![]() ![]() Shootdodging turns a fast-paced gunfight into what amounts to turn-based combat – you dodge and shoot, you land and they shoot, rinse and repeat. When you land, you’re unable to move for a second or so as Max pulls himself to his feet and resumes his assault – and sometimes, that’s enough to kill you, especially if you weren’t accurate enough with your shots. The game even quietly and instantly reloads your guns for you when you leap, because it would be rubbish if you leapt forward and weren’t able to shoot properly. Your reticle moves at normal speed but the rest of the world is treacle-slow your new vector and increased speed means that pretty much any bullet fired at you before you dodged is going to miss. When you’re in the air, you’re incredible. You are operating on the same rules as a fighter plane attacking ground targets – you are thinking in vectors, in avenues of approach.Ĭover shifts from something you occupy, almost an upgrade or an extension of your character, to something that you cruise past while you’re unloading an assault rifle downrange and, maybe, something you can land behind so any return fire doesn’t turn you to mince. You are not providing covering fire, taking up positions, returning fire and taking time to replenish your ammo. ![]() You are not planning an advance in Max Payne. It forces you to think in vectors, turning what is a pretty by-the-numbers shooter into something completely different. It is instantly easy to grasp, remains useful no matter the level of play, and helps the player look at arenas in a completely different way. I liked it because man go sideways bang bang very good yes. It is, to a 15-year-old me in the year 2000, everything I’d ever dreamed of.īut – crucially – it is also a brilliant piece of game design. It’s half of every fight scene in The Matrix. Whatever direction you’re travelling in, when you tap that right mouse button, Max hurls himself into the air and goes fully horizontal whilst time slows and he draws a bead on everyone who stands against him – then, as he slams into the floor laid out flat, normal time resumes and the bullets start flying once more. I’m here to ask you: what if it made your gun less accurate? What if, instead of slowing down the pace of the game and rewarding gradual advancement into cover, it shot you forward like a fucking rocket? These days, if you click the right mouse button whilst playing a shooter, you’ll most likely peer down the iron sights of your gun and become slightly more accurate. You might think that your right mouse button is pretty special, what with the drop-down menus it generates and the way it lets you do a different colour in Microsoft Paint, but these are nothing compared to what it does in Max Payne. Suddenly, slow-motion went from being a neat effect that a handful of games had messed around with to a core gameplay mechanic, serving to represent the edge that Max had over his enemies and making you feel pretty good at the game even if you were only delivering an average performance.īut! I’m not here to talk about Bullet-Time. When you slowed down time by tapping the Shift key, those bullets slowed down too, and you were able to actively move out of their path. Unlike a lot of games in the early 2000s, Max Payne modelled all of its bullets as objects in motion rather than instantaneous flashes of damage along an invisible vector. ![]() The most important part of Max Payne, though, is slow-motion – or as they call it in-game, ripping it directly from The Matrix, Bullet Time. Max Payne is a ridiculous game about a washed-up cop murdering his way through New York’s criminal underbelly to get revenge against drug traffickers for ruining his life it occupies that strange turn-of-the-century Playstation 2 space where games were transitioning out of their arcade roots, so while there’s a dream sequence that deals with Max’s guilt over the death of his son, it is resolved in play as a series of quite difficult platforming sections. Max Payne 2 absolutely perfected jumping sideways holding two guns at once, and it is this perfection that I am going to wax lyrical about.
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