Max Payne 3 Catch All

The PC version release has been pushed back to June 1st according to my Amazon digital download pre-order.

Yeah I really enjoyed easy difficulty, once I got over my "Ewww easy difficulty? I don't play easy difficulty!" crutch. Just felt more like a Max Payne game should feel that way.

Finished it last night. Enjoyed the ending. All in all, I went from being extremely annoyed with the game at first to really enjoying it at the end. I think I might try a second playthrough.

Max is a horrible person and I love him for it.

Maybe it's my love for Cohen brothers films or the Fiasco RPG or books like Joey the Hitman, but seeing this grim, crime novel decline is really entertaining. Max suffers his way to a small victory in a gunfight but as he walks out with a measure of badass confidence, the ground has shifted under his feet. I can't help but feel for him the same way I feel for the protagonist of any tragic story. The world is aligned against him, he knows it, and he is not being polite about it.

Also, slow-motion shootdodging is still cool.

I think I need to take a cue from many of you and just knock the difficulty down to Easy. I'm at the point where I just want to cruise through and see the story resolved.

I am in the middle of the first chapter of Disc 2 and the spaced out checkpointing and high difficulty is just ridiculous. I appreciate that they ramp up the player aids as you reload the same checkpoint but that doesn't wash away the bad taste left in my mouth by the combat design.

I'm really torn on buying this on PC at launch. R*'s PC history isn't too great on optimization. I'm also not looking too hard for SP games right now due to back log. Really, the only thing that would tip the balance toward buying at launch is if it's got a strong MP game that will have GWJ players in number.

I'll play it eventually. Just not sure if now.

Steam pre-load is active. Yikes this puppy is BIG. Almost 30 gb

I think this game might have the best gunplay I've ever seen. From what everyone has been saying, it sounded good, but I'm blown away by how *tight* it is. I can only assume it really shines with a mouse.

I smashed my way through medium difficulty by force of will (meaning numerous reloads.) That's okay, it gave me time to find collectables (sic) and enjoy the awesome soundtrack. I think the second play will be on Easy just to have fun with the ultraviolence.

The controls are still a little wonky for me. I haven't found the right balance of cursor speed and acceleration so I tend to spray a halo around my foe's heads before the kill shot actually hits home. Again, quantity over quality will still win, eventually. At first I relied heavily on the Last Man Standing mechanic and let the baddies bring me down just so I could get the one-shot kill but later that strategy seemed less and less useful and I was popping pills at half health, just like the old days.

Anyone else surprised that Max

Spoiler:

plays the piano? I stumbled against the rotting piano in the hotel and found out that he knows his theme song from memory. There's no achievement for it which surprised me but it's still a neat easter egg. I want to see if he'll do the same with the grand piano on the yacht.

gains wrote:

I smashed my way through medium difficulty by force of will (meaning numerous reloads.) That's okay, it gave me time to find collectables (sic) and enjoy the awesome soundtrack. I think the second play will be on Easy just to have fun with the ultraviolence.

The controls are still a little wonky for me. I haven't found the right balance of cursor speed and acceleration so I tend to spray a halo around my foe's heads before the kill shot actually hits home. Again, quantity over quality will still win, eventually. At first I relied heavily on the Last Man Standing mechanic and let the baddies bring me down just so I could get the one-shot kill but later that strategy seemed less and less useful and I was popping pills at half health, just like the old days.

Anyone else surprised that Max

Spoiler:

plays the piano? I stumbled against the rotting piano in the hotel and found out that he knows his theme song from memory. There's no achievement for it which surprised me but it's still a neat easter egg. I want to see if he'll do the same with the grand piano on the yacht.

I believe that I went with 7 for vert and hori sensitivity and 6 for acceleration.

Spoiler:

There are a few pianos. The yacht, the hotel, and maybe 2 others?? He plays all of them.

MannishBoy wrote:

R*'s PC history isn't too great on optimization.

