9. Max Payne and His Fevered Dreams
Ah Max Payne, a man who has been cursed to live a hilariously tragic life, but blessed with a haunting, lyrical spirit. The Max Payne games are hard-boiled detective fiction as directed by John Woo. It seems awfully trite now, but its Hong Kong action thriller style choreography was a genuinely ground-breaking mechanic in video games - having only just been popularised in western films by
The Matrix two years previously.
So, what's so disturbing about Max Payne? Being heavily inspired by film noir and the works of authors like
Mickey Spillane and
Dashiell Hammett, Max Payne is heavily steeped in pathos, cynicism and is, quite literally, dark. It is in essence an exploration of Max's suffering, as well as the negative aspects of the Human condition. But the power trip that comes from being able to slow down time and shoot an enemy mid-air prevents it from ever being too melancholic an experience.
That is until... I dreaded the 'nightmare sequences' for two reasons: firstly, I was a mere snot nosed ten year old not prepared for this kind of nightmarish labyrinth. And secondly, these levels featured confusing navigation, awkward balancing sections and precision jumping. But it is for the first point that it goes on this list. We already knew that Max is a mentally broken man, but here we get a clear insight into his clouded mind and it's like Walmart on Black Friday. There are rooms filled with blood - with trails of it leading out into bottomless chasms - the sound effects are unsettling (Max's wife sobbing, Wilhelm Screams, etc.) and the whole experience captures the canny, yet ethereal, quality of lucid dreaming rather well. I'd hate to imagine what the man daydreams about, considering he permanently adorns an expression somewhere between winning the lottery and realising you are your own father.