to come and look at the PC because every room, something cool and unscripted happened and that was always the appeal. But I think maybe with your critic’s hat on, Bullet Time doesn’t really have the chops. I think your point about how cover shooting lets you do offensive and offensive, whereas Bullet Time lets you do offensive is a good argument for sure. I think I am more pro the concept of Bullet Time than you though. I don’t think that Red Dead has a cover system too, of course. And I don’t think that sitting in cover for 40 hours is any more interesting than using Bullet Time for 40 hours. I think if anything, one will remain exciting while the other will feel more roped, at least to me. That’s how I would feel. A cover shooter system doesn’t really develop over time. It kind of is the same at the start and at the end. Let’s face it, there are very few of these straightforward third-person shooters even around now. So, clearly, cover shooting has also reached its limit. Even Gears 5 has open world stuff. The Division games are open world games, first and foremost, with third-person cover shooting combat in it. Arguably, a game that’s built just on that and sold just on that, they don’t really exist anymore in the same way. It’s just the mechanic has persisted longer than bullet time has. Interesting, though, isn’t it? That’s a good discussion, that. Any thoughts on Remedy’s upcoming remakes, Matthew? How do you think they’ll benefit from being spruced up? It really depends how much of a remake they are. They sound like it’s going to be substantial from the wording, right? Yeah, I think so. I understand it will be ground up in the controls engine, the Northlight engine, so it will probably look on a par with that. It’s only made for PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series XS and PC. So, yeah, you’re basically looking at a fully contemporised game, the contemporised version of these games that are two decades old, essentially. I’m really interested to see if they’ll take any cues from Max Payne 3, which already felt like an attempt to modernise and add some quirks to it. I just wonder if all this stuff we’re discussing is a chance to address it, if it’s a chance to go what they now know with 20 more years of making interesting, quirky action games under their belts. Will they use that to move the combat on or alter the combat in any way? I actually think the combat in Control was one of their more interesting mechanics. It had a lot more you could do, the variety of the powers and the different tactics you could mix up. That to me speaks to a team which is only growing in confidence in how it’s doing things. I’m kind of interested to see that thinking apply to Max Payne. I don’t just want a flashier engine remake of this where all the enemy numbers are the same and the enemy placements are the same. I hope they actually try and do something more with it. I still think that Max Payne 1 and 2 were Remedy’s best games. They’re my favourite games. I think they’re still so singular and so perfect tonally. I think they’re great. I don’t disagree, though, that this is a good chance to change them up, make things a bit different, maybe expand certain sections and shorten others and just take an editor’s approach to it. I’m sure they will do something like that. One thing they’re really good at is using 3D space in quite a head-flipping way in Control. I liked how Control messed with certain things, like where you’re doing the… I can’t remember the name of the department, the bit where it plays the heavy metal song and you’re basically in Inception World or whatever. I’d like to see that kind of technical know-how apply to the nightmare sequences in Max Payne 1 and 2. I’m definitely intrigued to see the kind of stuff that was the proto version of what Remedy would go on to do a lot. I’m interested to see how those scenes are improved by Remedy that is much better at those sequences now. Yeah, I agree with you on that. I think you’ll likely see more of that Max Payne 2 presentation that would shape future Remedy 8 games, spill back over into Max Payne 1, which is fairly light on them. I think that’s quite likely. You’re likely to see much more kind of physics-y kind of combat. I imagine you have a lot of the Max Payne 3 collapsing into objects and reacting appropriately elements to them. The kind of like brief sort of fleeting exteriors you get of New York City could look spectacular in that engine. It could look really, really good. I imagine they’ll look a bit like Max Payne 3’s New York sections, but maybe it’ll be more stylized. Do you think about like the graphic novel presentation element? Could that be updated in a kind of visually spectacular way? You know what I mean? Like you would imagine they’re not just going to do exactly the same thing. Will Sam Blake’s face still be in Max Payne 1? Well, that’s the other thing with both of them is that they… The look of Max Payne 1 is still like so singular in that it used all the kind of photographs of like real world textures. It hasn’t… I wouldn’t say it’s aged massively. Like it still really captures a sense of place and it looks like those places in that particular time, which I really, really like about it. And I’d be sad to see them like lose, lose that particular like texture. I mean, that was the thing that struck me replay Max Payne 1 more than anything. You were like, oh, atmospherically, this really, really holds up. The visual vibe of it is so perfectly matches the kind of hard-boiled dialogue. And this feels like really, really coherent as a world. And even if some of the locations are a bit drab now, there’s a lot of like warehouses and car parks and things. It’s actual kind of handling of those places is like interesting enough to kind of elevate them above like just the mere kind of cliches that they are. There’s almost a version where you can do those same locations and they could be a lot worse. That’s the risk. You know, if you lose that unique tone, it’s how you kind of maintain that energy without, you know, in the updating. Yeah, I think they’re probably four years away from coming out these. I think like we’re a long way off those. I mean, they’re polishing up at Alan Wake 2. You know, that’s a way off yet. So I think that these remakes are a long, long way away. I don’t think they’re even close to being like ready. But, you know, certainly I actually don’t mind them taking a bit more artistic license with it. There’s not like the original games are going away at all. They’re right there on Xbox 3, Series X and S and one for you to play right now. If you’ve got a disc copy, pop it in, just play it. Works really good. So I don’t mind them taking a sort of like some broader strokes of how they do it. But I agree that it would be nice to retain the very specific mythical New York atmosphere of those games. There is something really winning about the original aesthetic as well. That kind of like late 90s, early noughties, 3D accelerator kind of aesthetic. The thing that connects games like Deus Ex 2, sorry, Deus Ex 2, Max Payne is, you know what I mean? They’re just that sort of like blocky sort of like art style, just that repeated sort of textures in kind of realistic locations and nighttime city settings. You just saw this a lot at this time on PC. It’s very unique to PC, this aesthetic, and I find it quite comforting. I see those and I remember thinking, I don’t think they look