Why Max Payne 3 is (curently) 2012's only must have game.

 Max Payne was a great game. Max Payne 2 was a great game. Max Payne 3 should be a great game, right?

Well, despite its pedigree, it's going up against some impressive odds. First of all, the original dev team at Remedy has moved on to a new series featuring another bluntly named protagonist, Alan Wake. A new team handling a storied franchise can always be slightly treacherous. Second, it has been eight years since Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne, quadrupling the number of years between the series' first two installments. In a world where gamers are frothing at Activision's teat for yearly re-skins of Call of Duty, an eight year layaway can't say much about the demand for the under-appreciated Max Payne.

These nagging fears are pushed further into irrelevance with each developer diary Rockstar releases.



In fact, both of the apparently negative factors working against Max Payne 3 will actually end up benefitting the game. Remedy is a great development team, one of the few that actually seeks to advance games as a medium by treating them as mature narrative experiences. Their efforts in this, though, have been hampered by the fact that writer Sam Lake is writing a game in his second language.

Sam Lake was born Sam Jarvi, in his native Finland, a place Remedy also calls its home. A Finnish dev team trying to make a distinctly American film noir crime story has frequently played out exactly how it sounds like it should. That the game's titular character sounds borderline satirical is fairly telling.

This may seem an overly judgmental nitpick to level at a game, especially considering all my attempts at writing a game in Finnish have been met with relatively little success, but it does get in the way of what the game is ultimately trying to do; craft a compelling story. In addition to textbook (literally) syntax and conjugation that lacks the colloquial incorrectness that can make or break characters, there are nuances of characters' speech that are completely missed, causing the voice acting to sound worse than it is.

The exceedingly explanatory narration that attempts to pay homage Max Payne's film noir inspirations comes out sounding trite and contrived. Sam Lake also scripted Remedy's latest, Alan Wake, and the same subtle inconsistencies in dialect severely damage the verisimilitude.

Lake's expression while providing the facial model for Max Payne caused many to wonder exactly what type of payne Max was suffering from.

It should be stressed, however, that this isn't because Lake is a bad writer. He's a very good writer. The story lines, characters and scenarios he creates are some of the best in gaming. It's just that he's not writing in his native tongue, and thus misses some of the subtleties of dialogue and vernacular. Which is why it's exciting to see that Rockstar, the publisher of the Max Payne series, has stepped up as developer for Max Payne 3.

Rockstar owes a massive portion of its success to Dan Houser's ability to write dialogue. (The other, equally massive portion of their success pie can be attributed to hooker-slaying.) Just take a look at his writing credits. His ability to craft convincing characters through dialogue is on par with legends Quentin Tarantino and  Elmore Leonard. In short, he brings the one thing Max Payne was missing, which is why the change-up in developer isn't terrible concerning.

Also, Remedy seems pretty happy with the direction Rockstar has taken the story.

The delay between the second and third Max Payne games is also beneficial to the game, as it allows the developers to include the one thing the series gameplay the one thing it has been missing: A cover system.

Max Payne came out before the ability to take cover in third person shooters was the norm. Clumsily positioning Max behind a tenuously placed concrete column was about as close as it came, and given the binary nature of the movement speeds, this was rarely an easily accomplished task. Luckily, eight years later, shipping a game without a cover system is downright unthinkable, and Rockstar has wisely included one, along with several other gameplay modern gameplay features that will further refine the slow motion gameplay.

The cover system is really just indicative of the advancement of the gameplay as a whole since the second game's release, and if the gameplay videos of Max Payne 3 are to be trusted, it looks like we may finally get that awful Stranglehold taste out of our mouths.

And it's about time. You'd think we wouldn't have to wait eight years for a decent John Woo-inspired third person shooter with a film noir twist. Well wait no more.

Actually, wait a little bit more. Max Payne 3 comes out May 2012.