That's generous.

I'm really torn on buying this on PC at launch. R*'s PC history isn't too great on optimization. I'm also not looking too hard for SP games right now due to back log.

I bought it and tried it on my desktop at 1680x1050 (Ati 4890/AMD Phenom 955 3.20 GHz) and laptop at 1440x900 (Nvidia 560M/i7-2630 2.0 GHz) and so far it runs well on both. Lots of graphical options to mess around with.

Played the 1st mission on my desktop using a 360 gamepad in soft lock mode (love that there's an option between soft lock/hard lock and free aim) and all the tutorial prompts were 360 gamepad specific. Also played a round of deathmatch with the 360 controller. They give you an choice of finding servers with soft-lock enabled or free aim.

I also played the 1st mission again on my laptop using the mouse and keyboard. The tutorial prompts were m/kb specific this time. It controls as well as the other 2 games. I'll probably switch back and forth between the controller and m/kb depending on if I'm playing from my couch or sitting in front of a monitor.

*Groan*

PC Gamer wrote:

Rockstar have also given us Max’s DLC itinerary for the year, and it looks like this:

June 2012
- Local Justice Map Pack

Summer 2012
- Disorganized Crime Map Pack
- Deathmatch Made In Heaven Mode Pack
- Hostage Negotiation Map Pack
- New York Minute Co-Op Pack

Fall 2012
- Painful Memories Map Pack
- Trickle Down Economics Map Pack

Downloading from Amazon now. 26.52 GB - it started off at 6 hours remaining, and has now moved up to 9 hours remaining. Boo! I guess I will get to play tomorrow sometime.

PC version is gorgeous. Running 5760x1080 with everything maxed. FXAA on and MSAA off. Smooth as silk.

The gameplay is kinda just "there." Seems like it's just an excuse to show the movies as the plot progresses. Watch cut scene, get dropped into firefight. Rinse and repeat. I think I'm in chapter 4 playing on medium. Haven't seen anything new other than the cover feature.

I think they really need to re-balance the bad guys health. Pumping 8 rounds center mass into a baddy and having them remain standing is distracting.

I'll finish it but it hasn't sucked me in as much as I had hoped. Nor sure I like the text blurbs that pop up in the cut scenes. Distracts from the story.

I really wish they would have done the loading differently. It's pretty annoying having to watch these cutscenes over and over, when all I want to do is shoot some dudes. And I liked them quite a bit on the first go through the story.

JC wrote:

PC version is gorgeous. Running 5760x1080 with everything maxed. FXAA on and MSAA off. Smooth as silk.

Good gods, what kind of rig are you running that on?!

I agree the PC version is fantastic. I'm just running in 1080p but with everything maxed and outside of cutscenes, it runs at a solid 60fps on my GTX570 and looks astounding. It rarely runs my CPU above 15% either which I found interesting. Given Rockstar's mixed history with PC ports, I'm glad to see they put some effort into this one.

I'm liking the gameplay a lot but it does feel formulaic, repetitive and that it hasn't evolved much beyond the previous Max Payne games. I loved those games but anyone who didn't won't enjoy this much. The checkpoint spacing is also horrendous (it'll save 3 times in between sections with no combat but not after a 10 minute battle) and were it not for the all but instantaneous reload times on PC, I probably would have gotten controller throwing mad a few times now. I also feel it takes control away from the player too often to languish in their Tony Scott style cutscenes but I really like that the story moves at a breakneck pace and doesn't let up. I can respect that they made this a hard R-rated story. It's violent, depraved, grotesque, disturbing more than a couple of times and it owns that fully. This is something you rarely even see in movies any more, forget games. I haven't even touched multiplayer but I hope to finish up the story tonight and dig into it.

Parallax Abstraction wrote:
JC wrote:

PC version is gorgeous. Running 5760x1080 with everything maxed. FXAA on and MSAA off. Smooth as silk.