photorealistic now, but I remember at the time being like, wow, they’ve really done it. They’ve captured the entire world. This is what the world looks like. This is so incredible and replaying it, even if I don’t think that now, I can still tap into that memory and feel the satisfaction of it. One thing I really liked that they mentioned in that making of piece actually was that the… Well, there are a couple of things. The graphic novel sections, they did so they wouldn’t have to waste more time and resources on trying to do bad cutscenes basically. So by stripping that out, they saved themselves a bunch of money. And it allowed them to be able to like move bits of the story around as they saw fit. Like taking editors approach in a way you otherwise wouldn’t be able to with a game that’s got like cinematics, emotion captured and stuff. Whereas like… But the other thing that they said it gives us an advantage is that it allows you as a player to fill in the gaps between the panels of what the world actually looks like. So there is the world as it’s presented to you as a player, but then there is this additional layer of narrative where you are invited to think more about the substance of this world and the rest of the world out there and that it’s not just a sequence of like a subway station and like a bank and all these kind of generic locations. So yeah, I think there’s something in that. I think it’s like it just invites you to fill in the gaps a bit. So yeah, really good stuff. There’s a slightly sad note in that making of as well where he talks about the decision to go with the photo textures because he says originally they were going for a more hand-drawn art style. When they switched to it he was like this was definitely the right move but like in the studio some of the artists were like this is the end of the artist they said. This isn’t so much the beginning as an end of our craft as we switch into a new era where it becomes less about what we make and more about how we just harness the real world and you’re like yeah, that is true. Well, it’s true to an extent but then the way video game art is created still has a place for that kind of art for sure. Like, you know, concept art and, you know, it was made by two dozen people I think they said, the original Max Payne. And so obviously game studios now are like 200 people plus so you can have like, you know, basically a sprawling art department with people with different roles and stuff so it probably felt that way in the moment but it doesn’t feel like the importance of that kind of art has gone away at all. But the other thing is as well, I think the first game’s like graphic novel sections look a lot rougher than the second game’s when you play them back now. Like the second game’s got a really nice kind of colour palette to it and you kind of sense that Sam Blake and the actress playing Mona in the first game are not actors by trade, like in terms of their expressions and stuff. It feels a bit more like those sexy son, kind of like comic strips we’ve discussed in the podcast before, Matthew. Do you know what I mean? Yeah. That’s it, yeah. So there’s a bit of that to it. I think the second one does it a lot better. There was another article where a guy mentioned, because they filled they used so many of their friends and family as like the models for them. there was something about, you know, seeing like, oh, as my dad is like hoodlum number three in his car park or whatever, and just this idea of like seeing loved ones, you know, maybe, I think you may even said like now deceased, you know, to see them like live on in this really weird form is quite strange for them. That is quite interesting, yeah, like it’s a very, very specific, yeah, it’s almost like got the air of like a local sort of theatre production or something like that, like we just had to get anyone we could involved. I think like the Edge piece, which I will link because we’ve cited it so much here in like the, on Twitter and in the Patreon post, is that like, is that the AMD CTO is in there? Is one of the people? I was like, that’s kind of, kind of neat. Just like anyone we could get our hands on was just in this game. I think the bad guy is Sam Lake’s mum. Really? Yeah. The evil woman at the head of it all. Wow, okay. Yeah, that’s really, really good. But yeah, I think like, he basically, he said that, I think he reflected that his likeness being used was something that were they deeper into the game and he could take it back, he might have done when he realised how front and centre he was as a figure in the game. And like in a second game, he chose not to, so he could just focus on actually writing the game, because otherwise he’d been putting loads of effort and time into this. Whereas, yeah, but it is funny because when he made that decision, no one knew who he was. So it didn’t seem like he was going to have any kind of repercussions. But the success of the game means that that guy is now synonymous with that character, like forever. It’s like the main thing people talk about with Sam Lake still. And he leans into it in quite a fun way. I think it’s also made him the impromptu spokesman for Remedy. And I know that he’s super high up there now. But at the time, you know, like for a writer to be the face of a studio is quite unusual. But also the fact that like the way that Alan Wake would riff on that by having him in game and stuff. So, yeah, he has become like de facto sort of Remedy guy. Like I think we definitely mentioned this on a previous episode. Have you seen the his little Remedy retrospective thing where there’s a guy playing music in the background? I think it’s like Petri Olenko, the composer on the Remedy games, like is playing music in the background. He does this almost kind of like not quite William Shatner, but like spoken word, kind of like history of Remedy over the top of this music. Have you seen that before? I haven’t. It just seems super like he just really leans into being a bit of a character in a way that I think is quite fun. So yeah, yeah, yeah. It would be really weird if you went to a different studio because you’d be like, well, you’re the Remedy guy. So you can’t ever leave. You just have to stay here. So any further notes on Max Payne 1 and 2, Matthew, or should we take a quick break and discuss Max Payne 3? Let’s talk Max Payne 3. Welcome back to the podcast. So, in this section, we’re going to discuss Max Payne 3. We’ve ticked off 1 and 2. After Rebedee made Max Payne 2, which was actually like a bit of a commercial flop at the time, they sold the rights to Rockstar Games, who had published a second game, and essentially used the money and the kind of freedom that the money brought to basically like to conceptualize Alan Wake, which was a very long development process, quite famously. Meanwhile, Rockstar would do something with Max Payne at some point, but it wouldn’t emerge, what that would be wouldn’t emerge until 2009, when it was revealed that they were making Max Payne 3, set in Sao Paulo. And the game was meant to come out in 2009, I believe, but then ended up coming out like in 2012. So like a very long development process there. There’s a really interesting Game Informer article about the original reveal. Matthew, did you read that at all before this? I haven’t, no. Okay, so I’ll recap the really interesting bits. One, they weren’t going to use James McCaffrey at all as the voice actor. They