Drunk review of Max Payne 2

-Note: I was originally doing this as a video but didn't in the end. Basically I wanted to review a game purely for how it was to get drunk to-

Chosing a game to get drunk to is a long and complex process and one I solved by falling back on an old favourite – Max Payne 2.

The reason I chose Max Payne 2 is it comprises of the optimum balance of the two elements needed for drunken gaming: fun action sequences and lots of cut scenes to continue the drinking in.

I’ve previously considered Max Payne 2 the ideal game to get drunk to but I haven’t tried this in over a year so I thought I’d dust it off and share the experience with an unsuspecting public.

To replicate this experience, you will need vodka, mixers, glasses, Max Payne 2 cds (CDs! OLD SCHOOL!), giant Princess Liea Headphones because your girlfriend is asleep and A CAN DO ATTITUDE.

The install process took eight minutes and forty two seconds, during which I was able to consume 42 mililitres of Vodka. Your results may vary.

It was nesecerry to spend thirty seconds setting up my graphics settings but if you’ve engaged in rigorour pre-drinking, this may not be nesecerry.

I picked Max Payne 2 because there are plenty of cut scenes and story sections where you can catch up on valuable drinking time denied you by the need to shoot people in the face during the action sequences. It seems that attention spans have decreased significantly since Max Payne 2 was first released, though, because it seemed to me that the number of cut scenes had tripled since I’d last played it. Whatever, though, more drinking for me.

I hit a major problem with this game, though. The first few levels are, not to put too find a point on it, shit. Max Payne 2 comes from the era when every FPS was an entirely corridor based affair but for the first few sections they’re such badly designed levels and you’re given such little ammo that I found myself dying constantly and for highly unconvincing reasons.

Thankfully, things pick up after half an hour or so, after roughly 200 mililitres of vodka had been consumed.

If you haven’t played Max Payne 2... I won’t even both explaining the plot. Suffice to say that it was considered one of the best games ever made back in 2003 but a lot has changed since then in gameplay tastes. I’m hoping most of you will have played it, though, and are watching this review simply for instructional purposes regarding how ideal it is to get drunk to.

The answer is... It’s not ideal but it does the job.

The problem with many modern games is they’re so focused on GAMEPLAY GAMEPLAY GAMEPLAY that they don’t give the player a chance to relax and you need time to relax to drink in. Max Payne 2 gives ample oppertunity for drinkage but the game does have several problems which sulley the experience slightly.

For a start, there aren’t any quicksaves so when you trip over your own feet in a drunken stupor you can get sent back unceremoniously to the start of the level. It also pulls one of the great old school gaming dick moves of not giving you any decent weapons until you’ve been playing for an hour and a half.

For me, the game doesnt’ realy kick in until the second hour of play and by then you’d hopefully be too drunk to properly appreciate it.

Aside from Mass Effect 2, there aren’t any modern games I’d recomend getting drunk to over Max Payne 2, which is an issue. Of the classic drinking games like Vapire Bloodlines and KOTOR, I’d say that Max Payne 2 is still the best, sadly, it’s not quite as good to pulverise your brain with as it was.

The Void

I read a review of The Void on Eurogamer. The conclusion was basically that The Void is a brilliant game... it's just practically impossible to make any headway.

I get what they mean.

So basically, The Void is set in a world between life and death. You have died but are *just* clinging onto enough life to have another shot. I say life, I mean Colour - the currency of The Void.

You need colour for pretty much everything - movement, combat, creating more colour- even survival in certain places.

I'm not really explaining this very well...

Okay. So The Void has a massive hub thing - this is the titular void. You can travel around this and visit certain locations where you will find plot bits, friendly colours, enemy sanctuaries and gardens filled with dead trees you can infuse with Colour in order to create an awesome garden thing which will then give you more Colour down the line.

There's a lot more to it than that but that's the basis of it.

The Void is deeply, deeply unfair. You need to spend a lot of Colour to get anything done and even surviving past the first chapter is a massive challenge.

For once, I think this is actually a good thing. The whole atmosphere is based around the idea of one tiny glimmer of hope in the midst of despair and nothingness. A few crucial mistakes will cripple you and you'll find yourself unable to recover. If such a place as The Void exists, this is pretty much exactly what it'll be like.

The graphics are fucking beautiful - especially the contrast between the greys and browns of The Void against the stunning pastells of Colour. The Voice acting is serene and, whilst occasionally dodgy, generally pretty solid. The gameplay is.... interesting. Mostly pretty good, if very unfair, but there are moments of extreme dodginess.

