Max Payne 3 Catch All

Grabbed it as a rental, finished the first disc, didn't realize that RedBox was only renting disc 1 (I know, right!?) So, for $2 I got the first half of the single player (after the burning building)

I'd be lying if I said I didn't enjoy the heck out of it. I won't be purchasing it, just looking for a way to rent the second disc.

Mechanics for shooting are very similar to RDR, aside from the last chance thing (which uses up a pill bottle on success). Wasn't sure I'd enjy it much, but yeah, looking for to playing the rest of if sometime...

I played several more hours of SP last night, and I still love it. The plot has been the best I've seen in a Rockstar game, meaning that it is somewhere between "dumb action movie" and "action movie with some simplistic political and social satire thrown in." So far, at least, it's avoided the writing problem that got GTA IV and RDR, two games where the plot got derailed for many hours by "yet another double cross." I hope it holds up until the end.

I also played maybe 45 minutes of MP last night. I was not impressed at all. It seemed like GTA Deathmatch on Call of Duty maps. Maybe the worst was that as you look in the general direction of opposing players, their name and health bar appear above them. That shows up well before you can actually see them, so you end up chasing these red lines all over the map. I looked at the Season Pass, and it seems like it's all for MP, which as of right now looks like a huge miscalculation to me. I guess there's a bunch of 'boosts' (perks) to unlock, so maybe that improves things. I'll give it another shot, but I see nothing interesting or worthwhile as of now.

@Trueheart I think you got screwed even more than you realize. Disc 1 is MP and a lot less than half of SP (I'd guess maybe a quarter?).

Despite my comments about the MP, I went ahead and created a Crew on Rockstar's Social Club: Gamers with Jobs. If we already have one of these, I can delete it.

Montalban wrote:
skeletonframes wrote:

Bought it. Hate it.

More to come when I clear my thoughts so I don't just spit bile in Rockstar's direction.

Whaaat? Please elaborate, as clearheadedly as possible.

Okay. I've given the game more time. I don't hate it. There is actually quite a bit to like about the game. From a strong Max Payne 2 fan, it is a disappointment in many ways. It's also incredibly impressive in many ways.

I just completed Chapter VIII.

The Cons:

Rockstar has changed the fundamental way that the game is played from a run-n-gun to a cover-based shooter. This is the most jarring difference and it takes a while to get used to.

The default controls felt terrible to me, but after some re-configuring I've got them feeling pretty good. This was the biggest thing that was bothering me. The game just didn't feel good. After fixing this I started having a lot more fun with the game. (I set the X & Y axis aiming speed up to 5 and the aiming acceleration all the up to 10. The aiming feels much more fluid and precise, now.

Unskippable cutscenes (they hide the loading screens).

Enemies are made from stone. I have put 7 handgun bullets into a guy without him dying. A guy with no armor on. Dudes are supermen. Of course, so is Max.

Random game crashing. I've had it crash straight to dashboard during a cutscene 3 times and lock up my Xbox once.

The cutscene style is a bit overwrought and intrusive.

The bullet dodge goes away if you touch anything, which can lead to your death. Which will lead to your death. Many times. I would prefer it only end once you touch the ground. There have been times that my arm barely grazed the side of something and it ended my slo-mo before I could get a shot off and it dropped me in the middle of a room with all my enemies still alive. Insta-death.

The Pros:

The game is incredibly detailed. Rivaling and, in some ways, surpassing the environments in the Uncharted franchise. Uncharted still has the upper hand here, but it's impressive the amount of textures and detail they have put into this game. I can see why the game is spread across 2 discs.

Headshots are still one-hit kills and they are damn enjoyable. I love the blood spatter and bullet-hole technology at use here.

The story, once it gets going, is pretty good. The game is surprisingly brutal at times, which adds to the sense that nothing is certain.

The Last Chance system is good. I barely even use Painkillers manually anymore. I just store them until a kill shot sends me into Last Chance slo-mo and pop off a couple of guys before taking out my would-be killer.

The seamless cutscene-to-gameplay transitions are well done and can make you feel bad-ass at times.

I haven't really delved into multiplayer, yet. I played one game and was killed repeatedly. If it's as bad as Captain claims, I probably won't keep the game for very long.

All in all, I'm enjoying myself. It's a game that I'm glad I'm playing, but I don't know if it's a game I care to play again. We'll see.