were going to cast someone who was Max Payne. Two, they had this whole kind of Sao Paolo Fevella thing from the start, which would be a major part of the sort of like gameplay experience of the game. And the timeframe, I believe, was changed from, I think it’s set 12 years after Max Payne 2 in this Game Informer article. Then I think it’s only eight years after Max Payne 2 in the finished game. So there was that kind of going on. There was nothing about flashbacks to New York and stuff in there. And so my theory, Matthew, on how Max Payne 3 comes to be, and there’s not loads out there on the making of this game, is that I think Rockstar settled on the Sao Paolo idea first, built the Fevella level as a kind of proof of concept. Kind of like all the screenshots in this Game Informer article are from that level, quite clearly. And a lot of them look like shot for shot of what they would actually be in the finished game. And then I think everything around it sort of like changed quite a lot in development. But they kept that core setting and built it from there. And that’s where they kind of layer in the kind of flashbacks and all this sort of stuff. But yeah, what they started with was a bold Max Payne in a Fevella shooting a load of dudes in their 20s who were wearing football shirts and stuff, and then built a game from that. But yeah, that’s just a little bit of background there, Matthew, but I was curious about how you feel about Max Payne 3 coming back to this. This is kind of like partly where I wanted to do the episode because you started playing it again, and we had some quite interesting discussions offline about this, like Max Payne 3, what’s the Matthew Castle verdict in 2012? Sorry, 2022. On PC, I think this is a really fun action game. I think it’s not a very good Max Payne game. I think Rockstar gonna Rockstar and Rockstar all over it, and what you have is a very different voice to Remedy, who already had a really well established voice. So that’s why it’s particularly jarring. You’re going from something so specific to something else so specific. And I don’t think they even really attempt to capture what made the Remedy games, Remedy games. And while I’m still like a little bit sad about that, and I think it’s kind of a missed opportunity, and I don’t particularly like the Rockstar voice in this game, I do enjoy the action of it, though, as mentioned in the previous section, even here, I think the bullet time combat just runs out of ideas way before the end. But I am eating my own words in that I literally, I hated this game when I first played it, I thought it was terrible. Either I’ve mellowed or it’s that different a play experience on PC, but I played it through in two sittings quite happily and had a pretty great time. Yeah, I think this game is transformatively better on PC. And I’m not a big guy for going around and saying, you have to play this on PC or you’re getting half the experience. I’m not that guy at all. But there’s something about bullet time and the level of precision required to master this game. That means that I think mouse and keyboard control is a must. So I started playing this again. I only played this once at the time. I remember it being quite arduous, dying a lot. And it has an adaptive difficulty, which means it drops some painkillers in your inventory if you’re struggling with a section, which I really like. But it was, I just remember it being very hard work when it was over. I was like, thank God. I appreciated how lavish it was as a Rockstar production, some amazing environmental design in this, I think, even though they’re making a linear game as opposed to an open world one. I’ve mentioned the soundtrack by Health last time. But playing this now with a mouse and keyboard is so badass, the action. It feels so, so good. It looks tons better on PC as well. This is basically, if you were like, why do they never bring this game out on PS4 and Xbox One? This is that version on PC. This is the super high fidelity character models and just beautiful looking physics, really detailed environments. All that stuff is tons better on PC than it is on console. So if you can play on PC, definitely do that. I really think it makes a massive difference, Matthew, because I went through sections where I would die like once or twice and that was it. But then one of the things you said to me, I found really funny was, this is a game about a guy who dives into rooms, head-shotting people with three bullets and the entire room just collapses and then he moves on. That is so true. This is a game where it’s like, I saw it before, it’s like another attritional cover shooter that had bullet time in it because it felt like it had to, because it was Max Payne. Here, it’s like, I barely ever sit in cover, and I’m always in bullet time. It’s so generous when it lets you do the slow motion jump dive basically. You’re always doing it. It has no flow on console. I say it because I started replaying it on console for this episode and was like, oh man, this is every bit as rancid as I remember. Like, it’s just so vague and spongy. There’s like no precision to it. The enemies are incredibly precise. It’s super, super difficult, you know, so much of what the game is trying to do aesthetically, particularly with the music. It’s the flow, you know, the music’s got this like trance, like kind of beat to it. And it’s about like forwards, forwards. You’re always moving forwards. You know, it’s got this real kind of drive to it. Except you never ever hit that, that sweet space on console, at least in my experience. Maybe this is a good situation, but I’m pretty sure it’s just a spongy old mess. And the frame rate just isn’t up for it. Like it doesn’t give you the speed and reactivity. But when you do hit that space, you really charge through this game. And there’s some sequences which I just, I just don’t think make any sense if you’re dying over and over again. Like there’s just no satisfaction to it. Like there’s a lot of chases in this game. And it’s so stop start that all the kind of drama and tension of the situation is drained if you’re not able to just rinse it. But I would say though, the kind of flip side to that, and I think a huge missed opportunity, because of the difficulty and because of what you’re able to do on PC, it’s so much about efficiency that I don’t think you ever get to see the environments torn up in a way that you really want to see. To me, it feels like loads of rooms where you’re like, oh man, this is gonna be wrecked. But actually, you do two shoot jumps, shoot all 12 people in the head between those two jumps and move on. And there’s barely a scratch on the place where with this level of environment design, this level of detail and physics and everything you can do in a modern game, I’d really love a version of this where you can turn around at the end of a fight and just go, yikes, look at the state of this place. There are a few levels where there are sheer exceptions, which have got a lot of plate glass windows and things which shatter in a really nice way, but I do think that is like a strange contradiction at the heart of this game. See, it sounds like you’re even better at it than I am. I have like, I think I had the, I can’t remember if I had complete free aim on or the second option, which is like partial lock on with free aim, but like I would still miss shots for sure. Like it had to be like mega precise still. A mouse