Max Payne 2

[Gabriel]

LOL, the clerk was trying to get me to but Max Payne 2 also, since it was only 2 dollars new. I almost bought it, but I never played the 1st one and they didnt have it. damn, I spend more than twice that on lunch

 

 

First off, I'm not interested in buying this. I'm just sort of curious as to why it's all over the place.

 

Does the game suck? Or is it like Viewtiful Joe (made for a tiny niche of players and then WAY overproduced)? Why is this game all over the place, priced at pennies, and no one buys it?

 

Max Payne 2 and Jade Empire are ones I remember seeing big features on in some magazines, and both practically litter bargain bins. I saw Jade Empire for $5 practically a week after release.

[ninjarabbit]

Jade Empire was supposed to be the Oriental Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic but I guess it never caught on.

 

I never liked the Max Payne games because there are plenty of games that do what Max Payne does better.

[narutofan]

Wow, 2 dollars?

 

It's hard to tell wether it just was like viewtiful joe, or just really bad.

 

I have seen Red Faction at 5 dollars, as well as Mark of Kri, both of which I greatly enjoyed.

[xenomorpher]

Max Payne 2 is...ok in my opinion. The long load screens are a pain in the ass though and the cheap instant deaths. I haven't played it in about a year. Last time I got killed by a falling shelf and died instantly. I didn't have enough space on my memory card to even bother saving it. A lot of people probably didn't like it and just didn't buy it. It has been dirt cheap for a long time like the newest Turok.

[Lemmi]

the need to make a game of Major Payne

[xenomorpher]

the need to make a game of Major Payne

 

Thats one of my favorite movies. If they did, I bet the part about "The Little Engine That Could" would be a blast.

[Hyper_Eye]

I love the first Max Payne. It was a great game. I never got into Max Payne 2 enough to determine how good it is. It is just like a lot of my games... I have too many so it got put aside and never picked back up again. My gaming time is limited so I have to pick and choose what I play.

[2600Lives]

"I'm gonna be all over you like white on rice in a glass of milk on a paper plate in a snowstorm."

 

LOVE that flick.

 

I got Max Payne 2 used for 5 bucks. Great buy, if you ask me. I don't have the first one, BUT I've seen it played through to the end, so I know what's up. I personally enjoy a good run 'n gun game, and MP2 is as good as run 'n guns get. Hell, I bought Nanobreaker and Project: Snowblind for 2 bucks each and Best Buy, and even though Nanobreaker kinda sucks, it was still worth 2 bucks. ANY game is worth that.

[IronMongeR]

Max Payne 2 is brilliant! So was the original. I wouldn't hesitate to buy either for a bargain price.

[+remowilliams]

Max Payne 2 is brilliant! So was the original. I wouldn't hesitate to buy either for a bargain price.

Yeah, I loved them both. Played 'em on the PC - excellent games

[spacecadet]

First off, I'm not interested in buying this. I'm just sort of curious as to why it's all over the place.

 

I can tell you first-hand why it's all over the place, as I worked at Rockstar when we put it out.

 

Does the game suck? Or is it like Viewtiful Joe (made for a tiny niche of players and then WAY overproduced)? Why is this game all over the place, priced at pennies, and no one buys it?

 

Because frankly, Rockstar thought it was going to be a lot more successful than it was.

 

Max Payne 2 and Jade Empire are ones I remember seeing big features on in some magazines, and both practically litter bargain bins.

 

Rockstar is really good at getting features and covers. They do it by holding out the carrot of exclusive GTA material the next time that series comes around. They then build up a lot of hype and make wild sales projections based on the number of covers and features they've gotten - which they themselves secured because of GTA.

 

I left the company in part because upper management were so clueless in regards to video games. They were a marketing and design company; ask anyone who worked there in those days and they'll tell you the same thing. I say "in those days" because I can't speak to the current atmosphere there - a lot of the management has changed at this point. But they were really good at those things back then. And they did both acquire and help develop/produce some good games too - but that was largely due to pre-existing talent on the part of the developer in question. (I will say that the production work Rockstar did on MP2 really elevated the game to another level over the first Max Payne, and the same was true of a lot of other titles. But they acted more as "script doctors" do in Hollywood than as real full-fledged developers.) They didn't really understand a whole hell of a lot about the games themselves or the gamers that played them, and they thought that anything they could generate enough hype for would sell buttloads. (To me, this was actually kind of insulting to GTA - which really is a great series - because it assumed that it sold because of the hype Rockstar generated and not the quality of the game.) Whenever a game would come out that sold well, we'd get a lot of pats on the back in the marketing and PR departments, but you'd never hear about anybody complimenting how good the game itself was.