I'll elaborate on two things SF brought up:

--Enemy health and headshots. They do indeed take ton of damage to the body, and headshots are one-hit kills (and easy to get if you have any slo-mo to use). The game just expects you to headshot all the time, and you'll probably run out of ammo if you don't.

--Cover. I spend a lot of time in cover. I believe there's a developer comment out there that they want you to be always running forward and using slo-mo, but you take so much damage from enemy guns that I don't see how you could survive doing that. Maybe I'm just not good enough at it yet.

I also think you do more damage when you are in bullet time mode.

CptGlanton wrote:

@Trueheart I think you got screwed even more than you realize. Disc 1 is MP and a lot less than half of SP (I'd guess maybe a quarter?).

Big spoilers for discussion of my placement:

Spoiler:

Max *just* shaved his head after his boss died prior to the big fire.

I believe it was the end or beginning of Chapter 7. My understanding is there are 14 total?

And for $2, I'd hardly consider myself screwed over. That was a ton of entertainment for the $2 I paid.

I enjoyed what I played last night. I look forward to playing some more. It was odd that slow mo wasn't activating for me for some reason though. I just threw it on easy (I know) and was enjoying running around and shooting people. I was still amazed at how much damage you take though.

I finished SP on Medium last night. I'm happy to say that it avoids the endless double-crosses and other padding that (in my mind) hurt the plotting so badly in GTA IV and RDR. I'd call it the best SP that Rockstar has ever put out, and it's one of my favorite shooter campaigns of the last few years, too. It's definitely got the most arresting visual style of any game that I've played recently (I also liked Man on Fire, so factor that in). I think that it's too bad it hasn't caught on any better than it has around here, although obviously Diablo 3 has a huge role in that.

I have started a Hard run. Hard is hard, so we'll see how that goes. I'll also give MP another shot, but I'm not optimistic about how that will turn out.

trueheart78 wrote:

I believe it was the end or beginning of Chapter 7. My understanding is there are 14 total?

I was going from my impression of how long I spent on each disc. It seemed to me that a larger % of SP is on disc 2, but I might be wrong.

obirano wrote:

I enjoyed what I played last night. I look forward to playing some more. It was odd that slow mo wasn't activating for me for some reason though. I just threw it on easy (I know) and was enjoying running around and shooting people. I was still amazed at how much damage you take though.

On Medium, you can lose most or nearly all of your health from a few bullet hits (maybe 3-4 'thunks' from an assault rifle or SMG). And since guys can keep firing at you after you've killed them (their guns keep firing as they spin and fall, so if it swings around at you you're kind of screwed), the damage you can take before you're aware of it can be very high. There are a couple of parts that are going to be brutal on Hard. I'm pretty decent at shooters, but I don't know if I'll be able of finishing Hard.

The comparisons to Man on Fire are making me really excited for this. I already was, though, so I guess it's a moot point.

CptGlanton: Roughly how many hours did it take to finish?

Very early into Chapter 2 and I have a feeling the story and cinematics production is what's going to be pushing me forward. The gameplay is good but I may have reached a breaking point with third-person shooting. Something about the old Max Payne feel has been lost and that's not working to MP3's advantage.

Almost all evening, Tues, Wed, and Thursday. I'd guess four hours each night, so twelve hours total.

Edit: Rockstar's website says 9:10 for me, but it also has me missing collectibles I know I got, so take it for what it's worth.

It's lots of fun, but what's with all the flickering on the cutscenes? Are they trying to flush out latent epileptics?

I don't know what people expected, the game has Rockstar written all over it. Of course it's going to be different. I'm loving it so far, just got to the part where you fight through the Favela so chapter 7 or 8? Not sure I'll get into the multiplayer but I already have the feeling that I got what I payed for.

Edit: I think PC version is going to have more of a classic Max Payne feel what with more precise controls and such.

I can't express enough how important it is to move the Aiming Acceleration up to 10. The shooting was nigh unbearable for me before I did that.

I'm playing on Easy for my second play-through and it's much more Max Payney. I've only used cover once, and that's when I was in it coming out of a cut-scene. It's such a better game this way.

Played one multiplayer round on Soft Aim and it was pretty bad. I played one on Free Aim and it was better, but it was still pretty bad.