control definitely gives you that, but like I wasn’t hitting every shot. So I would still see environments get torn up, bits of cover rip apart in this. They’re like the office sequences in particular are quite good for showing off the kind of like debris that goes everywhere and like how messy it gets. Yeah, I sort of like, it’s true though, I don’t factor that in as like a massive part of the game. It’s not like you come out of an environment and it’s like that sort of bank lobby sequence in The Matrix where it’s just, you know. I think that, and that is still like a gaming sort of fantasy for me, you know, like, I mentioned it earlier, Stranglehold, which I think is an alright game actually. It has you fighting in one location for so long that it’s like bound to be torn up. And here it just feels like a bit of a wasted opportunity. Like I almost want a mode in this where you have like infinite bullet time and like an infinite machine gun just so I can churn up the environments. Like I wish that unlocked at the end. Like I just want to see like what damage I can actually do because everyone in this game is so lethal, you and the enemies, that it’s just too precise to ever really get as hectic as it needs to. And I’d say that’s the same about 360. You know, they kill you so fast. You know, the things you’re hitting are kind of by accident. I don’t know, that remains a problem I have with it. But definitely the kind of the sensation of like jumping into a room and blasting everyone and like how reactive their bodies are because it has that mad, is it euphoria? I think it is. Yeah, which is like the sort of next gen kind of ragdoll physics, basically. You know, that was always the stuff I was really excited about. So, you know, I loved all that shit in GTA 4. I remember when Rockstar was making this, I was so excited for this game because I thought, you know, Max Payne, but with those insane like injury and like people falling downstairs kind of physics, it’s going to look so good. But actually what I encountered was so frustrating that I never really got to enjoy that. But, you know, this playthrough on PC, I did. It’s a spectacularly horrible game in so many ways, the violence of this. The bullet cam shots of like people’s, like they wince when they’re bleeding. Like they’re like really like, ah, on their faces as like a bullet goes out the back of their head and like the exit wound just looks disgusting. Yeah, the exit wounds are like brain plumes. Like they’re just like, you just see this kind of like, sort of fountain of like red and stuff as the bullet comes out. And like, yeah, it’s really nasty, but it makes like your enemies feel like much more than just disposable. They feel like I’ve just like shot a person. And that may not be like to your liking, which fair enough if it’s not, but I think it really, it really lands as a kind of way to extend the Max Payne formula. Yeah. I suppose like the, so I, of all the levels, I played nine chapters of this. I know you played the whole thing. So my highlight by far was the Favela level, because I think that I did actually like, I enjoyed pretty much every level I played. Like I really dug it. Would have given the original game a seven at the time. I would have to give this at least an eight on PC. Like it’s, I absolutely think everyone should play it on PC. It’s really, really good. But the Favela level I love, because it felt like a labyrinth. There’s a lot of like tiny pathways, but very like tall buildings surrounding you where people are shooting you from a great height. And you always feel like you’re stuck in a pit, trying to like stay alive. And it feels to me that like, that was the starting point of the game. That was the conceit of the game. It’s like, well, okay, we’ve matched a style of level to a real world location, which will drive the tone of the game. And like the level just, it just feels really good because like you go into like a courtyard and there’s like six dudes pointing guns at you who are all on like, who all have the higher ground on you. And it’s really stressful, but quite exciting. So I really dug that actually. But I was curious, Matthew, what was kind of your highlight from replaying it? I really like the level where the, you sort of go to your boss’s headquarters, just cause it’s a really like modern glamorous building and there’s lots of glass in it, which, you know, you can’t help, but really wreck a room in that particular level. And I was like, oh yeah, this is more like it. This is what I want. More than specific levels, I really like the sort of cinematic kind of, I don’t know, they’re not really quick time events, but like most levels have one or two moments where you’re put into like forced bullet time and you do something that’s quite bespoke. So like in the first level, you slide down this ramp and have to shoot a guy in the head, but there’s a couple of moments where you sort of hold onto this sort of chain and shoot this pulley and it kind of pulls you up through quite a tall building and you get about 15 seconds of just straight bullet time, which you like never get in these games otherwise. And there’s just enemies swarming in and as you’re getting pulled up on this chain, you’re just shooting each one of them in the head and it’s just absolutely brilliant. Like it looks so cool. You feel so powerful. I mean, it’ll be the same every time. It’s not an emergent moment. If it’s something remedied, never ever do. Like they rarely take control away from you in that way. But it’s something where, you know, I thought those landed really, really well. There’s another one where you like jump onto this like trolley wheels across this room as you sort of machine gun down everyone on this kind of opposite ledge. And I really like those moments just because, you know, it’s a chance to see the most environmental collapse, the most slow motion, the most bodies kind of pirouetting in slow motion. That’s really what I want from this game. So, you know, if there was anything from this I’d want Remedy to take for their remakes, it would be to maybe like add moments like this. Yeah, that was something they had in mind from the start. Like it’s mentioned in the Game Informer article and like the chain one, yeah, that’s part of the Favela level. And I thought that was like an amazing moment. And then it leads to kind of like a quite fun sequence where you’re clearing out a warehouse full of people. Yeah, really, really good. I agree with you, those kind of work incredibly well. The tough thing about this game, Matthew, we discussed this on 2012. The tone, it’s such hard work, the tone in this game, isn’t it? It’s so dreary. Max is a kind of like, Max is not a fun character at all. In the second one, he’s so preposterous that other characters even point out sometimes just how miserable he is. And like he’s mocked by Vlad, the villain in the game, as like, you just never have any fun in life. You’re always so miserable all the time. And this game is kind of like, we discussed this last time, but there’s a heightened comic book reality to Max Payne 1 and 2 that this game doesn’t subscribe to. This game is like, he’s like, he had to flee New Jersey and basically just live to become like private security in Brazil to make ends meet. Bottom of the bottle, all this stuff. It’s very sincere in how it tells the story, but it’s just not very fun. There’s so many sequences of him being sick because he’s