The Ugly Paulistano

Every tourist is an ambassador for its country. As a man who mostly communicates with bullets, Max Payne isn’t perhaps the best man to represent its country.

Max Payne has always communicated through bullets, though. In Max Payne 3, the only difference is that he is now restrained from relying on any other means. As an ignorant foreigner, unwilling to learn the local language and expecting the impoverish locals to know his, Max forces us to play the role of the ignorant foreigner.

I’ve been living in São Paulo, or Sampa for short, for almost a decade now. A German friend of mine asked me how it felt to play as an alienated foreigner while being able to understand everything being said by the locals at the same time.

Finding out the answer scared me.

Feedback Loop – Backward audio progress in Max Payne 3

A company that has a reputation for sparing no expenses spent 8 years in development producing Max Payne 3, a game with sound that belongs on the PS2. Instead of providing the cinematic sound spectacle I expected, Rockstar cut corners in ways

How do you Solve a Problem Like Max Payne?

The man is a high-functioning alcoholic. He spends his nights drinking himself into oblivion while the light of day finds him planting heavy metals deep into the flesh of his enemies with the biologically-ingrained certainty of a fifth generation lead

Soundscapes – The Future of Sound

Have we perfected sound yet? No, not by a long shot. We imagine that graphics will be “done” when we can create anything we can imagine without hitting a hardware limit. Whether it’s a perfect recreation of reality or whatever

Waiting to Respawn: Don't Take The Story Out of Multiplayer

Last week, Bitmob staff writer Rus McLaughlin pondered the usefulness of narrative elements in multiplayer modes in his piece “Multiplayer Doesn’t Need A Narrative.” You can probably guess his stance from the title. McLaughlin admits that certain games have incorporated

Rockstar Tidbits on LA Noire, Red Dead Redemption and Max Payne 3

As we’ve mentioned before, the Max Payne series is defined by its noir-inspired comic book aesthetic, so the move to Sao Paulo raised a few eyebrows. Max Payne without permanent rain? Well, I never. Nevertheless, in an FAQ on their official

Bullet Time in Brazil: Rockstar on Max Payne 3

Max Payne is a series predicated on aesthetic. It may have popularized bullet-time and third-person shooting, but its real strength is its use of film-noir tropes – its deeply flawed protagonist, revenge plot, perennially stormy nights, comic-book panel exposition and