Re: OOC: General Chat
Yeah, you were waiting on me. Slow as usual!
Max Payne 3 was really disappointing. Now, I REALLY loved Bioshock Infinite. Without actually counting, I can say it probably made it's way into my top 10 games ever. And I played it before MP3. If I had played them in the other order I may have liked it more, but I think I still would have been disappointed overall. There were some really, really cool aspects about the game. For example, the cutscenes were integrated right into the game play. You would walk around a corner and then you'd get some special effect on the edge of the screen and Max would start walking on his own. And if you got lost, Max would have a voiceover to guide you to the right place.
And the tiny attention to detail was superb. There were several different voiceover effects in each level for picking up the pill bottles, or for getting lost. For instance in the drug-dealer's compound if you dilly dally too long he'll say "maybe the drugs in the air were getting to my head, but I knew I needed to get out of there." Or when you find pill bottle in the police station he'd say something like "illegal drugs aren't the only thing that can be found in impound". Or somesuch; I'm not really doing it any justice. But instead of having the same voiceover, they probably recorded 10s or maybe 100 different ones, fully knowing you will never hear them all in the course of the game. Another thing I thought was cool was the way they did the weapons. You have two shoulder holsters that can carry any pistol you come across, and you can carry a large gun (shotgun, rifle). If you have a large gun and you are shooting with one pistol, Max will hold onto the stock of the large gun in his off hand, so you don't have the "bag of holding" effect a lot of video games have. And if you get out both pistols, he'll drop the big gun on the ground and you can pick it up later.
My biggest complaint was that the game was just plain hard. I'm a casual gamer, but I always play on Medium difficulty with moderate site assist and so on. I had to turn the game on Easy with full assist just to be able to get past the beginning levels. The bad guys just seemed really, really, hard to kill. After I got my bearings with the aiming, I would go into bullet time mode, come out of cover, get a headshot, turn to the next guy... and the first guy was still shooting at me! It was halfway through the game before I discovered that your crosshair changes to an X once you finally kill the guy (and that may only have been because I changed the crosshair settings to the easiest settings).
And as much as I liked the interchangeability of the weapons, paying attention to ammo was a bitch. There wasn't any good indication of which weapon took which ammo, and you didn't know how much of each ammo you had. The game is definitely designed to run and gun -- you keep shooting until you run out of ammo, then run out and do the nifty bullet-time-forward-roll-grab-a-gun-and-keep-shooting maneuver, but if you happen to pick up the same type of gun you already had (or one with the same bullet pool), you might only have 8 bullets in it -- which was not enough to take down some of the heavily-armored people at the end, even with headshots.
And then there were these little side quests. You could find "clues" that sometimes give a little insight into the story, which I liked. But they were impossible to find, and there are several chapters in the game where if you stay in one place to long you simply lose and have to start over at the last check point. And I'm not sure what the point was; you didn't seem to gain anything from finding the clues, and there was no penalty for missing them. And they had this "golden gun" aspect, where if you find 2-3 pieces of a certain gun, then when you use that gun any time in the game it has a bigger clip and does more damage. It's kind of nice but at the same time, you won't find all the pieces to all the guns, and the game is not designed for you use your favorite gun for a long period of time; you are supposed to switch up often.
I loved the Max Payne series, and I was sooooo excited when this came out. But it's the only game where I've finished it knowing that I will never desire to play it again. It was entertaining enough that I made it to the end of the game, but I know I'll never come along several years from now and thing "man, I really should pick that up again".
