Shooting Inanimate Targets is Disgusting

I wasn't really planning to write more about the aftermath of the Sandy Hook shooting. My other post, written out of frustration when I had too much time on my hands, was more than enough — too much, in fact, since everything worth saying was already said before I got mad enough to say it again. (My apologies for being redundant.)

But, once again, this is just too stupid to ignore.

It seems the country is in an uproar over an iPhone game called NRA: Practice Range, allegedly funded by the National Rifle Association itself (though it was developed by MEDL Mobile). In the game, you shoot at targets in both indoor and outdoor shooting ranges. All of the targets are inanimate objects. Some of them move, some of them don't, but as far as I can tell without buying the app (and according to what I've heard from those who have), none of them bleed. Even so, everyone is pretty angry about it, either because of the timing of the application's release or simply because so many people have never seen a gun in a cheaply made video game before.

Anti-gun activists and half the journalists in the nation have been attacking the NRA relentlessly for whole month, and this game only made it worse. Personally, I don't care about the NRA, because I don't own any rifles, and I don't care much about this game, because I don't own an iPhone. But it's hard not to notice when the media collectively goes off the deep end and drowns in its own frantic panic-mongering.

I'll just post a nice example that caught my attention earlier today. An opinion piece on NY Daily News, creatively titled Simply app-alling, calls the game "truly sickening" and — echoing the words of NRA executive vice president Wayne LaPierre as he criticized the developers of violent video games — "callous, corrupt and corrupting." It is slightly ironic that an NRA-branded shooting game has appeared so soon after LaPierre uttered those words in his ill-informed attempt to redirect blame for shootings from guns themselves to violence in media (i.e., from one scapegoat to another)... but only slightly.

LaPierre, it would seem, has a problem with violent games, and NRA: Practice Range isn't violent. Literally no violence occurs. So while the untimely release of this game is somewhat ironic and even a bit distasteful, given the context, it certainly isn't an example of "disgusting hypocrisy, profiteering and irresponsibility."

I don't see how it's disgusting at all. It might actually be one of the least violent shooting games ever released. It makes Duck Hunt look like a nightmarish glimpse into the mind of a mass murdering psychopath.

cute little ducky... BANG

In fact, Duck Hunt would serve as a much better training tool for an aspiring spree killer, since it's played by aiming a plastic gun at the television. Meanwhile, NRA: Practice Range is played by making smudgy thumb prints on a touch screen. If we're going to write about disgusting, appalling, "truly sickening" games, we should probably start with something that actually involves killing, even something as mild as this wholesome Nintendo classic, rather than railing against the one game in which nothing gets hurt.

Somehow, though, I don't think Duck Hunt is soon to be the target of any political poo-slinging. I'd have mentioned instead a few of the many games in which shooting virtual people is the goal, but if today's journalists are so horrified and offended by fake target practice in a fake shooting range, then learning about a game in which you blow fake people's brains out might send the lot of them into a catatonic state. On second thought, that would be pretty nice. I should send them some gameplay footage of Max Payne.

Jumping in Slow Motion: The Sequel

Recently, I wrote a little about Max Payne, which I'd neglected to play until this winter. Now it's a week later and I've gotten through Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne.

Again, very enjoyable, and again, occasionally hilarious. In my opinion, it wasn't quite as difficult as the first — or, at least, it seemed to require a bit less of that dreaded trial-and-error save scumming in most levels. This is because fewer of the fights are set up in such a way that you'll be blasted as soon as you enter a room and subsequently die for no good reason other than your failure to predict the future (which, of course, was perfectly fine in the first Max Payne as long as you didn't mind saving often and learning things the hard way).

Regardless, I still progressed through Max Payne 2 at a snail's pace, retrying some fights over and over again before moving on, but that was usually by choice rather than by way of humiliating failure. After getting past a particular room, I'd often decide to see if I could do it again without getting shot, or with as few bullets as possible, or just for the sake of using some grenades (which I have a tendency to hoard until I can't carry any more).

The combat itself seemed a lot more forgiving. Either that, or I've just gotten that much less terrible at third-person shooters in general, and Max Payne in particular. So maybe I'm completely wrong, but I did get the impression that the enemies' reaction times were increased, and that the protagonist is a bit more bulletproof than he was before. Bullet time, also, seems considerably more useful this time around.

Maybe I'd be able to offer a better analysis of the differences between the two games if I were to play them both in the same day, perhaps side-by-side for a careful comparison, but I'm less interested in the details than in the overall experience of playing the game. In short, it was a hell of a good time.

The story, though I'd be lying if I said it were even 10% of my motivation for finishing the game, was a lot better than in the original. Spending some time playing as Max Payne's sidekick, nemesis, and love interest Mona Sax was a nice change, too, even if it was only a superficial one. What I really didn't like about the game was the occasional escort mission, the first of which has a player-controlled Mona Sax defending a nearly-helpless computer-controlled Max Payne.