an alcoholic. Like him puking into his toilet or him like falling over his coffee table. I was like, oh, yikes. Yeah. He’s not a fun hang in this, Max Payne. I will say that. And I think that is kind of a bummer. Like that’s probably the element that’s stated the most is just how dreary it is. Did you find that too? Yeah, definitely. I think the difference is Remedy being a Finnish studio. They’re total outsiders. And while the game has this like quite miserable, hard boiled style, there is something kind of wide eyed about its love of genre. You know, it’s these people who are like, we sent some of our guys over to New York. You know, it’s kind of the New York of pop culture. You know, there is an admiration. There is a kind of wonder to it, which gives you that very sort of cinematic universe where Rockstar, as with everything with Rockstar, is always done with a sneer. I think that’s the difference. I don’t think Remedy have that sneer in them. Maybe a smirk, but there’s a huge difference. I think Rockstar, just the sort of venom for everyone in this world, it’s not just enough to be a villain. It’s like, his VO is full of these vacuous, stupid millionaires and all this stuff. And you’re like, oh, I just get it. But it’s just like this nasty teenager with nothing nice to say about anyone. It really grinds you down. It’s my least favorite thing about all Rockstar games is they just think they’re above everything. It’s just so wearying, you know, and I just, I don’t think there’s like an ounce of that in Remedy. I think they are so much more like chilled and sort of vibing with the genre. And yeah, I’d say that’s the difference. It’s interesting how this game sort of falls in terms of like the tone and story. Cause I don’t think it’s like got an eye on the ball massively when it comes to what it’s trying to say about either the character or the world itself. Like they picked a setting that had like a big kind of wealth gap and like admittedly this game was made in an age before like Twitter discourse about things like police officers and the wealth gap and what that means and you know, the ethics of like billionaires existing and things like that, that like are quite hotly discussed now. So it feels like it lives very pre that in a lot of ways like you are working for a millionaire. He max deliberately kind of calls him like a good guy and stuff and it’s like, it feels like they are the victim to some extent, but then this militia comes after Max because he’s murdered so many of their people and so is the game trying to say, look at this bad thing you did, but then you go to a favela and shoot loads of like kids in their 20s basically, who are probably working at desperation for this gang leader. Like morally, it’s very murky and I can’t tell what it’s trying to say about anything. There’s moments where it almost hints that it is going to like tie back into Max Payne 1 and 2, that it’s somehow gonna pull it around. There’s a lot of talk about like revenge and like your past sins kind of catching up with you. And actually the kind of sins that catch up with him are like relatively modern day things, nothing to do with the first two games. And you know, I almost think this game misses like a third act rug pull, where actually is about like the sort of illuminati bullshit or whatever from the first two. And I think it would almost land a lot better if it did that. Like it could be quite a sort of fun twist in, maybe the rest of the game tonally like doesn’t allow them to do that. But it’s sort of surprisingly bleak and sort of surprisingly straight about what it’s about in terms of the plot and kind of who’s out to get them and everything. And you know, in terms of like the wider ethics stuff, I just, you just come out of there thinking well they just, they sort of hate everyone. Like everyone gets it. It is weird because I feel like calling it Max Payne 3 is part of the issue with the tone here, where it’s like the fact that they were recasting, they originally were planning to recast Max Payne. Take him to this vastly different environment and kind of like do this Sal Paolo set, Tony Scott-esque story. Makes me think that they basically wanted to soft reboot Max Payne. But instead the end result ends up like awkwardly threading the Max he used to know and this new version of Max, where it’s really hard to connect to here. Like he writes off the whole romance with Mona and Max Payne 2 in like a single line while he’s in front of the grave of his wife. Like it’s, it’s like, oh yeah, it was just like a love thing and kind of moves on. But it doesn’t really add up as a kind of backstory for the man. And so when it kind of makes this tonal shift into being dreary and nihilistic, like you say, that’s only really part of the tonal package of Max Payne 2. And I think that like Rockstar understands what the difference is, but I think they just wanted to do something so different. And maybe those two things just don’t coalesce in the way that maybe you’d want them to. Maybe it just has to be one or the other, you know. But even the New York flashbacks in this, they’re nothing like the original Max Payne. Like, they’re so much uglier. What the character’s doing, the language they use, their kind of behaviour is so much more like, vicious and unpleasant. Yeah, like that veteran guy who suicide bombs and kills all those dudes, for example. That’s quite intense, that stuff. But even like the fact that they’re all kind of, you know, they’re dealing with these horrible kind of racist teenagers in the kind of bar and stuff. And they’re really like repellent, but not in a fun way. Like you go back to Max Payne 1 and 2 and the gangsters are like properly comedy gangsters. But in this one, it’s all kind of, well, you can’t even repeat it, it’s so unpleasant. You know? And you’re like, oh, yikes. Like, yes, I do want to shoot these people, but like, not in the same way that I want to shoot a comedy gangster. Yeah, I really like, I kind of admire the idea that they had such a firm idea of like, we’ve seen these films, like City of God or whatever. They had these influences they were drawing from and they obviously have a really confident idea of like, this is what we want to do. This is the setting we want to do. Went there and like scanned people who live there. I understand it got some flack for like some of the Portuguese in the game, not quite being right. There’s a lot of people in this game who shout Portuguese slur for a sex worker at you. And it’s like, you hear that word a lot in this game. And like, it sums it up quite nicely. Like everyone is like irredeemably awful. The cops are corrupt. Everyone in this gang is incredibly unpleasant. Max himself is not a pleasant character. It’s a lot. And it’s like, it doesn’t have any of the kind of like cheeky fun elements that Rockstar games usually have and that Max Payne 2 had in abundance. So I’m with you on that. It doesn’t have like an Italian mobster boss who is very invested in Lords and Ladies. Like that’s just not part of the formula here. So Matthew, do you think there’s head room for another Max Payne game after replaying Max Payne 3? I think there’s definitely room for the remakes they’re making. I think there’s definitely room for a more modern, more technologically advanced version of those games, which have got a really nice established tone and story for them to kind of work within and sort of play within. I wouldn’t