10 Video Games Way Weirder Than Advertised

10. Max Payne

The original Max Payne was basically marketed on one thing - "Do you like John Woo movies and The Matrix?"

In the wake of The Matrix's massive success, Hollywood couldn't resist but tirelessly replicate its ground-breaking bullet time effects with wildly mixed results.

And it wasn't long before the games industry got in on the fun, Max Payne being one of the first major video games to feature slow-motion gunplay.

It was a hell of a hook, though the game's advertising failed to give much of an impression of the game's dark, surreal heart resting beneath its slow-mo heroic bloodshed.

The marketing painted Max Payne's quest for vengeance against those who murdered his family as a fairly by-the-numbers one, conveniently eliding the literally nightmarish manner in which it's presented in-game.

Max is far more of a tortured soul than the action-centric trailers implied, addicted to painkillers and driven by nothing but a desire to murder those who took his wife and child away.

On top of the deeply unsettling - and frustrating! - nightmare sequences, there are bizarre comic strip asides featuring a character known as Captain Baseball Bat Boy, because why not?

Max Payne could've easily succeeded as a purely conventional revenge narrative, but writer Sam Lake had far more cerebral and unnerving concerns on his mind.