My life wasn't as bad as the characters', but we were all, respective to our situations, having a pretty poor time.Īnd then there was the setting. Maybe it was genuinely the illness, or maybe it was just the adolescence talking, but I felt more at home in this virtual world. It wasn't a game where everybody was having a fucking good time, all the time-alongside Max, the ex-alcoholic widower, the characters in Max Payne were variously drug addicts, prostitutes, and murderers. ![]() Max Payne, despite its stupid, sexist narrative setup, was a bit nuanced, a bit dialed down. In the same way that the constantly fucking, constantly getting high-off-their-balls teenagers from Skins made me feel alienated, I found the square-jawed protagonists in Modern Warfare and Uncharted intimidating. Plus, all the characters in the other games I owned were gorgeous, uncomplicated heroes. It's dumb and big and comic book–esque, and it was hardly comparable to the life of a teenage boy getting ready for tests, but it meant Max and I were, in a roundabout way, on the same wavelength. In a classic example of that awful narrative trope "fridging," Max's wife and infant daughter are killed at the beginning of the game and he sets out to avenge them. This older game, first released in 2001, spoke to me at this point in my life, firstly because its main character, the eponymous Max, was having such a hard time. Even the myriad distractions afforded a middle-class white kid weren't helping.Įxcept for Max Payne. I'd just been diagnosed with depression and I was on SSRIs. But the big hitters of the time- Stranglehold, Resistance: Fall of Man, Dead Rising-weren't much, and, inevitably, my mind would start to wander. From about 3AM through the rest of the night, I'd slump it in front of the PlayStation. ![]() ![]() The same could be said for my game collection.
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