want more of Max Payne 3 Max Payne. Like just tonally, it’s just unfun to hang with. I just don’t think there’s much left in that character. And, you know, even though we maybe disagree on the bullet time, I just don’t know if there’s much in the bullet time. Because even by the end of Max Payne 3, I felt like they had nothing new to say with it. I think they had a few tricks early on in the game, like using bullet time to shoot grenades and stuff. That’s really cool. But there was nothing new in the final third. It was just repeating itself by then. Again, as I said earlier about Red Dead Redemption 2, any game with bullet time, I feel like by the end, I’m just shooting everyone in the head so perfectly. I’m like, well, what’s the point? Yeah. I think maybe, yeah, I do like bullet time more than you. But the thing it comes down to for me is bullet time was replaced with cover shooting and then no one had a better idea than cover shooting. So cover shooting is what we had. I don’t think cover shooting changes vastly from hour 1 to hour 10 either. This game, of course, has both. Your actual time in cover shooting is mostly spent just trying to replenish your bullet time so you can go back into slow motion. You can pretty much slow-mo dive at any point in this game anyway. But yeah, I think that’s fair. It is an overly long game as well, Max Payne 3. It’s like a lengthy game. Not as lengthy playing on PC when you’re headshotting games perfectly. It’s so quick. The way people describe this game, it just doesn’t hold up if you play it on PC. It’s so much faster moving. That end airport scene, which everyone always talks about, you basically fight through an airport as the, I’d say probably the definitive track of the game plays. It’s just a three-minute plowing through enemy forces while this really good bit of music plays. Seeing how that’s meant to move and flow on PC, that is transformative, that scene. It’s so fucking good, that whole sequence. But on console, it’s none of that. It’s so stop-start. It’s a really miserable rough time. Yeah, that’s it. I don’t reflect on that positively. I remember thinking thank fuck when it was over. Tears by health, that’s the track. Do you want my hot health take? Go on then, is there Randy Newman? A lot of the tunes in the game just feel like the automatic drum backing on a school keyboard. It’s just a drum going, tika. Everyone’s like, wow, this is awesome. You’re like, is it? Or is it just a drum going tika tika tika tika tika? The only reason people like the airport is because it’s a drum going tika tika tika, and then a man sings a bit over the top going, ooh, he’s so sad, ooh, he needs to shoot some people. And everyone’s like, oh, I love this fucking album. I’m going to play it at my wedding. I mean, give me a fucking break. Like, proper Emperor Has No Clothes. That is just a drum. That is just a fucking drum. So I don’t think you’re completely wrong. I think that there was a strain of people dying to tell me how much they read Pitchfork when this game came out. Like, oh, fucking health, Matt. It reminded me of people talking about Arcade Fire in 2007. It’s like, I get it, mate. I get that this is like a cornerstone of your personality. But I will say that I think that this game doesn’t sound like other games. And whether you question the kind of complexity of the drum effect or whatever, like it does give it its own atmosphere and vibe. And like, yeah, I don’t know, like it’s just the kind of like the different sort of flourishes they use in the music work very, very well. And yeah, I don’t know, I think it does add to it for sure. It’s definitely like totally kind of coherent as a piece, you know, it all fits together and the music definitely ties it together. I just like, you can’t hum it. Yeah, for sure. And you definitely can’t sing along to tears because you can’t work it out. That’s like a lot of his singing, isn’t it? Tell you what, though, Stonefist by Health, that’s a good song. There’s a few good health songs, Matthew, probably about six that I like. But yeah, there you go. That’s my one hot Max Payne take. That’s why everyone who has any interest in music has just unsubscribed from the Patreon hearing us describe that. That’s like, we just lost like 400 quid doing that, Matthew. It’s yeah, good stuff. I have some thoughts on this, Matthew, as well on the whole another Max Payne game thing. I don’t really need to see a sequel. I agree with you on that. I would be more into a strain of Max Payne likes that riff on the visual style of the original game, as we’ve seen with shooters like Dusk and Amid Evil in recent years riffing on Quake and things like that. That way, I think you can borrow and iterate on the gameplay style that adjusts the world around the character based on whatever fictional influences they’d like to bring in. I’d love to see maybe two or three games like that where they’re like, we’re just funding a sort of Max Payne-alike, basically, and you immediately know it when you see gameplay of it, but it’s maybe a little bit different, just like how we’ve seen with so many PC revival games. An ascetic revival. Exactly. I’d rather that more than, what did Max do after his Desert Island and Max Payne 3? Like that dude, I don’t want to spend any more time with that guy. He’s just too miserable, frankly. It should just go back to Remedy, where they have to try and somehow write out of the hole that they put them in Max Payne 3, where he’s like, oh, now I am sad about Mona again. And also it’s like I have re-entered a slightly daft noir world and stuff. Yeah, very hard to kind of join those up. But I think Max Payne’s kind of done as a series. It doesn’t seem like it’s high on Rockstar’s agenda as a thing to revisit, versus the money makers that are GTA and Red Dead. So yeah, I think it’s probably done for now, but I’m OK with that. As a trilogy of games, well, the first two are certainly coherent with each other, and the third is its very own beast. But I am pleased to have come away from playing Max Payne 3 thinking it’s a lot better. And actually, like you say, reading some of the reviews from the time, those takes don’t date well when you play the PC version, because you’re like, I promise you, the definitive version of this experience is around and you will love this. You just need to play it without a controller. So that’s the big take, Matthew. So anything more to add, Matthew, or should we take a quick break and come back with our final ill-advised section of this podcast? Let’s take a deep breath and do it. Welcome back to the third and final section of this podcast, the Did Max Payne Say This Or Not Quiz. It has reminded me of the name of the podcast, The Back Page. It’s a riff on the back page jokes that would come in UK games magazines. I think some US mags did them too. And the whole thing with those is they were comedy under duress. That is, there is a deadline. We have to think of something funny. Good comedy either happens under duress or it doesn’t happen. It’s either a hit or a total miss. And the ongoing existence of Saturday Night Live is testament to this. It’s like you have to make a whole hour of TV show and jokes in a week. If you’re having a bad week, it’s an absolute train wreck. If you’re having a good week, it might enter the pop culture sort of consciousness permanently and be talked about for decades. Now, this section is more on the train wreck side, I would say. Because I’m