There's nothing else in the world like The Void. It's... in many ways a horrible game that will punish you for making the smallest mistake, but this is part of the charm. It all builds to an oppressive and horrible atmosphere where even the smallest moment of solace and respite is to be treasured. It's basically Goth: The Videogame.

I find it hard to recommend The Void, even though it's unique, artistically briliant and generally pretty damned innovative. It's just so fucking hard... I haven't come anywhere near to completing it and I've just given up in the hope of finding something more fun to play. If you can commit to your games and fancy trying something new I'd really recommend trying it, just be prepared for frustration...

What went wrong with AVP 3

So it's two weeks after AVP 3 was released onto the intertubes. Two weeks after everyone looked at it and thought:

"...is this it?"

They were working on that game for two years. We got a very short, very generic single player campaign which I consider to be nothing but a waste of bandwidth. Everything else in the game is lifted straight from AVP 2, with the exception of the co-op survival mode. Which is pretty rubbish.

The only fun game modes are Infestation - where everyone starts off as a marine, one person is randomly selected to be an alien and every marine killed turns to a xenomorph. There's also Team Species deathmatch, which is fairly amusing.

There are many vids and articles on the internets going on and on about what's wrong with AVP 3 so I won't go on about it. To sumerise:

1) The single player is shit
2) Marines can block the aliens attacks which is as stupid and game breaking as it sounds
3) The predators are gimped
4) The focus jump system for the predators is a good idea, but it's broken
5) It's worse than the original AVP, let alone AVP 2
6) The multiplayer server system is broken

We should have all been somewhat suspicious in the lead up to AVP 3's release. Why? Well, all the articles were comparing it to the original AVP, not AVP 2. I know that's because both 1 & 3 were done by Rebellion but why is that a good thing. I've looked at the list of games they've developed and it's a sorry sight. Aside from the original AVP, their games range from bad to utterly terrible.

I wasn't even really a fan of AVP when it first came out. Sure, it was okay but it got completely eclipsed when Monolith released AVP 2.

So how did AVP 3 end up in this sorry state?


1) Rebellion tried to re-invent the wheel

This blocking stuff is ridiculous. To sumerise, Rebellion tried to impliment a melee combat system, politely ignoring that fact that this has only ever worked in ONE fps before. There is no reason for this to be there at all. If a predator or an alien gets close to a marine, that marine should be dead, no questions asked. The whole point of the humans is that they're deadly at long range but vulnerable up close.

You could just about post-rationalise this stupid decision regarding scraps between the predator and alien if you'd forgotten that the reason the predator/alien scraps worked so well in AVP 2 was that the predators almost never engaged in close combat. I spent all my time in AVP 2 as a pred using the Speargun to kill marines and the pistol to kill aliens. I kept my distance, knowing that if an alien got close to me, I was dead.

In changing the predator from a ranged fighter to a close range fighter by removing their weapons (you can pick weapons up but they're gimped and you can only carry one at a time) Rebellion essentially created one ranged character - the marine - one close combat fighter - the alien - and a bullshit hybrid that was as effective as neither.



2) At the same time, they hardly changed anything

It's really odd, this. Rebellion changed things that didn't need changing - like the melee system and introduced a lot of stuff that didn't really work - like focus jumping but they didn't really change the game.

The single player is the same series of cliches plagued by every aliens/predator itteration since Aliens. The stories are these:

Marines - Aliens and predators are scrapping. They kill all of your friends before you get to them, forcing you to fight on your own. There is an evil corperation trying to profit from the alien technology. Somehow.

Alien - you are a captured alien. You escape. You eat people.

Predator - humans are dicking around with your mayan temple. You kill shit.


I'm begining to wonder if it's possible to do an Aliens story without having a bullshit generic evil corperation capture an alien queen and perform experiments on her offspring. The number of times this has happened in this universe seem endless and it *never ends well for anyone*. You'd think the corperation would have noticed some sort of pattern.


The multiplayer shows a similar lack of originality. All the good bits are lifted straight from AVP 2 - and these are hampered slightly by the fact that the game is just that bit worse, despite being made nine years later.





I'd like to give Rebellion points for trying but I'm not entirely convinced that they even tried very hard. I didn't see any evidence of real effort anywhere. There were no briliant weapons, there were no incredible levels which spoke of hundreds of hours spent in designing and playtesting...

So yes. I'm going to re-install AVP 2 and play that with my friends over Hamachi. Fuck you Rebellion, Fuck you Sega.