Max Payne 3 is looking like a true sequel

Even though Max Payne 3 isn't being developed by Remedy (the house behind the first two games), the Rockstar reps on hand informed me "they'd seen what we were doing with the game, gave some notes, and they're excited about its direction." When the first trailer for Max Payne 3 debuted on September 14, Remedy CEO Matias Myllyrinne tweeted, "A big thumbs-up and congrats to Rockstar on the Max Payne 3 trailer!"Reprising his role as the voice of Payne is James McCaffrey, who is also responsible for Payne's motion-capture in the third game. It's his physical appearance Max Payne is now based on--which, from what we've seen, isn't that much of a deviation. I had always likened Max Payne to real-life actor Dean Winters ("Oz," "30 Rock," Allstate commercials) but found out otherwise when I met Sam Lake face to face. Lake is the writer of and physical inspiration for Payne in the first title. Payne was modeled after actor Timothy Gibbs in the second title.After those first initial screenshots dripped out, I remember hearing questions like, "Why is he bald?" It's a reasonable concern, as clearly Max Payne was not bald in the previous two games nor did he show any signs of a receding hairline. No, this Max Payne has shaved his head because, well, he's been through a lot.The gruesome murder of his family and the unfortunate events that followed in Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne have left our antihero a broken man. With the pains of his past bubbling over inside, Max decides to seek refuge, and perhaps some clarity, by taking up a private security job in Sao Paulo, Brazil.Max's new responsibility is overseeing the security of the wealthy Branco family, made up of three brothers, the eldest of which is Rodrigo Branco. When Branco's wife is kidnapped by a rogue gang, Max once again finds himself in an uphill battle, not against mobsters, but an entire Brazilian paramilitary outfit.That's all the backstory I was given, so it was on to the hands-off demo which began in--of all places--New York City. The Rockstar reps made it very clear that Max Payne 3 would not be a tale told linearly, but rather as a series of flashbacks and forwards. But it's in this first section of gameplay where I immediately recognized Max Payne's hometown familiarity: the dirty shadowed apartment building corridors, the faint police sirens in the distance, the dreary recognizable piano riff. Here, Max Payne resembled the same character we've grown to love, the jacket-and-tie-wearing vigilante.It's also here where I got my first look at Max Payne 3's bullet-time effect, and it was an impressive evolution of the technology. Max gracefully dives and unloads rounds toward enemies in a bloody ballet of destruction, completed by the "final kill-camera" from the previous games that denotes the end of gunfight. Rockstar's use of the Euphoria game engine allows for shockingly realistic behavior of not only Max's body, but the kickback of each bullet's entry as they pepper an enemy.