Hey there. I know ideologically charged mods and multiple threads about subscriptions are all ther age, but how about talking about some games?

Max Payne is, without a doubt in my mind, my favourite game of all time. But I find it frustratingly difficult to find the right terms for it's most important quality - it's tone. Yes, the gameplay is great and in my opinion still holds up perfectly, but it's the overall tone of the game that makes it so special to me. But what do I even call it? It's simultanously dead serious neo-noir, surreal, self aware, funny, and even it's humor is a number of different styles of humor at different times.

For all it's fantastic action it's very sombre, even melancholic at times. At times it's actually deeply unnerving, mostly in the creepy dream sequences. Yet there's also humor, sometimes it's in Max's Chandler-esque narration ("He had a baseball bat, and I was tied to a chair. Pissing him off was the smart thing to do."), but sometimes it's downright slapstick, like a Buster Keaton-esque falling wall gag. Most of all it's very self aware, even the protagonist's name and some other characters', like the Finito brothers or sisters Mona and Lisa Sax, make that very obvious, not to mention the fourth wall breaking dream revelations.

And then there's all the Norse mythology, making the whole thing even more surreal. And the remarkable thing, the tone of the whole thing is perfectly consistant. None of it clashes, it isn't one thing in one chapter and another in the next. It's all of that all the time.

Sure, there's stuff I can compare it too, it's not like Sam Lake is exactly hiding the Twin Peaks influences in his games to name just one thing, but I always find saying "it's like X but with Y" to be a pretty lame way to describe fiction, at least if the thing in question stands on it's own and isn't just a shameless rip-off, which Max definately is not.

So, what would you call Max Payne's tone/style/genre? "Self-aware surreal neo-noir" is the best I can come up with, but I wouldn't be surprised if there's some term I didn't think of or don't even know that would perhaps nail it.

Constipated.

https://medium.com/@ruubbiiee/max-payne-the-legend-of-the-constipated-hellbringer-ffb9f9b529a8

Only ever played the demo but not every fourth-wall breaking self-deprecation has to be constant throughout the game.

Max Payne was early enough that just a couple of references were novel enough that you didn't have to do it constantly.

It was a well put together FPS with a novel mechanic inspired by The Matrix and generally got good reviews.

Melodramatic (soap opera-ish) noir.

And the developers lampshaded that with the (actually fun!) soap operas playing on TVs throughout the game.

Hmmm...that is a tough one. It has been 20 years since I played the game so hopefully I am not just talking out the other end lol. I would love for GOG to have Max Payne 1 and 2 here DRM-free. Max Payne 3 did not look as appealing to me but, for the sake of completeness, fine...it is not as though Hitman Absolution is some masterpiece, and we have that. Anyway...I digress.

I will go maybe a little outside the box and say Max Payne can be called "gothic noir". I think the "noir" part is obvious enough it speaks for itself. I pulled up wikipedia's description of the characteristics of gothic fiction - obviously not everything here applies to Max Payne - but I bolded what I thought relevant (or similar...in Max Payne, not every building is necessarily a "ruined" one but the grime and decay certainly are there throughout).

"Gothic fiction is characterised by an environment of fear, the threat of supernatural events, and the intrusion of the past upon the present.[1][2] The setting typically includes physical reminders of the past, especially through ruined buildings that stand as proof of a previously thriving world that is now decaying.[3] [better source needed]Characteristic gothic settings in the 18th and 19th centuries include castles, and religious buildings such as monasteries, convents, and crypts. The atmosphere is typically claustrophobic, and common plot elements include vengeful persecution, imprisonment, and murder.[1] The depiction of horrifying events in Gothic fiction often serves as a metaphorical expression of psychological or social conflicts.[2] The form of a Gothic story is usually discontinuous and convoluted, often incorporating tales within tales, changing narrators, and framing devices such as discovered manuscripts or interpolated histories.[4] Other characteristics, regardless of relevance to the main plot, can include sleeplike and deathlike states, live burials, doubles, unnatural echoes or silences, the discovery of obscured family ties, unintelligible writings, nocturnal landscapes, remote locations,[5] and dreams.[4] In the late 19th century, Gothic fiction often involved demons and demonic possession, ghosts, and other kinds of evil spirits.[5]"

[end of wikipedia quote, back to my analysis]
Despite the common misconception that gothic fiction = "dark, horror, etc", the genre allows for a bit wider variety than only that. There is indeed room for some humor, usually in the form of black comedy/dark humor. A gothic fiction classic which I would recommend to those who haven't read it is The Monk by Matthew Lewis. Despite all sorts of serious subject matter in this novel, there are also moments of humor. So I don't think it is inappropriate for me to apply the gothic tag onto Max Payne, as it can indeed account for Max Payne's humor.

Thankfully my physical copies still work fine. MP1 needs a sound patch, but it's a minor adjustment, and MP2 works perfect out of the box. As for 3... If it got a GOG release I'd play it for sure, but I'd probably end up feeling about it like I do about Shadow of Mordor - something that would be good if it stood on its own, without the supposed to tie to a previous work it doesn't really fit. I think you have an excellent point. It really does fit a lot crucial elements of Max Payne, I think even some stuff you didn't put in bold would also apply:

religious buildings such as monasteries, convents, and crypts - not a religious building in itself, but Jack Lupino basically turned the Ragnarock club into a church for his own cultish religious ravings.

often incorporating tales within tales - the tv series Adress Unknown fits that to T, even if that's more a Max Payne 2 thing, where it is pretty much the axis around which the entire game revolves.

doubles - Lisa and Mona are identical twins, and Adress Unknown is all about the protagonist being framed for murder by his evil double.

Thanks, and thanks for refreshing my memory about the game some more. Now I am really wishing it arrives here DRM-free so I can re-experience it.

Until that happens - the 1:1 dumps (created from the original retail discs) floating around the net are not that hard to set up and get to run on Win10 with some of the fixes and patches on pcgamingwiki.

Noir something, as already said.

I think post-modern neo-noir is what you're looking for. The postmodern aspect includes the breaking of the fourth wall and the tongue-in-cheek names of the characters, as well as the sci-fi contamination.

This.

I remember it being described as a neo-noir back in the day.

I could never get into it, so I never completed it (I think I didn't even get that far along).

Gritty NY noire(well except the 3rd game, which is more favella-punk) :) Bruh, I almost spit out my drink!

Max Payne 2 even made fun of his own permanently constipated grimmace in Max Payne 1! :-)

Huh? Max Payne is many things, but of sci-fi there's no trace.