not in the most jolly mood, it’s the end of like an Easter holiday period. I was stressing coming up with this. Matthew, you pitched this. Do you want to explain the concept of what we’re doing here? Max Payne has a famous hard-boiled tone where he speaks in this metaphor simile laden overwritten angsty text, which on the surface seems very easy to mimic and mock. So I thought we could do a quiz where we tried to come up with lines in the style of Max Payne, lace them with real lines from Max Payne and see if we could deceive one another. So I think we each have 10 lines. Some of them are real Max Payne lines. Some of them are fake Max Payne lines. And can we tell the difference? Here’s something funny, Matthew. I’ve misunderstood the concept here. And I’ve done basically I’ve got like 10 sets of like, there’s a real quote and then a fake quote. So I’ve got 20 of what you’re pitching basically. I’m wondering what you were stressing out. Yeah, that’s why it took me so fucking long. I put like an hour and a half into this. It took ages and none of them are funny. I was so upset at the end. I was like, oh my God, I’m going on to the podcast with this non-comedy to like basically murder the episode at the end. So I think Matthew, what we should do is, cause I’ve got like an A and B for each one of my 10. Maybe we should like do yours or mine first and do the others. Would that make sense? Yeah. Should I do yours first? Like, do you want to like read me yours and I should try and guess if they’re real or not? I was going to do them in a semi Max Payne voice to help get you in the mood. Oh yeah, go ahead. Should I do the theme tune? There you go. It’s great. Here’s my number one. What is it with. Rich people in their towers? I think that’s fake because there’s a bunch of other lines like that in Max Payne 3. All right, one out of 10 is good. That sets the tone. Goal number two. The sign next to the door had no vacancies. When I was done with the place, there’d be plenty. That is real, I think. Max Payne 1 and 2, I feel, that one. But yeah, I think that’s real. That’s fake. Oh, there you go. You are basically Sam Lake, Matthew. Oh my God. If I trick you enough, I get a job at Remedy. It’s like the reward, and then you just leave the podcast. Okay. Quick number three. Out in the night, snow fell like confetti over the devil’s parade. The storm was anything but over. I think that’s probably real. That is real. Okay, so I’ve got like two out of four so far. Is that right? Yeah, something like that. Yeah, okay. I’ve got two right, anyway. Two out of three, yeah. Okay, good, yeah. I had a bullet with Lem’s name on it, and a bullet etched with the name of every man that stood between me and him. At the very least, I got to practise my handwriting. God, there’s just, it’s plausibly a Matthew Castle flourish there at the end. I’m gonna say fake. Is it fake? Yeah, it’s fake as shit. It’s a bit too much detail for Max there. He usually does like two clauses, Max. Oh, god damn it. Originally, it finished all told 500 bullets. It was just garbage. Well, the thing is, when you get to mine, you’ll see that some I have made tricky on purpose, and some of them were clearly meant to be a joke. So, I’m glad we divided this up now. I’ve got correct now. Three I’ve got correct, I think. Three or four. My job prospects aren’t looking good. I felt thin as death. I’ve been living on an endless supply of weak old donuts. They were fuel for this crazy furnace inside my head. God, does Max eat donuts? I think that might be fake. That’s real. Okay, damn it. Even if I picked donuts, you’d think it was a fake one. Oh, nice. Good strategy there. I thought, yeah. Well, I don’t want to give away any more of my plots. Any of my plots, any of my plans. It’s like the draft all over again. Yeah. The place lit up like a Christmas tree, but there was no jolly red fat man coming down the chimney. Only me. And I didn’t care if you’d been naughty or nice. God, I think that might be real. That’s fake. I guess in retrospect it does seem pretty fake, yeah. I think, like, I don’t care if you’ve been naughty or nice. It does sound like something Max would say. Your job prospects on the remakes are just perked up a bit, Max. Nice. OK, next up. With all the junk they shoveled into their veins, they didn’t even notice when someone started injecting their friends with lead. I think that’s real. That’s fake. Wow, you’re pretty good at this. That could be a Max Payne one-liner. I wouldn’t even bat an eye. He could run, but with a bullet in his stomach, like a broken bottle of Tabasco, he was quickly running out of time. That sounds fake. That’s real. Oh, for fuck’s sake. I thought Tabasco would flow you. Yeah, you’re just picking food stuff that would throw me off. Donuts and Tabasco. I ate my bucket of fried chicken and then shot him in the head. It’s like, oh, it sounds fake, Matthew. You’re like, no, that’s real. And I’m like, I don’t remember that bit. But yeah. I went to Intermezzo and ate three baguettes. You’re like, that’s fake. I’m like, no, that was real. That was in Max Payne 3. Yeah, I guess you didn’t play enough of it. That’s on the last level. We have to kill Tony. Intermezzo’s rarely discussed Sao Paulo franchise. Next up, Vinny Cogniti had guts. Too bad I had to spill them across half the rooftops of New York City. I’d heard of painting the town red, but never figured myself for a decorator. I think that’s fake. Yeah, that’s fake. Yeah, that just sounds like, again, there’s just a bit too wordy that one. Oh, for fuck’s sake. Well, he’s not that wordy, is he? He fits it all into a tiny little thought bubble panel. But then I got the Jolly Red Fat Man one wrong, so what do I know? Here’s the last one. The family treated me like a glorified nanny. Mary Poppins with an alcohol problem and a Beretta strapped to her hip. Gosh. I don’t remember that line from playing Max Payne 3. I don’t remember a Mary Poppins reference, but I was drinking some wine when I played the opening chapters. You’re as bad as Max Payne. Yeah, I am a little bit. I did drink a lot of red wine this weekend. I’ll take a punt on that being real. That’s fake. Why don’t I just follow my instincts? Yes. So I got 4 out of 10 right for me. It’s not very good. So you win that one, I would say. Yeah, that means I get a job. Yeah, have fun. And I’m equally able to write Max Payne 1 and 2 or 3 dialogue. Unfortunately, Matthew lost his job when he went in on day one and said, guys, haven’t we reached the ceiling of bullet time? Yeah, they’re like, we heard your podcast for you slagged us off for an hour. These games aren’t as good as I remember. It’s like, oh, sorry. I was trying to offer a counterpoint to the co-host. Oh, no, yeah, very good. My one, this is so tortured, my one, Matthew. It’s going to take fucking ages, I think. Right, so I’ve basically done it as, yeah, it’s like 1 to 10, there’s an A and a B, you’ve got to decide which one’s real and which one’s fake. Now, I think this is a lot easier than your one because the way you did it made it harder. There’s at least three joke answers as well. I didn’t take it that seriously, I’ll be honest. We’ll go with number one, so A or B, which one’s right or wrong? Okay, A, do I have to do the voice as well? It’s entirely up to you. Oh, I don’t know, what is my Max Payne voice? I had a hole in my second favorite drinking arm and the only way we were likely to get Fabiano back now was in installments. No, I