we recently powered through all of Max Payne and I still haven't quite figured out why. that might seem like something we already ought to know the answer to but well that's not how we've worked as a person and dissociative plural system. usually it's the other way round: we do things because we feel strong compulsions, we can't come up with good enough reasons for NOT doing the things, and therefore we figure "okay might as well see where this leads." and we have some general rules for ourselves. one of them is that Kris would like to get better used to playing games again; there's some desensitization issues to be addressed with computer games. so playing Max Payne at least made some overall sense.
all the same it wasn't really an enjoyable task; it was like an unpleasant job to be powered through out of necessity, and that's such a strange attitude to have while playing a game—especially one we've gone through before—that it's prompted some internal wondering. Kris plainly feels a lot of guilt about wasting times on games in the past, and...perhaps especially about playing violent games.
and holy heck is Max Payne violent. sure, it's tame in terms of visual gore (though modders did their best to increase the splatter, "Brutal Doom" style) but gawd almighty is there a lot of murder in Max Payne and after a while it gets very samey. the setting changes; the Bad Guys™ get somewhat better guns and wear different clothes. but really...it's the same stuff over and over again.
there's a storyline, an extremely thin one by my standards but I have to remember that it must have seemed amazing for a 2001 kill-'em-all game. but I'm an old-fashioned sort; my notions about Good Entertainment™ were largely shaped by old movies, and by the standards of old-movie writing Max Payne is wretched. it has something of the same cockeyed appeal that you get from a movie like The Oscar, in which Harlan Ellison was either trying to parody '50s hardboiled movie dialogue, or trying to demonstrate his ability to write superior hardboiled movie dialogue, or something; I've never been quite able to determine whether Ellison was actually a good writer or not. at least he's a memorable one; I guess that counts for something. in any case Max Payne sounds like...well, this.
it sort of LOOKS like this, come to think of it.
~Chara