Stu: You are aware that it's ten to one you'll never see a scene that looks as good as a dev screenshot the entire time you play the game? I could show you shots from games that are five years old that make modern games look like ass. As a matter of fact, that one does a rather poor job of demonstrating your point, as it's pretty obvious that all that's there a low-poly environment with soft shadows and some very nice skins- which is nothing new, the original Max Payne did a great job with skinning, too, and shadowmaps (like **** that's raytraced) can be found in N64 games. Which is a good thing, too many games rely on pure quantity of polygons, but doesn't do anything to change the fact that there's nothing in that screenshot that's much at all different from what you coulda gotten three years ago- virtually everything but Max himself in the image is a cube (the pillars are chamfered, so really an extruded octagon there), and the character model wouldn't be more than about two hundred polys by the looks of it. Maybe, oh, 50% more model detail than the guys in Quake. One would think, on a 3d-art-intensive board as this one, you'd learn to see these things.
Also... IGN? You're joking, right? You think a positive IGN rating means anything at all? AH-HAH HA! AH-HAHAHA! Those corporate whore lackeys? You kill me! They ain't given anything under an 8 to anything they thought might sell well since the hottest game out there was Pong.
And he "falls" because a dramatic name'll sell well, even though he's basically still ****ed for life at the end of the first game.
Oh, and no. Many games actually implement what are called new "features", things like minigames or vehicle control or different styles of combat (though, sadly, the minigame has for the most part gone the way of the nonlinear plot). These are what are known as "innovative games" or just for short "good games". The original MP had, among a few other things, bullet time- this one has nothing to add.
If you like the game, want it, whatever, fine- that's subjective. Just don't lie to yourself and pretend that you're getting anything more than Max Payne: the Expansion Pack. For one thing, it'll make me unhappy because I don't like it when people get tricked into monetarily encouraging uncreative gamemaking- it's already ****ed up gaming in general enough, maybe one in fifty games actually isn't a graphically upgraded clone of something these days.
