20 Great Moments in PC Gaming
FEATURE
Max Payne’s face in
Max Payne
By Tom Senior
Can a man’s face be a moment? This one can.
It’s a photograph wrapped around a low-poly
head to represent the angst-ridden gunslinger
Max Payne. It’s a picture of Remedy writer
anddesigner Sam Lake, who chose to represent the
character’s deep pain at the loss of his family by
scrunching up all the parts of his face at the same time.
Should we do another take, maybe more brooding and
serious? No, Sam. This is it, the expression Max Payne
players will be looking at for 12 hours. Nailed it.
It is the face of a man so cross his eyebrows have gone
to war over the middle of his face. It is the face of a man
engaged in a deep internal conflict with a bad curry that
won’t quit. It makes me unreasonably happy whenever I
see it, and I have played a lot of Max Payne.
I’m convinced it would have been a lesser game if the
studio had used a more conventional look. Max Payne 2
dropped the Sam Lake grimace for a new head based on
the actor Timothy Gibbs. Lake still continues to appear in
the surreal video skits you can find on televisions in Max
Payne 2 and Alan Wake. It’s not quite the same.
It’s a rare example of a game character being
memorable purely because of their demeanour. Max
eventually evolved into a generic thug over time, but I’ll
always remember him as this goofy hardboiled hero.10
Comebackwithustoa simplertime.1993.
BeforeYouTube.Beforemostofushadthe
internet,infact.WhenDoomwasdebuting
onmagazinecover-disksandblowing
everyoneawaywithitsrealismandincredible
originality.Yes,it wasa longtimeago.Ah,butlook
closeratthesharewareedition.
Youseeit?It’stheweaponslistatthebottomofthe
screen.Pistol.Shotgun.Chaingun.Rocketlauncher.
Butwhatarethoselasttwo?Plasmagunand...BFG?
What’s a BFG? A weapon so mighty and mysterious,
not even the IDKFA code could summon it. The only
way to find out was to play the registered version.
Remember, this is the era where the FPS genre
basically consisted of Wolfenstein 3D, where the best
you could hope for was a Gatling gun. That was
nothing compared to the hulking lump of hardware
that finally rose up once the BFG was acquired. The
rumbling as it prepared to fire. The explosion of green
energy that scythed through everything on screen. The
sense of power unrestrained. That noise. PSSCHOOW!
Games have had many great weapons, but few so
mighty to justify the months, maybe even years of
staring at the empty slot on the interface and
wondering what that last weapon would be like.
The answer: Worth the wait. That’s all that matters.Firing the BFG for the first
time in Doom
By Richard Cobbett
8 Digging through discs of
1,000 shareware games
ByRichardCobbett
Before the internet,
games were hard to come
by. Most of us only got
one for our birthday and
Christmas. The rest of the time, we
had to make do with magazine cover
disks, with a k. Typically a whole
1.44MB of joy to dig into, in the hope
that the disk editor had uncovered
some amazing new shareware game
or endlessly replayable demo.
But with the dawn of the CD
came a whole new world of gaming
goodness. Stores would stock discs
with names like ‘1001 Free Games’,
with only the tiniest text clarifying
that most of them would beshareware demos consisting of one
episode and a request to send a
cheque to someone on the other side
of the world. But that didn’t matter.
Digging in was like digital archeology,
with every new directory having the
potential to contain the next Doom.
Quality was not exactly top
priority. The joy of discovery was
better than the actual games. How
else would so many of us have
learned of titles such as Snake Pit and
Pickle Wars? Truly, a whole world
with every compilation, even if it did
mean filtering through five billion
crap EGA platformers in the hope of
striking gaming gold.9