Post-Mortem: Max Payne "Clones"

Honestly, writing isn't that hard.

You don't need to put a gun to my head for me to write down enough words that a hardcover would be thick enough to beat goats to death with. Typing on this keyboard is real easy, and complaining or praising things in video games is even easier.

Structuring on the other hand, that's really hard.

Something I identified recently, mainly after the Warhammer video is that I'll often spend so much time setting up my script's structure, that the raw thoughts themselves on a game, what I'm listing as a positive or negative trait, gets lost in the process.

So I created a "Raw Points" draft where structure didn't exist.

The farm yard mission goes on for way too fucking long, and that's not even including my own personal fuck ups in terms of approaching objectives. Having a cutscene play every single time you destroyed a tower when there's four of them just gets extremely dull, doing absolutely nothing but padding the runtime. Are there any unique environments in this farmland, are there any notable lines said by characters, do I get a cool gun, or gimmick to navigate in the middle of a fight? No. You're just running/driving through a big open field for 20-30 minutes and it gets really goddamn dull.

The sentences aren't elegant, kind, or especially well written, but that doesn't matter, because no one's going to see them.

Well, you are now, but… I don't care anymore.

And seriously, what's with the fucking auto-aim. If they say game balance, the game isn't balanced. I can spam 14 fucking abilities at once, what do you mean game balance? It's more likely stemming from adapting to consoles, the consoles that already had Max Payne and Halo which proved you didn't need lock on targeting to succeed in this market, not matter how crazy your game is.

Despite the… crassness of it, you can see the building blocks of points that ended up in the final video.

There are actually little bits and pieces from the raw points script that I wanted to keep, but edited for the sake of optimization.

The driving massively sucks. I mean, I knew that, because it's a 2000s action game, of course its driving sucks. This was the era that even Tony Hawk attempted to have vehicle levels. Actually, come to think of it, its' the era when Tony Hawk tried to have an open world.

As tempting as it was to have just that little mention of American Wasteland, it was more important to keep focus on Total Overdose as it already had a long list of features to cover.

I can't remember a single notable set piece about this game. Most of them are taking place in thirty second cutscenes. Hey, maybe instead of driving a boat into the mansion and landing in a pool, it could've been a car, you know, that thing you actually made and have in the game yet don't use for this basic premise?

I really wanted to keep the mention of how Ramiro could've driven a car into the Mansion in gameplay as Total Overdose had the genuine sandbox for such a setpiece to work, but ultimately, that's not an important enough point to make to justify giving not one but two reworks of a level.

You've gotta pick your battles, and perhaps a better writer than me could've figured out a way to layer all of these extra details over my primary points, but that's for them to find.

I value pacing and clarity above all else, and those were some of the things I decided to drop in this process.

Also, the guns, my fucking god, I don't know if I can keep playing this. Upgrading my gun so I can hear the stock revolver sound effect even more often is going to make me want to hurl myself off a bridge.

As much as I wanted to talk about Stranglehold's paper-thin story, WET's bugs, or Total Overdose's Sandbox, at the end of the day, they didn't build to the video's main point, which thanks to this Whiteboard approach to structure, I was able to string together.

Each game added mechanics, and they added nothing.

Another challenge I've realized I put onto myself with these original videos is that the structure isn't defined.

Really, Years Later videos take a long time to produce because of the volume of content and amount of research, in-terms of structure, half the work's already done as it's an established format.

I don't need to spend as much time identifying what the story I'm trying to tell is.

That's what I try to do with each video, establish and explore some kind of narrative, that's what I took from all my hours of watching Top Gear, and Super Bunnyhop.

Videos and segments that look like a plain review, and become so much more as the narrative continues.

How successful I am, that's for you to decide, but at the end of the day, I'm very pleased with this video, because of the story it tells.

That all of our efforts of adding additional features to games, might be just be wasted.

On a completely different note, there were things I failed to anticipate about the video itself.

Both Shammy and one Commentator mentioned this to me. That they thought I didn't mean what "WET" was because I said "I don't get it either", not linking the sentence to what I'd been building up with A2M's long list of licensed shovelware releases to be suddenly met with an M-Rated Grindhouse Shooter.

It's funny because when conceptualizing, I envisioned a sentence like "I don't know how they pitched this" which might've made the point clearer.