 

As for the game itself, Max Payne 2 is really a pretty good game. It's not a classic, and it doesn't deserve to have sold 4 million copies (which is what they pressed for the PS2 version). But it's fun - some ports more than others. The PC version is the best, the Xbox version is ok, the PS2 version is hard to play because of frame rate problems.

 

I was actually pressed into screenshot duty on this game (my normal job was producing web sites) - I have one of the big three screenshots on the back of the PC box (the one where he's shooting out the window, which you actually can't do in the game), and some of the big magazine features had my screenshots too. I actually had a lot of fun taking those shots - normally, screenshot duty is pretty brutal.

[Gabriel]

So, more or less, the "next big thing" that wasn't.

[2600Lives]

The way I understand it is that most game companies are run by people WAY too old to really understand games or gamers, and who are simply businessmen and marketers. They put all kinds of pressure on the developers to meet deadlines (there should be NO such thing as a deadline. It's either ready to ship, or it goes back and gets tweaked some, period). Why is the game industry this way? It's like the government. Run by people in their 70's and 80's with absolutely no clue as to what young America wants or cares about. If I ever started a game company myself, it would be way different. There'd be no deadlines. No idiotic suits telling you to change things around to meet the "mass market appeal", or any of that crap. Yeah, it'd probably get crushed by the next installment of <insert popular first person shooter or sandbox style game here>, but at least I'd have kept my integrity and not let some moron who can't even pronounce the word Nintendo tell me how to make games.

 

The early days of game development had the right idea. Allow the developers to actually DEVELOP the damn games and don't pressure them. Of course, now games cost millions of dollars to produce and you have teams rivaling that of movie teams making any given game, but if we could go back to those early ideals, the industry would benefit from a surge of creativity and originality not seen in 20 years.

[spacecadet]

The way I understand it is that most game companies are run by people WAY too old to really understand games or gamers, and who are simply businessmen and marketers.

 

Maybe some game companies are like that, and maybe Rockstar is now for all I know (I think Take 2 management got a lot more involved in the years since I left and the company developed some obvious cracks in their veneer). But it wasn't that the people were too old and out of touch when I was there. If anything, it's that they were too young.

 

The CEO of Rockstar was/is younger than me. I am pretty sure he is still there. The founder, who I think called himself the "chairman" of Rockstar at the time (I don't think such a position actually existed) was also younger, as was the creative director. The marketing director I could never be sure of her age, but she was definitely not old - though she went a little grey while I was there, that's for sure.

 

Most of the people I worked with were in their 20's, from the game producers on down. The problem with that is they have no historical basis for making games; it's like they're constantly learning as they go along. You can go to school for marketing and get a degree and then have a successful product and you think you're an expert (and given how fickle the public is, maybe that's true). But I think to make a really good game, you have to know all about the games that came before, not to copy them but to know a bit about how game mechanics actually work and what makes a good game fun.

 

The lower-level people at Rockstar (like me) did have to actually play the games as part of their job, and they mostly did learn. There was a lot of grumbling about certain games; people mostly did know when we were putting out a piece of crap. But management didn't. It wasn't because they were too old, though; it was because they were too young and weren't interested in learning that part of the company (which is the most important part!).

 

They put all kinds of pressure on the developers to meet deadlines (there should be NO such thing as a deadline. It's either ready to ship, or it goes back and gets tweaked some, period).

 

Well, this I don't agree with. Having worked with developers (I worked with 3DRealms, for God's sake), I think there have to be deadlines. But they do need to be realistic and there needs to be good project management along the way.

 

One thing about Rockstar is that I don't think they've ever shipped a game with any sort of game-stopping bug or anything that anybody felt was unfinished. Sure, the GTA series has always lacked a little polish, but it's in sort of an endearing way. It's just kind of raw. But there's nothing that causes the game to crash or anything like that. And Max Payne 2 is one of the most polished games around. I don't think Rockstar really ships games that are unfinished (Take 2 does; Rockstar doesn't); one thing management is good at there is cracking the whip.

 

If I ever started a game company myself, it would be way different. There'd be no deadlines.

 

Then you'd be working at 3DRealms and your company would never ship a game. Developers always want more time. They always want to improve things or fix things. At some point, you have to call it done and ship it - no game is 100% perfect. The only way to do that is to tell people when it's going to have to be done ahead of time; otherwise, you're being completely arbitrary about when you call it done. Deadlines are a way to give developers warning and actually give them time to prioritize and fix what they think really needs to be fixed.

Edited November 1, 2006 by spacecadet