Playing 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Max Payne in 2022, I’m surprised at how well it holds up. It isn’t a game that I played at the time, and typically early attempts at third-person action don't age especially well. The game predates the Wars (God of and Gears of) by a few years, but its blend of guns-blazing shooting, graphic novel presentation, and slo-mo dodges still feels great 21 years after its release.
Though the gameplay doesn’t feel dated, the shooter does evoke iꩵts pre-9/11 era in the best possible ways, with com♚ic panel storytelling that feels ripped from the Clinton years. In many ways, It feels like the last gasp of the ‘90s preserved in video game form.
Last night, I blitzed my way through the level set in an underground science facility, then the one in the parking garage, and finished up with the💫 Matrix-inspired shootout in an opulent skyscraper lobby. With its still, shadow-smeared cutscenes and breezy levels which rarely take longer than 30 minutes to complete, playing through this game in 2022 — now that loading times have been fully obliterated by the mus𒀰cular processing power of modern PCs — feels as enjoyably easygoing as spending an evening paging through a stack of comic books.
One of my favorite rituals as a kid was going to get McDonald's breakfast with my grandpa — both of us got the two breakfast burritos — then going to a comic shop in town to flip through their wide selection of back issues, neatly arranged in plastic sleeves. When that store eventually closed — our small town wasn’t big enough to support it in an era before nerd culture ubiquity — we’d go to a used book store in town where a few cardboard boxes in the attic were stuffed with old comics for fifty cents a piece . Each visit, I would pick out a few to read for the day. These issues were largely from the ‘90s or earlier, and the Turok books I grabbed stand out as the most ‘90s of them all for being significantly darker and more violent than the superhero and Sonic comics I was used to. The ads for movies that had long left theaters and the shadowy art left an indelible imprint on my brain.
Now, as an adult, I still enjoy this kind of deep-dive on occasion. My local library has a great selection of comic books, and I had a great time last year spending an autumn evening lying on my couch under one dim light, a hot toddy steaming on the coffee table, paging through Batman’s 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Court of Owls arc. Max Payne taps into this same feeling. Its world is as dark and noir-influenced as the best Batman comics, itཧs cutscenes are impressionistic and gorgeously dark. I love it for that, for the simpler years it evokes, and for the enjoyment it can still provide years after its graphics stopped being remotely cutting edge.