Escort and defense missions are generally pretty terrible in any game, and I failed plenty of times in this particular level — partly because it was such a drastic change of pace, and partly because I vastly overestimated the protagonist's ability to survive when I wasn't controlling him. With Mona Sax high up in a building and Max Payne down with the bad guys on the ground, this part of the game is essentially an exercise in spotting those bad guys before they can start shooting. If Max is getting shot and you don't see the shooter right away, his health is going to drop very quickly.

By contrast, whenever the player is controlling Max Payne and Mona Sax is nearby, she's invincible and doesn't need to be defended. In these particular fights, if you're feeling lazy, you can even hang back and let her wipe out every enemy in the room. I can't help but wonder if the developers sought intentionally to turn the so-called "damsel in distress" cliché on its head with this rather unusual discrepancy. I almost wonder what Anita Sarkeesian thinks of it, and perhaps we'll find out when she finally releases the long-overdue premier video in her crowd-funded series on sexism in video games, but if she does analyze this game then she'll probably be more interested in the fact that the game's heroine is seen nude or partially undressed on multiple occasions, and might be regarded as little more than an excuse for sex appeal if you can manage to ignore most of the game's plot.

Whatever her purpose in the game, I really started to enjoy Max Payne 2 during the first level in which Mona Sax is the playable character, though I can't say exactly why. Maybe it was the level design. Or maybe it's just that I had finally reached the point where practice pays off and started getting a lot of headshots with the Desert Eagle... which, by the way, might just be the most satisfying weapon in the game. Even blowing up three guys with a grenade isn't nearly as gratifying as efficiently popping each of them in the head as you jump out from cover in slow motion, and even though painting the entire room with bullet holes while wielding dual Ingram machine pistols might be more effective if you're still a beginner, it also gets dull pretty quickly. Part of making an enjoyable shooter is including a selection of weapons that feel powerful (without actually making them so powerful that they break the balance of the game), and this means good sound effects. The Ingram, unfortunately, sounds awful, but the Desert Eagle sounds very nice.

It only does the job when you can manage to hit the bad guys in the face, but that's where you should always be aiming regardless of your weapon of choice. Headshots are everything in Max Payne (which is why I find it so strange that the developer, Remedy Entertainment, went on to create Alan Wake, in which shooting a bad guy in the head is no different from shooting him in the toe... but I guess that's just because Alan Wake really isn't a shooter). Max Payne 2, like its predecessor, very often becomes a game of activating bullet time and then clicking on heads as quickly as you can. Anything else is a waste of bullets.

Now that I've gotten both of Remedy Entertainment's Max Payne games out of my backlog, I can look forward to (eventually) playing Rockstar Games' Max Payne 3. But, as I've mentioned before, I'm in need of a better computer, and I'd rather wait until after I make that purchase so that I don't have to play the game on minimum graphical settings, or at a mediocre frame rate, or both.

Jumping in Slow Motion: The Game

Last night, I finished Max Payne. (The first one.) It took me a while, because my playing time has been cut drastically by that irritating thing called employment, but I finally finished it.

I'd previously played both games in Remedy Entertainment's newer series, Alan Wake, so I was confident in the developers' ability to create an entertaining third-person shooter. Obviously, though, the two franchises don't really have much in common aside from the presence of firearms, the fact that each game is named after its protagonist, and the amount of time you'll spend looking at the back of each protagonist's head.

Max Payne, for example, is insanely, ludicrously, hilariously violent. It was even a bit awkward, I must admit, to start playing this game less than a week after a particular mass murder which called into question (for some) the effects of violent video games on young people. Personally, I don't think games like this one are harmful at all, but the subject was still on my mind. This is exactly the type of game, I thought to myself, that would start a misinformed media frenzy if it were ever discovered in the bedroom of some kid who had gone and shot a bunch of people.

If someone told me that Max Payne, of all games, might desensitize players to violence and make them more likely to commit violent acts, I'd respond that the game is just too damn silly to have that kind of effect on people. The game doesn't take itself very seriously at all, and while some might say that's part of the problem, there's just no way that anyone could get real ideas about harming people after playing a game in which most of the shooting is done while jumping in slow motion. If a killer in the making were going to get ideas about how to commit a mass murder from a video game (which is unlikely), or if such a person actually wanted to train for such an act using video games (which is extremely unlikely), he or she would probably be found playing a more realistic shooter.

