Max Payne 3 Mod Finally Restores His Original Face

Sam Lake as Max Payne, in Max Payne 3, stares at himself in the mirror, courtesy of modder AlexSavvy.

Image: AlexSavvy

If you were feeling nostalgic for old-school Max Payne, the perpetually grimacing star of Remedy’s iconic third-person shooter of the same name, take heart. There’s now a mod for Max Payne 3 that brings back the character’s unforgettable OG face—based on Remedy Creative Director Sam Lake—squint and all.

How Alan Wake 2 Builds Upon The ‘Remedy-Verse’

For the uninitiated, Max Payne is a 2001 third-person shooter developed by Remedy Entertainment, the studio behind Alan Wake, Control, and Quantum Break. The game featured the likeness of Sam Lake, a Remedy staff member who became known for lending his very structured face to the game’s protagonist. But Lake’s time as Payne’s face soon ended, as both Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne and Rockstar Studios’ Max Payne 3 changed course, with the former NYPD detective being modeled after actors Timothy Gibbs and then James McCaffrey in those sequels. However, modder AlexSavvy has now released a Sam Lake mod on Nexus Mods that puts Lake’s memorable mug back into Max Payne 3.

AlexSavvy

The mod “brings back the original look of Max Payne from the first game” so you can basically play as Sam Lake’s Max Payne in Max Payne 3. That game was pretty graphically sophisticated in its time, so making this mod required AlexSavvy to alter the fitting of every single costume to match Sam Lake’s body, and also model all the different hairstyles Payne sports throughout the game’s narrative.

The modder sought to fully preserve all existing facial expressions and wounds, and also brought back Payne’s Hawaiian shirt and leather jacket combo from the first game. In total, the mod replaces some 98 in-game models and 66 textures to reconstruct Sam Lake’s likeness. As ever, even a seemingly simple mod can require a ton of work.

If early feedback is anything to go by, AlexSavvy nailed it. Certain Max Payne fans have always had a bone to pick with the character’s changed appearance in Max Payne 3, and while it may have taken over a decade, now they can finally enjoy the game as the Max Payne they know and love, who happens to look a lot like Sam Lake.

Lake, incidentally, will also be appearing in Remedy’s upcoming Alan Wake 2, in which he’ll provide his likeness for the FBI agent Alex Casey.

…
by pbnbigesdi Posted on

Original Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 Offline Due To Malware

An operator takes point in Modern Warfare 2 (2009).

Image: Activision

After a recent spike in interest as old servers were brought back online on Xbox, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II was taken offline earlier this week on PC over reports of malicious hacks. According to Techcrunch, players were getting attacked in the 2009 game via “hacked lobbies.”

This Modern Warfare 3 Gameplay Feature Spices Up A Weak Campaign

Update 8/2/2023 12:47 p.m. ET: 2008’s Modern Warfare 2 is once again operational on Steam. Activision tweeted that the underlying issue has been resolved and online multiplayer is working. Now all you have to worry about are your standard run-of-the-mill cheaters.

Original story follows.

Alerts about malicious activity in the game date back to June 26 with a post on the Steam Discussion page warning that players should make sure they have a virus scanner active before playing. “They attack using hacked lobbies,” wrote Steam user Bee, identifying the malware as “Trojan:Win32 Wacatac.B!ml.” Other players corroborated the issue. “Ye, i just deleted that Trojan,” wrote back Steam user Kordiii. “Was wondering wtf is that.”

According to Techcrunch, hackers were using a worm, a piece of malicious code that can self-replicate and automatically spread from one user to another. Anyone in one of the hacked lobbies would get the virus, and then spread it to whoever they played with next. “This means the hackers must have found and are exploiting one or multiple bugs in the game to execute malicious code on the other players’ computers,” it reported.

Activision ended up taking the Steam version of the game offline on July 26. When asked about the issues, a spokesperson for the company directed Techcrunch to the following tweet: “Multiplayer for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (2009) on Steam was brought offline while we investigate reports of an issue.”

