Hands-on Preview of Max Payne 3

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Written by biXen

Max Payne 3 Hands-on Preview, Introduction

Before you start reading our Preview there're some things you should take into account. During the course of time quite a few have previews already out in the wild. Most of them reveal detailed level information. Our article is spoiler free (it mentions areas / action that can be seen from screenshots and the first articles about Max Payne 3, but not the plot in itself, Kristian's hands-on has the least amount of story info) and we tend to put emphasis on the experience of the trip and gameplay, rather then revealing lots of spoilery information. While we could, we truly believe you'll have the best experience when you'll find out all these things yourself. Enjoy!

Some practical information. We have split up the preview, if you want to jump straight to single player hands-on you can do that in the table of contents on the right. If you want the full impression of our trip and all screenshots, start here and just go through the pages. To make it clear who's writing what we've added small headers to the start of each person's dialogue.

Kristian & Patrick 

Invitation and preparation

Kristian:

Friday the 13th, usually a day you expect bad things will happen. But in April 2012 that was when we got an email from Rockstar Games, asking us if we'd like to come to New York for a fan site event, that included playing Max Payne 3 and obviously meeting them and other fan sites. I was just about to leave for a weekend trip, and knowing I needed a new passport to go to the US I wasn't sure if I could make it. I immediately told Patrick though, and he didn't even believe me at first.

Patrick:

However, that feeling of disbelief quickly faded after airplane tickets found their way into my mailbox. Since I'd never visited New York City before, this venture was going to be an amazing experience. Count some Max Payne 3 hands-on time with that, and you've quite possibly one of the best weekends a gamer could imagine. I was thrilled!

I remember speculating with Kristian a few weeks before if, by any chance, Rockstar would repeat organizing a pre-release event like Kristian enjoyed before. How little we did know.

Kristian:

Obviously it's been 9 years since I was in NYC to try Max Payne 2 and with mostly new people in Rockstar and a different era with Twitter, Facebook and all being important for publishers I wasn't expecting anything like this even if we had kept in touch with Rockstar as the release of Max Payne 3 got nearer. Still, we were excited to get invited, we got our passports on time and off we went!

Friday 20th April

Patrick:

Quickly after I arrived at the John F. Kennedy Airport I shared a car with Thomas, the head administrator of RockstarBase.com. The cab would bring us to the luxurious Grand Soho Hotel where we would spend the nights. I immediately noticed that Thomas was from the Netherlands as well, which resulted in many laughs and good talks in our native language during the one hour drive. The cab driver could not make any sense of our language and often frowned while hearing us laugh.

Thomas and I were the first ones to arrive at the hotel, meaning we had some time to explore the surroundings, get settled in our rooms and meet up with some of the other fansites before we would leave for dinner. I was eager to meet Kristian for the first time since the start of our partnership in 2004.

Kristian:

On Friday we went out to a bowling place in Brooklyn which can be best explained as a bar, night club and bowling alley in one. At this point I had been awake for about 20 hours and done a transatlantic flight with a stop in Amsterdam, and many of the other people knew each other so I guess I was a bit of a party pooper. Of course I had just met Patrick for the first time as well, so he can chime in on that. But it was a cool introduction to some of the people there. Though it's hard to compare to the Saturday as we all knew that would be the most exciting day!