Good gods, what kind of rig are you running that on?!

2 MSI GeForce GTX 580 Lightning Xtremes in SLI.

I'm digging the hell out of it on PC.

It's the best third person shooter I've ever played. Hitting four headshots in a row has never felt cooler. Honestly, even moving corner to corner, aiming down the barrel, changing the camera from left to right and back is just so good.

I'm being a filthy skimmer but it seems like I'm one of the only people around that isn't too high on this game.

I don't really know what I could discuss without bringing up spoilers but I didn't like the Man on Fire style double image effect that happened every 3 seconds in every cutscene. Towards the end of the game it didn't bother me as much, but I also think they reduced the frequency of the effect.

So is the PC version worth the price of admission and the download?

Swarfigo wrote:

So is the PC version worth the price of admission and the download?

outcome unknown please try again later...

I think it depends on what you're looking for.

Gimpy_Butzke wrote:

I'm being a filthy skimmer but it seems like I'm one of the only people around that isn't too high on this game.

I don't really know what I could discuss without bringing up spoilers but I didn't like the Man on Fire style double image effect that happened every 3 seconds in every cutscene. Towards the end of the game it didn't bother me as much, but I also think they reduced the frequency of the effect.

I think that I put my final thoughts in the finished games thread, but, in a nutshell, I agree with you. I played on easy with auto aim off in the end, which made it a lot more fun. It was kind of a chore before I knocked the difficulty down.

This is a pretty good game, but I think it falls in the category of "this should have been a movie." I really dig the anti-hero theme Rockstar likes to pull, but as a game, I feel it is lacking somewhat. I'll finish it, of course, but I feel like indifferent about the whole experience.

Oh, and the initial load time for me (on PC) is usually over three minutes. During the game itself, I rarely see load times, but that initial load... wow. First world problems and all.

Swarfigo wrote:

So is the PC version worth the price of admission and the download?

Take this with a grain of salt - I've devoured every Max Payne game I've tried. Perhaps the highest praise I can give Rockstar is that I had the same reaction to this one. I just finished up the PC version, and I can echo a lot of what I've read in the thread. Unlike their previous titles, the PC version seems tight. I had no crashes in the entire play through, and that's with the game idling on pause for long periods.

I ended up playing on easy for the 1st play through and loved it. Shooting from a prone position after a dive was an amazing touch, especially the way Max rolls around as you swing the cursor. The incredibly satisfying feeling I used to get diving into a group of baddies, doing what needs doing, and standing up as the last body hits the floor...they nailed it for me.

As for the story. I'm a Rockstar game fan, and found their touch on the Max Payne story a pleasure. Not the kind of pleasure I get when I play Peggle, but I was more interested in the story this time around than I was in #2....#1 was its own beast I can't separate from nostalgia.

After my experience with GTA IV modding, I've decided that PC is my platform of choice for Rockstar games, and I'm happy to say that the decision didn't bite me this time.

Finally finished it. Great story and the environments were top rate. Once I didn't try to make it more than it is (shoot the fish in the barrel) I enjoyed it immensely. The song in the airport by Health "Tears" is fantastic!

JC wrote:

The song in the airport by Health "Tears" is fantastic!

I was talking with a friend the other day about how brilliant that sequence is, just because of the song, and how more games need to do this sort of thing.

SpacePPoliceman wrote:
JC wrote:

The song in the airport by Health "Tears" is fantastic!

I was talking with a friend the other day about how brilliant that sequence is, just because of the song, and how more games need to do this sort of thing.

I thought it was really effective in RDR too. Seems like Rockstar isn't afraid of that sort of thing--good on 'em.

Just finished Chapter 11 last night (flashback on the boat) and the soundtrack hit another great high. Yeeeeah, I think I may have to look for this soundtrack on iTunes now.

The part where he wakes up to a bit of drama? Yeah, that was really sweet.