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Reviews
Max Payne (2001)
Still One of the Best Ever
Max Payne is easily one of the best games ever made and even nearly 20 years later that fact still stands in my view. I have played many games since this came out but it still ranks up there for me. The story is a masterpiece that fits together wonderfully. The voice acting is fantastic, James McCaffrey was a perfect choice for Max. The soundtrack fit well and set the mood. The game play itself was a thing of beauty. No game allowed you to be in a John Woo movie before and until Stranglehold years later none who tried to emulate it did it well. For me one of the things I loved was the little details. When you walk in the snow you leave footprints. After a gunfight there are shell casings on the floor and your discarded magazines. There are bullet holes in the walls left by you and your enemies. All adds to the game and sadly are things many games still don't do for whatever reason. The games comic book style way of telling the story was awesome and fit well with the FMV cut scenes. The news reports in the background and on the televisions was also an ingenious way to add to the story. The cast of characters are memorable. Even after all this time I still remembered them, all the way from Mona; Max; Bravura; Lupino; Gogniti; etc. There isn't a wasted character or bad one in the bunch. The variety of weapons and ability to dual wield most of them made for a kid in a candy shop during gunfights. I did feel that the shotgun was a little under powered sometimes as even point blank it took 2-3 shots to put basic enemies down. It also didn't make sense why Lupino needed so many bullets to go down despite not being superhuman, V or no V. These were minor things though that didn't stop my enjoyment one bit.
I played Max Payne on Linux using Steam's Proton. It never crashed on em and I didn't notice any bugs or glitches. There are 3 settings for AA; 3 settings for AF; and 13 other graphic settings. The game allows you to manually save whenever you want and gives 10 slots for that. There are auto saves for those who prefer. Alt-Tab worked. You can pause FMV cut scenes but not skip them. You can skip the comic book cut scenes. Performance was fantastic. The game certainly is no spring chicken visually but n it's time it was top notch. A few times the FPS dropped from 144 but only dropped to 130 and 119 and only for a split second so it wasn't an issue. I played version 1.05 of the game.
Disk Usage: 792 MB
VRAM Usage: 706-797 MB
CPU Usage: 10-14 %
RAM Usage: 2.4-3.3 GB
Frame Rate: 119-144 FPS
If by some chance you haven't had the pleasure of playing Max Payne and enjoy shooters then rush out and get this now. I finished the first play through on the fugitive difficulty and it took me 7 hours and 10 minutes. I forget what I paid for my physical copy years back but for this Steam version I paid $2.55 and it is worth so much more. Even the full price of $10.99 doesn't do it justice. One of the few games worth $50.
My Score: 9/10
My System:
AMD Ryzen 5 2600X, 16GB DDR4-3000 CL15, MSI RX 5700 XT 8GB Gaming X, Mesa 20.0.5, Samsung 970 Evo Plus 500GB, Manjaro 19.0.2, Mate 1.24, Kernel 5.6.7-1-MANJARO, Proton 5.0.6
Near Death (2016)
I Wish More Survival Games Were Like This
Being that Near Death has a few similarities with the horror movie The Thing I constantly expected a monster to be entered into the story at some point but luckily it stayed true to a exploration and survival game. It does a good job of that in my eyes. I am not normally a fan of survival games as I find them tedious but this game did a good job of breaking down the tasks and keeping me focussed.
It strikes a good balance between giving you solid tips for the game but not holding your hand too much to tell you exactly what to do. For instance I found a blowtorch in the game but it was never said when I had to use it, I had to figure that out for myself. The game did give helpful tips such as reminding you that if you set up rope lines between locations it would help you not get blown around by wind as much but it doesn't go into a full blown tutorial about how to setup rope lines or when to do it. The game also does a good job of making things a little harder as the game goes on and the weather gets worse without going full blown survival sim where you have to manage the cold as well as your hunger, thirst, sleep, etc. Basically you must craft items to help yourself survive such as patching windows to keep the cold out and making items to restore power to certain areas of the facility but there are only so many items to be found so you have to make choices of what to repair and where to give yourself the best chance to survive and progress. The story is simple but effective. Your plane goes down near a facility that had been left behind with little suppies and you must find a way to get passage back to the nearest manned outpost 225 miles away. The game gives you specific objectives to do this which I enjoy over a more sandbox approach. The game has a lot of nice subtle touches such as when your character is sufficiently warmed it doesn't say so on the HUD but you can tell by her voice. Also the map doesn't say where you are at the moment so you have to by a combination of memory, signs placed around the facility and landmarks you come across to figure out where you are and where you need to be. This may sound difficult to some but I didn't find it hindered my playthrough at all and was a nice small layer of diffiulty.
A couple nitpicks I had was that the map you're given of the facility doesn't show detailed layouts of each section, just an overview, and for some such as the science facility I found it hard to navigate. I also think that having options to turn on certain things such as a map marker of where you are and a meter showing body temperature would have been nice for some players. Giving people more options to customize the game to them hurts no one as they would be optional.
The game was pretty good from a technical standpoint. It never crashed during a playthrough but I did have a few times where on startup the game would go all distorted and the screen was transparent. It would keep doing this until I exited the game, exited Steam and restarted my PC. It would then work fine for a while. Over the course of 3 hours it did this 3 times. I haven't done any work yet to try to narrow down the cause whether it is with the game or my system. The game has next to no graphics options to speak of. There is 1 checkbox for AA (on/off) and no other ways to tinker with graphical fidelity. The graphics themselves are not top notch by any means but are not an eye sore either. There is a FOV slider though. It actually shows the FOV unlike some games which is fantastic and it goes from 50-120. There are auto save spots throughout the game but you can also manual save any time you want. This is the best way as people can save however they want. You can also change the difficulty mid game at any point. ALT-Tab also gave me no issues. The game ran pretty well overall. I did have FPS drops to the 50's from time to time but was usually at the 70-90 range. It does like fast CPUs on Linux. When I was on my FX-9590 my FPS was usually in the 30's all the time but when I upgraded to my Ryzen 5 2600X it basically doubled.
Overall this game was a great experience. Those looking for a survival game should give it a go. I find the only people who may not enjoy it is those looking for a more hardcore survival sandbox game such as The Long Dark. This would be more geared towards those loooking for a more story based experience as The Long Dark is not finished their story campaign. The game took me 3 hours to finish on normal difficulty and felt good for the length. Didn't overstay it's welcome and didn't feel rushed. Orthogonal Games has really shown themselves to be versatile as Near Death and The Novelist are very different types of games but both are fantastic.
My score: 9/10
My system used:
AMD Ryzen 5 2600X; 16GB DDR4-3000 CL15; MSI RX 580 8GB Gaming X; Mesa 18.1.1; Samsung 850 Evo 250GB; Corsair AX1200; Solus 3; Kernel 4.16.15-76.current