The Slowdown: Max's Brazilian Wax

The Slowdown take a gamble with an early, speculative opinion piece on Rockstar's upcoming Max Payne 3. After tackling the deep list of apparent changes made to the concept, the text shifts its focus to the features that originally gave the series its identity. In the writer's mind, these features lay in-between interaction versus action.

The article then proceeds to speculate that Rockstar's decision to push Max deeper into the inhumanity of the Brazilian favelas has forced the developers to utilize a more easily discernible, more readily marked set of symbols and all-black distinctions instead of the subtle greys of its predecessors.

Against Rockstar senior developer Barrera's view of noir as "looking at a world in a bleak way", the writer attempts to find out how Max's downward spiral relates to that of Nico Bellic in GTAIV. Finally, while the aim of the article is not to be a qualitative assessment of the game's potential merits, the writer nevertheless asks whether Max Payne 3 will be able to properly motivate the inclusion of its titular hero.