can’t do that for this whole thing. I’m just going to read it in my voice. Okay, A, I had a hole in my second favorite drinking arm and the only way we were likely to get Fabiano back now was in installments. B, every bullet hole felt like a message from hell. If I didn’t keep moving, Fabiano was coming back in a body bag. A or B, which one’s real and which one’s wrong, Matthew? I think A’s real. Correct, yes. Yes! Yeah, every bullet hole felt like a message from hell was a bit on the nose, wasn’t it? So, OK, good. That Sam Houser reading through your lines for the day, going through his teeth. Oh, God. OK, so, two. A, the clientele were your usual mix of lowlives, bottom feeders and social climbers. B, this club had more smoke and mirrors than a strip club locker room. Oh, difficult. I think B’s real. Yeah, correct. That’s a Max Payne 3 line. I feel like having recently played Max Payne 3 might make some of mine a bit easier, to be honest. Oh, this is really easy, this one. OK, three. A, every bad decision pulled me deeper into the hole, and each time I tried to climb back out, I found myself right back where I started. B, the genius of the hole. No matter how long you spend climbing out, you can still fall back down in an instant. Is B real? Yes, correct. So you’ve got three for three so far. This one, well, let’s see how this one goes. For A, this place was like Baghdad with G-strings. B, this place was like Basra with thongs. Thongs sounds wrong. Correct, B was the Basra with thongs. Now, that may have been one of the joke ones who can really say. Are you still there? I just like the idea of a script writer in his room going, guys, Baghdad with G-strings or Basra with thongs? I came up with that this morning and just made myself laugh and I thought, you know what? It’s worth throwing off the sanctity of the quiz just to get that in there. Basra with thongs just made me laugh so much. Oh dear. Guess who Googled cities in Iraq this morning? And sexy underwear. Number five. A, love always ended the same way, a beautiful woman lying in a pool of blood paying the price for my mistakes. B, this is love when someone drags you from the wreckage when you have given in, ready to just lie there and die. Oh yikes. They both sound legit. Is A real? A is mine, I’m afraid. I thought I did nail the Max Payne tone. Yeah, definitely. Which one was that from? That’s from Max Payne 2. It’s actually quite an incidental line. It’s not like a highly quotable one, so I tried to mix it up there. I didn’t even finish my version of the next one. Amazing. The past is a shattered mirror, every shadow reflection of the person you used to be. The past is a puzzle like a broken mirror. As you piece it together, you cut yourself, your image keeps shifting, and you change with it. It could destroy you, drive you mad, it could set you free. And if it’s B, that’s a very ambitious line. Is B real? B is real, yeah. Yeah, that’s like from Max Payne 2. So, yeah, very good. Okay, 7, A, I’d killed more cops and cholesterol. B, I’d killed more cops and corn syrup. Oh, yikes. A is real? Yeah, that’s like… Corn syrup! I don’t even understand that one. Is corn syrup deadly? Well, it’s just, you know, loss of sugar in it, isn’t it? That should have been the follow-up line. I told you this is interminable. It already feels like it should be over, but it keeps going. I’ve killed more cops than corn syrup, which, let me remind you, is incredibly sugary, and that leads to a lot of health conditions. Everyone’s like, man, the writing in this fourth Max Payne is shit. And who’s this red guy coming down the chimney? Who’s been naughty on ice? Awesome, it’s my Tabasco. I fancy a doughnut right now. 8A, the smell of this place reminded me of how long it had been since I had any food. A drinker eats when he’s loaded. A real drunk eats when he’s not. B, this place smelled like a smokehouse that needed a health inspector. The scent of searing dead bodies filled my lungs. Smokehouse feels quite you. I’m going to say A is real. Correct. I thought smokehouse that needed a health inspector was quite a good little line, personally. I do like that, but I think not many people would naturally go for smokehouses. You know too much about me, Ant. That you like meats. Yeah, that was really working against me there. Okay, nine. A, your past is a way of sneaking up on you. You’ll hear broken echoes of it everywhere like a bad replay. You’ll get mad at everyone for reminding you about it, even if it’s all in your head. B, the past is an old friend crawling up from the gutter, a manifestation of all your most painful moments and fatal decisions. After it’s gone, your brain is awash with places and people you spent your whole life trying to forget. Oh, yikes. I mean, they’re both quite overwrought. Is A real? A is real, correct. 8 out of 9 so far, very good. Okay, 10, the final one, thank god it’s over. A, the past is a gaping hole. You try to run from it, but the more you run, the deeper, more terrible it grows behind you. Its edges yawning at your heels. Your only chance is to turn around and face it, but it’s like looking down into the grave of your love or kissing the mouth of a gun. A bullet trembling in its dark nest, ready to blow your head off. B, the past is a gaping hole. An unending abyss, pulling you further and further in. A really deep hole, so deep that it keeps going and going. Really an inconveniently deep hole. I shout into the really deep hole, hoping to hear Michelle calling back to me, but the only sound is my own voice booming back to me because it’s such an outrageously big hole, both metaphorically and also literally. I mean, B’s gotta be real, right? I think this whole thing was just so I could do that one joke. I think that might be what that entire torture exercise was, Matthew. That is what The Back Page is for in a mag. It’s one joke stretched so thin that you lose any grasp of what the original joke was. Yeah, that’s what happened there. I really hope the listeners enjoyed that and the houses, I’m sure, will just be calling me any day now. Looking forward to that. Matthew got nine out of 10 right there. I got four out of 10 right in his. He arguably did it better than me, but hopefully we both had a good time there, Matthew. Did you enjoy yourself there? I enjoyed it. I enjoyed doing my best Sam Lake impression. Yeah, it was good. Okay, cool. Well, that’s the end of the podcast, Matthew. It was good fun to revisit the Max Payne series there. I think we did it justice. Doug Deep, you’ve played fucking loads of it. I played quite a lot of it. So I’m really earning our Patreon bucks there. That’s good. Self-consciously doing that. So if you’d like to find us out there, it’s patreon.com/backpagepod if you’d like to support the podcast. There’s a one pound tier and a four pound fifty tier. The latter tier gets you bonus podcasts as mentioned at the start of the episode. We’re Twitter BackpagePod. If you’d like to leave us a review on Spotify or Apple Podcasts, we always welcome the support. Particularly if you’re in the Americas, where we’re trying to find more listeners. I think we’re slowly growing in America. I’ve got a few Patreon backers from the US. And you can find our Discord link on our Twitter page as well. Matthew, where can people find you on social media? MrBazzill underscore Pesty. I’m Samuel W. Roberts on Twitter. Thank you very much for listening. I will be back next week. Goodbye. Bye.