Heh. I liked Max Payne well enough, but the one thing that I didn’t like is a moderately-sized gripe on my part: the scaling difficulty. What the fuck was up with that? Why did they even bother giving you difficulty options? As far as I could tell your options were “insane / insane / insane / impossible / impossible with a time limit”.
So you’re playing for a little while. You make it through a few rooms pretty handily. The game then decides that you’re ub3rl33+, even on “easy” difficulty. Thus when you enter the next room, BAM BAM you take about 30 shots right between the damn eyes and have to reload. You go back into that room, BAM BAM reload. Lather/rinse/repeat a couple more times. The game then decides that HUH! Maybe you’re NOT all that incredibly skilled after all! So it tones down the difficulty to a reasonable level. Now you can make it through a few more rooms. At which point the game’s short-term memory causes it to then say “WHOA! Why the heck did this guy pick Easy difficulty? Verily, he is a GOD at this game!” Then it’s BAM BAM reload BAM BAM reload BAM BAM OKAY SCREW THIS BACK TO DEUS EX.
Granted, that was alleviated somewhat by the quickload times - hell, it should have been called ‘instantaneous load’. I don’t know how Remedy pulled that off, but it was an absolutely genius touch on their part to handle the load times so well. I just wish I didn’t have to rely on the quickload so friggin’ much.
Honestly, can anyone beat Max Payne on any difficulty level without dying once? Heck, without dying at least once per level?