Review: Max Payne 3 (PC)

Max Payne isn't a broken man.

Hooked on pain killers, a stumbling alcoholic, and plagued by guilt, loneliness, and rage, Max Payne is a shattered man who continually screws up his job as personal security for a rich family in Sao Paulo, Brazil.

Ultimately, he tries to pull himself together as an act of some kind of redemption, if not forever then at least long enough to "fix" things. It offers a simple contrast to the disassembly and dysfunction that drives the entirety of the plot, which plays out in extensive cutscenes and flashbacks to explain how Max wound up in Brazil.

The Weekly Checkpoint 12

It hit a few technical snags, but we finally managed to get the new Checkpoint up.  This week we talk about cheaters in Max Payne, the possibility of Star Wars: The Old Republic going free to play, and Diablo III's real money auction house going live.

Review: Max Payne 3 (360)

Addicted to painkillers and a raging alcoholic. Emotionally and mentally tortured by the murder of his wife and child. His law enforcement career completely done. The New Jersey mob has a vendetta contract out on him. Zero self-respect for himself. And people around him have a penchant for dying in horrific and painful ways. Yeah, Max Payne's not exactly the life of the party in his return to gaming with Max Payne 3 on the Xbox 360. But while Payne himself is figuratively in the gutter of life, the game itself is Park Avenue great, with the trademark Rockstar solid storytelling in the long-lasting single-player mode along with a surprisingly robust multiplayer mode.

Review: Alan Wake's American Nightmare (PC)

Alan Wake is a writer. Trapped as he is in some kind of nightmarish other place, his only weapon is his writing ability, his gun skills and ability to reload a flash light battery in a half-second. Terrors made terrible through the power of his own imagination, he fights without end in an endless looping homage to The Twilight Zone, Twin Peaks, and LOST. And possibly the Roswell Incident of 1947.

That's really the pointy end of the stick of Alan Wake's American Nightmare. It's everything and its own thing all at once and it pulls this trick where I'm constantly over-thinking everything; trying to sort out the storyline where it doesn't need sorting; trying to explain things that aren't explained.