Just another lesson in perspectives.

The other thing I didn't anticpiate is how much room there truly is left over to revisit this idea.

My thought process of covering Total Overdose, Stranglehold, and WET, is that they're each individual games.

Sure, Stranglehold is technically a sequel to Hard Boiled but… come on now.

Let's not pretend you're going to tell someone they need to play Stranglehold after watching Hard Boiled to get the full story.

The reason I didn't cover Dead to Rights isn't just because it's gameplay similarities are more superficial than the other three, it's also that Dead to Rights itself has four games.

I am aware that most people only appreciate the original, and covering the series isn't mandatory, but I don't know, I think it's just something for me to cover on its own in the future.

As for Max Payne clones, the reason for not covering things like El Matador, and Made Man, is quite frankly… they look like shit, and would certainly build a much different narrative for the video than what ended up in the final product.

It is one with potential though.

There's also a part of the WET segment I had to cut because of misinformation. I originally had a long raging build up to "This game hurts me", it was going to have me nitpicking the ear rape scene (at one point I considered parodying Cinema Sins, but thought that's too played out), and then covering how the London level would respawn you after landing in water rather than kill you unlike the rest of the game…

It turns out however, that was just the first time I fell into water that doesn't kill you.

While replaying the game to get extra footage, I happened to miss a jump landing me in water that I didn't even know existed in a different stage.

I wasn't angry to find out I'd been wrong though, in-fact, it made me reevaluate the whole WET segment which was originally a lot meaner and more vitriolic in its complaints.

I've often drifted towards Angry Gamer for Comedy™ but often back up as I find it's just not me, and I can make the same points without blowing people's ear drums…

Besides, WET's mixing already does that.

Four days before uploading, I had no introduction. That's because I'd created and dropped two of them.

The first was this long diatribe about Max Payne being remade which… bored me.

Not only does it spoil what the whole video's building up to in its conclusion, it also forced me to drop details that would be better suited to the Total Overdose segment, such as setting up the context for Next-Generation games just being over the horizon.

So I thought to myself… fuck the intro.

Let's just do an intense opening montage of all three games built off of the 4chan image.

It seemed cool in my head, and I wrote the rest of the whole video with it in mind. So once I had everything laid out in Adobe Premiere for the games themselves, I tried making that Montage…

For about 10 minutes.

Immediately I realized the lack of cinematic shots in Max Payne 1, the pixilated HUD, the janky shoot dodge animation, and so much more.

Not only that, even if it did work, I'd have to do the same for the next three games, and it's easy to forget just how much effort goes into Montage editing.

People equate one hour of editing to one minute of video, and for my style, that's true, on a good day, even faster.

Montages?

It's more like an hour for ten seconds, at least if you wanna make one that isn't just a random array of clips that's completely off beat to music.

So, with four days left and literlaly nothing else to work on but the intro, I typed up what's in the final product, and… I'm happy with it.

Doesn't take too long, doesn't spoil the ending, and it still uses both of my original ideas.

It uses the 4chan board to set the stage, and it uses split-screens set to music, having the energy of a montage, but with none of the effort.

Remember, some call it laziness, other's call it efficiency.

Lastly, my longtime collaborator Stoofer has been off Youtube indefinitely, and losing that reliable creativity for both Thumbnails and Graphics has had me doubtful about my video quality this year.

I know in terms of total minutes featured, it's not huge, but for establishing context, it's massive, and I always loved seeing people highlight in comments Stoofer's work. It confirmed its significance.

I think though, while I'd welcome back Stoofer the instant they return, I'm starting to move on. I'm very pleased with the Thumbnail I did for Max Payne "Clones" as well as the Split Screen Intros for each game, even though I wanted to do something fancier.

I've also gotten to know several other great artists to collaborate with, and I hope to meet more in the near future and upcoming projects.

Now a heads up for the next video, it's about coop featuring three friends.

It's by no means a let's play, but it's most likely going to be… goofier, than you'd expect.

I hope you'll enjoy it.

And to all the newcomers here from Max Payne "Clones".

THANK YOU!

I didn't expect so many people to come along after its release, and it's allowed me to worry slightly less about rent payments for a new home. Most places in Vancouver are $2000+ CAD, so getting above that on Patreon is really huge, and I can't thank you enough!