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This second featured better physics and graphics, actual in-engine cutscenes with new animation beyond the standard AI movements, more varied gameplay (including having Mona appear as a playable character for several chapters), and an original song by the newly-formed Poets of the Fall. Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne came out in 2003, in which Max investigates a highly organized and well-funded group of assassins who are wiping out the powerful syndicate The Inner Circle, while becoming entangled with the Circle's possibly-trustworthy-who-knows hitwoman Mona Sax.
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The game also impressed with its highly interactive environments, deep soundscape, and interesting aspects of gameplay such as playable dream sequences. Slowing down time slowed down the bullets as well, letting you see every bullet you dodge. This gave Max an edge over the bad guys as well as looking darn cool, especially since the game was one of the first to use projectile modeling for each and every bullet rather than a hitscan technique. The game's biggest selling point, however, was the use of Matrix-style Bullet Time (despite the game being in the works before the movie came out), which allowed the players to slow down key points of the game while letting them aim and react as usual. The cutscenes were told in Graphic Novel form, made by photographing the scenes and altering them digitally to resemble watercolor drawings. There are even a number of references to Norse Mythology. A mixture of both the film and graphic novel treatments of noir, it featured such stalwart elements of the genre as the hard-boiled cynical hero, the capable and mysterious Femme Fatale, and the complex plot with myriad linear and tangential echelons of villains, all played under a gravel-voiced narration laden with gothic imagery and twisted arthouse metaphors. This 2001 Third-Person Shooter from Remedy Entertainment was an attempt to break video games into Film Noir. With the police hot on his trail, Max wages a one-man war on the mafia and a shady corporation, killing everyone in his way as he gradually unearths the truth behind the creation of Valkyr and the death of his family. Then one night, as New York settles into the worst snowstorm in decades, Max's partner is murdered, Max is framed for it, and his cover is blown. Three years later, Max has transferred to the DEA and gone undercover with the Punchinello crime family, intending to bring the Valkyr drug ring down once and for all. NYPD detective Max Payne's wife and baby daughter are killed in their home by junkies strung out on the designer drug Valkyr.
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