Max Payne / YMMV - TV Tropes

Catharsis Factor: The game has a lot of this. From shooting enemies with explosives like a Mad Bomber to the death cries of the enemies.
- Shooting any enemy with the Grenade or the Grenade Launcher will cause them to fly away from the impact. Bonus points for it being a One-Hit Kill.
- Using Molotovs on enemies. Seeing the enemies flail around while on fire can get some laughs. Especially when the enemies are in groups.
- Shooting the V-head Junkies. The Hilarious over the top Death Cries they make when shooting them can make anyone laugh and give a healthy dose of satisfaction. While it can come across as kind of messed up to some, it's still entertaining to do. Burning enemies also gives the before mentioned death sounds.
- Putting in the cheat codes also give this off. Especially the all weapons cheat code. L1, L2, R1, R2 Triangle, Circle, X, Square. Have fun.
- Hitting a gas canister and making it explode. Like the Grenades above, it's simple but fun.
- Just beating the game can cause this. Since you stop Nicole Horne from getting away by making her fall to her doom within the helicopter for the pain she caused Max and all of the villainy she's done within the story.
Complete Monster:
- Nicole Horne is the ice-cold CEO of Aesir Corporation, using her resources and connections to perpetuate her atrocities. A former member of the Inner Circle who headed up Project Valhalla, Horne oversaw the creation of Valkyr, using innocent people as test subjects and driving them insane, notably siccing three of the drugged up victims onto the Payne household to murder Michelle Payne and her infant daughter after Michelle accidentally learned of the project—later mocking Max over their deaths and forcing him to relive their murders simply for cruelty. Continuing to experiment on tortured captives with Valkyr years after, Horne begins marketing Valkyr into the drug community of New York, using Angelo Punchinello as a figurehead to spread Valkyr far and wide, uncaring of the thousands of lives it claimed. Horne used Punchinello to carry out a variety of assassinations and crimes in her name, murdering the man when she lost use of him and later enacting "Operation Dead Eyes" to cover her tracks, entailing the wholesale slaughter of each and every one of her former partners, employees, and test subjects in Project Valhalla, as well as the entirety of the Inner Circle.
- Angelo Punchinello is the Boss of the Punchinello Crime Family. A mobster with countless deaths on his orders, Punchinello tries to wipe out the Russian Mob while enforcing the power structure of his Family with such monsters as Jack Lupino and the Trio. Under Nicole Horne, Punchinello sees the mass distribution of Valkyr with no care for the minds it destroys. In his personal life, Punchinello is a sadistic wife beater who tortures his own wife Lisa to death.
Demonic Spiders: Any grenade launcher armed mook. They will one-hit you.
Porting Disaster:
- The Steam rerelease of the game is... a bit of a mess. Just getting it to run needs several tweaks and downloads, due to the game's age, including a fan-made patch to make the audio work, because without that patch the audio often cuts out. There's also a Game-Breaking Bug tied to the game's frame rate with Vinnie Gognitti's pathing as he runs from Max that results in him not going where he's supposed to go. This means Vinnie isn't there for in-gameplay cutscenes, and eventually, one such instance causes the game to hang, forcing the player to either use an additional program to lock the game to 60 FPS or to use a cheat to skip the level. In addition, the game will crash if the player is using any Ryzen CPU from the 3000 series onwards.
- The PlayStation 2 version is another faulty release, rarely running at a stable framerate to the point of making some sections almost unplayable.
- In a surprising turn of events, the Android and iOS releases avert this by being some of the best ports of the game, running at a higher resolution and frame rate than any of the console ports and not requiring numerous fan patches like the original PC version, the only major issues with these versions of the game are poor touch controls and the game not mapping inputs for PS4 controllers properly.
Retroactive Recognition: That's Marko Saaresto, singer of Poets of the Fall being the model for Vladimir Lem. Of course, it wouldn't be until the next game that they'd really take off...
The Scrappy: Angelo Punchinello for being overall irrelevant in the long run in spite of being the fucking don of the very mafia Max is warring with. He's also overall boring compared to more interesting characters such as Gognitti and Lupino. The fact that he's killed unceremoniously is quite alright with fans who just wanted to see him gone so the game could get the hell on.
That One Level: The two nightmare levels. Each of them start off cool and creepy, and then tack on an infuriating maze. The first maze has you running down featureless hallways endlessly until you take the right combination of turns (or you can blow grenades to ease your orientation). The second has you running around a maze of bloodtrails in otherwise featureless blackness. Every time you reach a dead end, a horrific baby scream plays that exactly mirrors your own. It's even worse on the console, owing to the imprecise controller movement and use of checkpoints in the Playstation 2 version instead of quick saves like in the PC and Xbox versions.

YMMV / Max Payne

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