Does anyone here still own Far Cry 2? If so, can you tell me if there's an option for Aim Acceleration in that game? I'd like to try that game again if I can fix the aiming.

Loading screens should be useful/interactive. Max Payne 3's are neither.

Got my rental copy, took it round to a friend. We took turns playing through the first few levels. I kept tweaking the acceleration as per Skeleton's suggestion. Each time we passed the controller, we bad to change the settings; he runs vertical inverted, I keep it normal.

We really liked not being able to change controls during a cutscene. Pressing start only for it to pause wasn't a problem. I liked seeing the same scenes replayed again and again.

1Dgaf wrote:

Loading screens should be non-existent useful/interactive

I have no opinion on your post, outside of this snippet I fixed for you.

A game that does loading super well (fast, seamless) is automatically at least five times better.

(Note that this is just me complaining about an aspect of modern gaming that is hardly ever prioritized as much as it should be. I'm sorry for being a waste of space.)

Somewhere in Chapter 3 and feeling like the game is OK. Adding in that cover system forced them to balance the combat around that, making the bullet time dodge a whole lot less useful, less Max Payne and more stop n' pop. The cover system I should say is pretty bland. No vaulting or doing anything fancy while in cover.

As mentioned in other comments, the enemies soak up a lot of damage. The animation system is almost too slick for its own good. I'm thinking this as I go into "last stand" mode and stare at Max sloooowly swinging his gun around to target he guy who killed me.

This game is weird. I thought I'd be loving it but I'm not.

There's something in the story that really bothers me.

Do not read if you haven't beat the game:

Spoiler:

Max lets Serrano go. What the f*ck? The dude is a cold blooded killer. He shot Fabiana in the f*cking head for no reason! So what if he was tortured or starved. He deserved it. I wish the game would allow Max (read: me) to kill him.

Maclintok wrote:

Somewhere in Chapter 3 and feeling like the game is OK. Adding in that cover system forced them to balance the combat around that, making the bullet time dodge a whole lot less useful, less Max Payne and more stop n' pop. The cover system I should say is pretty bland. No vaulting or doing anything fancy while in cover.

As mentioned in other comments, the enemies soak up a lot of damage. The animation system is almost too slick for its own good. I'm thinking this as I go into "last stand" mode and stare at Max sloooowly swinging his gun around to target he guy who killed me.

This game is weird. I thought I'd be loving it but I'm not.

I'll take a break from being a downer by saying that I really dig the music, at least what I've heard so far in the first 3 chapters.

I started off unsure about the music, but then began to like it.

Skeleton,

I agree with your spoilered comment.

I'm about 3/4s of the way through the game on Hard, and I can say that after you play for a while, it isn't all that hard. Some of the checkpoints are too far apart, but that's really been the toughest thing so far. While I personally feel like I understand and appreciate the combat better now, it does kind of become "Headshot, the Game." And you can sometimes take absurd amounts of damage (like, say, losing 80% of your health on a single shot).

1Dgaf wrote:

Loading screens should be useful/interactive. Max Payne 3's are neither.

You'd really rather hammer X to open doors (a la God of War) than watch a 10 second movie?

If it was ten seconds, I could understand. But they aren't ten seconds. They drag. And I'd like the option to change my settings during a loading screen. Once I've seen it, I don't need to see it again. It's dead time.

I'm waiting for the PC version and it's really surprising how empty this thread is. It's been out for couple of days and there is less than page of posts about it. Are people that indifferent to it? It seems hard to imagine for a Rockstar game to be so unbuzzworthy.

GWJ has always been more PC game-centric than other places, but it seems that the margin is getting wider with time. A lot of people may be waiting, like you. Also, Diablo III. Also, I don't know. I guess people just don't care that much? I thought it was a fine game. Lots of good things.

Apparently the PC version is going to take 4 DVDs.

Finished it this morning. I thought it was enjoyable for what it was. I don't really feel a need to go back through on the other modes.

UCRC wrote:

I'm waiting for the PC version and it's really surprising how empty this thread is. It's been out for couple of days and there is less than page of posts about it. Are people that indifferent to it? It seems hard to imagine for a Rockstar game to be so unbuzzworthy.

It's just underwhelming. I don't know, the production value is sky high as usual for Rockstar and I enjoy the cutscenes but the moment I discovered I could play Diablo 3 on the laptop I was all over that instead.