Read More: Nicki Minaj Is Coming To Call Of Duty, Barbs Stay Winning

Despite being over a decade old, Modern Warfare 2 still averages 500 concurrent players a day on Steam. And that number increased earlier this month after players discovered matchmaking had been improved across a host of older Xbox 360 games. While players on console encountered lag and cheaters, there don’t appear to be any similar reports of malware infections. In the meantime, there’s over a dozen other Call of Duty multiplayer games people can pick up and play.

           

…

by pbnbigesdi Posted on

Baldur’s Gate 3 Dev Says Divinity: Original Sin Sequel Coming

There seems to be another Divinity: Original Sin sequel in the future, but eager fans will need to wait until well after developer Larian Studios releases Baldur’s Gate 3 to get their hands on it.

Baldur’s Gate 3’s Karlach Actor On Playing The Beloved Barbarian

In an IGN interview published July 27, the Belgian studio’s founder Swen Vincke confirmed that players haven’t seen the last of the tactically-minded, isometric role-playing game series Divinity: Original Sin, saying that it’s Larian’s “own universe,” and that “we’re definitely gonna get back there at some point.”

But his team will very much need to “refresh [themselves] creatively” after Baldur’s Gate 3, its first game in six years, before committing to an actual game announcement.

In an article from earlier this July, Kotaku staff writer Kenneth Shepard explains why this latest entry in the Dungeons & Dragons-set, party-based RPG series first introduced by BioWare in 1998 is “a big deal.”

“Baldur’s Gate 3 fills a current void in big-budget RPGs as BioWare sorts itself out,” Shepard writes. “It’s been a minute since we got a meaty RPG that is truly character and choice-driven, full of big decisions and consequences and relationship-building, and involving player expression on this level.”

Vincke guesses that people will only experience about 30 percent of the game or less during their first playthroughs, he told senior Kotaku writer Ethan Gach in a recent interview.

Read More: Hyped RPG Baldur’s Gate III Took Six Years To Make Because It’s Scary-Big

“You’re seeing 400 developers putting their heart and souls into [Baldur’s Gate 3],” Vincke said to IGN. “You’re getting the best of them and their craft into this game. And so I can tell you, it’s quite a thing.”

Sorry, Divinity fans. Take solace in the fact that your time will eventually come.

It might help to know that Baldur’s Gate 3 is almost out the door—Larian, hoping to avoid competition with Starfield and the Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty expansion, bumped its PC release date up a month to August 3. It will release for PlayStation 5 on September 6, and an Xbox Series X/S date is not yet confirmed.

 

…
by pbnbigesdi Posted on

Imagine A Pokémon Game Based On Ken Sugimori’s Original Art

Imagine a world in which someone took Ken Sugimori’s original Pokémon art and brought it to life with animation. And then, in this wonderful idyll, someone took inspiration from this fanart, and developed a 3D Pokémon game based on it. And just to be sure, this developer would have already built an engine for creating Pokémon-inspired games. Obviously we can’t live in this world, because Nintendo would miserably crush it, but just imagine.

The Week In Games: Pocket Monsters And Simulated Goats

If I were imagining such a thing, the idea possibly planted in my brain by GamesRadar, I’d begin with the extraordinary fanart of pokeyugami, who would create adorable animations showing how the earliest Pokémon games would look were they 3D and based on the art of original Pokémon TCG card designer, Ken Sugimori. In my head, it would look something like this:

Or maybe like this:

What I’d then do, purely speculatively of course, is pick studio Yanako RPGs to see these clips, which would be inspired by them to develop a full game based on the concept. I’d choose Yanako RPGs, because it would be the developer behind MonMae, an open source engine that allows anyone to make their own monster-collecting game, which is also developing a game within the engine, Dokimon. I mean, that name would obviously be far too on-the-nose and get a developer sued into the sun, but it’s just what my imagination came up with in the moment. I’d definitely remember to come up with something more than one letter off a multi-billion franchise before I released such a game for God’s sake.

