Viqor played Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne

Did the last part of Max Payne 2 today, and began to reflect not on what I thought of the game itself, but how it affected me. See, when this game came out in 2003, I was just getting back into PC gaming, having built my first computer a year earlier (upgrading from an ancient 1997 Gateway 2000), and this was one of the first major PC games I played that really pushed my new computer, and it really colored what PC gaming meant to me. The ultra-sharp textures, cutting-edge physics (that truley enhanced gameplay), laser-sharp mechanics, and glorious mod support helped set it apart from the console games that I was playing at the time and really became a standard for what I expect from a really great PC game. Max Payne 2 quickly became one of my favorite PC games at that time, and looking back, It's really easy to see why I remember it so fondly. For all of its faults, it succeeded in improving upon the shooting mechanics of the original while telling a more interesting more tragic, story, while being funnier, while having better art, while reducing frustration, and while expanding the bullet-time mechanics. While generally being similar to it's predecessor, The Fall of Max Payne made enough improvements to make the jump from the good original to a genuinely great game.