Max Payne has absolutely no respect for the concept of realism, and everything (including the violence and the motivation for violence) is consequently so tongue-in-cheek that, to me, this particular shooter almost seems like a parody of its own genre. (It some parts it even becomes a parody of itself.) Like the gameplay, the story is pretty grim, in a lot of ways — it involves drug use, corruption, government conspiracy, and a ton of murder — but there's enough humor and absurdity in the telling of that story to lighten the mood, just a little, if you're paying attention. More importantly, the ridiculous, contorted expression on Max Payne's unmoving face destroys the serious tone of the opening cinematic. I couldn't hold it in; I had to laugh. In fact, that happened a lot throughout the game, not necessarily because it was meant to be funny but because the stuff happening on my screen was so insane.

The type of carnage that occurs throughout Max Payne is only a couple of steps beyond cartoon violence. There's a bit of blood spray and some flailing when the bad guys fall down, but that's it. They even stay in one piece when they're blown up with grenades, which makes it more hilarious than tragic when a thug tries to toss a grenade at you and ends up killing himself. I should also mention that Max Payne isn't the only one with a goofy face. All of this is due in part to the outdated graphical capabilities of the game, but the developers clearly weren't aiming for realism in any case. The only hint of realism throughout the entire experience is that the protagonist is by no means invincible. If you're playing for the first time, prepare to watch Max Payne die over and over again, sometimes from a single gunshot without any warning.

Part of what made the game interesting for me is that the main character, though certainly a bad ass, is pretty fragile for an action hero. I played through the game on the easiest difficulty setting (because the others are initially locked), and the game still killed me plenty of times. Unlike some other video game protagonists, Max Payne isn't exactly a bullet sponge... and unlike some other video game villains, the ones here aren't always terrible at shooting, so you won't be feeling so great if one of them manages to shoot first. You can fill up your health bar by finding painkillers and eating them like candy — another aspect of the game which is so absurdly unrealistic that it's hard to see it as anything but lighthearted humor — but the painkillers don't work instantaneously. If you start getting hit with bullets, and the guy who fired them isn't already dead, you're in big trouble, and you'll probably be watching your own slow-motion death before you can head for cover.

The reason Max can survive to the end of the game, taking down hundreds of heavily armed bad guys along the way, isn't because he's tougher. It's because of the advantages that you, as a player, have over the game — actual intelligence, the ability to quicksave and try again when you die, and the ability to know what's coming when you do so. The game is very scripted, so it's rather predictable. If you immediately die when you walk into a room because some thug with a shotgun was waiting or you on the left, you'll know to turn left the next time you enter that room. If you get blown up by a grenade that comes flying around the corner as you walk down a hallway, you know that the same grenade will be thrown in the same spot the next time around.

Since playing the game for the first time without dying over and over again is virtually impossible, you'll have to rely heavily on quicksaving. In some places, you'll only succeed through trial and error. You can always improve your reflexes and practice your aiming, but you'll win by knowing where the bad guys are and by turning to shoot them before they appear.

The player also has the ability to jump in slow motion, shooting in mid-air, and this is the game's big gimmick. Having trouble with a particular gun fight? Try using bullet time. While it certainly isn't the end-all game-winning move, as the slow-motion feature in F.E.A.R. was, it's still pretty useful. Then again, the game was designed around it, so it's really all but necessary if you don't want to be hopelessly outgunned. Like quicksaving, it's a crutch, but it's a crutch you'll probably need to lean on in order to beat the game. If you refuse to use those crutches, you'll be putting yourself through a lot of unnecessary punishment.

In any case, despite the occasional frustration, Max Payne was a pretty interesting experience. To be perfectly honest, I didn't expect to like it very much, for some of the game's most noticeable attributes are associated today with bad game design — the scripted enemy behavior, the excessive reliance on a single gameplay gimmick, and what might be called artificial difficulty (in the sense that the player will die frequently through no fault of his or her own and must rely on save scumming to progress). But the game is still fun, in its own way. Furthermore, while much of the game is a thoroughly tongue-in-cheek embrace of senseless ultra-violence, Max Payne is still known for its great writing.

The plot isn't the most imaginative, but the protagonist's monologues — though a bit too heavy on the metaphors — are very well done. They affect the mood and the atmosphere of the game in a way not often seen in shooters, and the neo-noir graphic-novel style storytelling makes the game truly unique.

Obviously, the game is pretty outdated now, so I'm not sure how strongly I should recommend it to the average player. You certainly won't see the beauty in this 2001 game's ugly graphics if you can't compare them to the uglier graphics of the late '90s and beyond. But I hope new and future fans of the series will keep returning to this game despite its visual shortcomings. The franchise is still alive with the past year's release of Max Payne 3, and it's always best to play an entire series in order rather than simply skipping to the newest game.

Then again, I haven't yet played either of the Max Payne sequels, and I honestly can't say whether the latest installment bears any resemblance to the original.