In my mind, it gets declared with a tweet like this:

The game would be created using the same watercolor art, but also implement ideas from the more recent Pokémon games, as well as being inspired by Pokémon Black & White 2.

Sure, it’d be lovely if any of this could actually happen, but given Nintendo’s reputation for releasing its rabid legal hounds at anyone who even looks at them funny (thus illegally reflecting their copyrighted artworks in their eyeballs), it will have to remain my fantasy.

 

…

by pbnbigesdi Posted on

Switch 2 Hype Peaks As Nintendo Nukes Original YouTube Reveal

The Nintendo Switch was first revealed via a three-minute trailer posted to YouTube on October 20, 2016. Seven years later, Nintendo has pushed the video to private, reigniting fans’ excitement for a much anticipated announcement of the Switch 2, and also destroying an important piece of history in the process.

What You Should Know About Mario Strikers’ Big Free Update

The disappearance was first noticed on the gaming forum ResetEra, where users joked about what it might mean, including if a Switch 2 reveal might now be imminent. That, sadly, seems very unlikely, given Nintendo’s repeated insistence that it won’t have any new hardware to discuss until the start of its next fiscal year in April 2024. The company also has two big games left to sell this year: Super Mario Bros. Wonder and Super Mario RPG Remake. Nintendo doesn’t usually like to steal the spotlight away from one product by surprise-announcing another.

The original 2016 Switch reveal was notable for a bunch of reasons. Unlike the Wii U, which got the full red carpet rollout at E3 2011, Nintendo relied on a single YouTube trailer to get everyone excited for its successor. Instead of executives describing all of the new handheld hybrid console’s functions in detail, fans got to see a video of the device in action, showing both people playing alone in their living rooms, and sitting around picnic tables at night by the basketball court.

The video highlighted the Switch as a machine for portability and sociability, epitomized by the now infamous scene of hipsters playing Super Mario Odyssey at a rooftop party in the city. It eventually garnered over 50 million views. Here’s a re-upload of it by Gamespot:

Gamespot

So why did Nintendo remove it all of the sudden? Is the company trying to get old marketing out of the way so a similarly-named Switch 2 doesn’t have to compete with it in the algorithmic SEO abyss of the modern internet? Or did it simply decline to renew the licensing rights for the White Denim song used in the trailer? That’s usually the reason why video game marketing materials get delisted from YouTube, though it’s not completely clear why Nintendo would abandon the most recognizable commercial for a console that’s still selling millions of units a year, especially heading into the 2023 holiday season.

Nintendo did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The Switch has been an unexpected boon for Nintendo, catapulting it from talk of a desperate merger with other tech companies following the failure of the Wii U, back into contention for being the maker of the number one gaming platform in terms of first-party exclusives, convenience, affordability, and just plain fun. Many see the Switch reveal as not just a flashy ad, but an important piece of the company’s legacy and gaming history more generally.

“Nintendo should take the steps to ensure the Switch reveal video stays on their channels forever,” tweeted former head of social content for Nintendo of America, Kit Ellis. “They may disagree, but it is an important piece of video game history. It’s time for a mindset shift on things like this now that their official museum is on the way.”

As for what this means about the impending announcement of the Switch 2, or whatever Nintendo ends up calling its next console, it seems clear one way or another that the company is finally gearing up for the upcoming reveal. Multiple reports of Switch 2 developer kits at Gamescom proved Nintendo’s next hardware is already being shown behind closed doors to development partners. Even if the official announcement is still several months off, more leaks seem inevitable at this point. Hopefully, whatever the Switch 2 is capable of, whether it’s 4K resolution or backwards compatibility, we can still party with it on the rooftop.

Correction 10/18/2023 11:12 a.m. ET: The song used in the original Switch reveal trailer was not by Imagine Dragons.

           

…

by pbnbigesdi Posted on
Proudly powered by WordPress | Theme: Looks Blog by Crimson Themes.