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"It's Payne!" ....I broke 2 months of silence for this?

In a related note, what the hell ever happened to the Future Crew? Man, I remember waiting with bated breath for Second Reality to download over my 2400 baud modem.

Several members of the "Crew" founded Remedy Entertainment. Remedy developed Death Rally (a 3D top down racer, very fun and ran on the old Rendition board if I remember correctly, maybe even 3DFX) and also a little game called Max Payne. Maybe you've heard of it :) I also believe they developed a 3D benchmarking tool, but I don't remember the name off the top of my head.

As a parent, I can understand why some people think that playing Max Payne would be like training for the next Columbine. Violence runs rampant in our media.

Yeah, I can imagine a bunch of testosterone-filled teenagers with guns running around in their local school, throwing themselves around the corner, just to realize that Bullet Time doesn't work in real life.

As a parent, I can understand why some people think that playing Max Payne would be like training for the next Columbine. Violence runs rampant in our media.

But it always has. The greatest literature, and some of the most thoughtful movies (Schindler's List and Platoon come to mind) are rife with violence. The difference is the follow-through. Showing a full consideration of the effects, or the struggle against violence is often what sets stories of violence apart as literature.

Would I want these games banned? No. The ratings system that is in place is what I use. Before my kids get a game, I evaluate it. Only the responsible ones get through.

The best new game engine is in Max Payne. You can read about Max Payne here and here.

Excellent point. That's pretty much happened with most generes

Might be that plot structure is already happening...Half-Life, Max Payne, the older and unfortunately not-widely-played Marathon all have actual, immersive plots.

I've got an AMD K6-2 450 at home (among others) and trying to play Max Payne was a sad, daunting experience, going under 5fps at times. And I have a decent enough videocard.
Get a grip, serious gamers need serious speed and anything >2GHz sounds like it does the job! [for now]

Future crew actually eventualoy changed their name to Remedy and have joined 3dRealms to work on games. To see their latest work, check out their newest realease, Max Payne... its a pretty awesome game.

Max Payne, for instance, was developed mostly with GeForce cards. This means that by choosing their standard developer hardware setup the developers are actually becoming hardware-dependant and are, if not frankly, saying that these cards are the ones that you should use to play their game.

This is really no news.

"Optimized for Pentium III" is what read on every possible piece of marketing material with the late Battlezone II.

I would make a conclusion that hardware dependancy of games goes far beyond than just the graphic cards. Use this processor to get better results, use this sound card to hear the sounds more precisely, etc.. It seems that game industry has big bucks, and every hardware vendor wants to make sure that when the next big hit comes, everyone needs to buy their product in order to get that +15% FPS out of it.

I am glad that the book is out, even if it does suck. Linux needs more native 3d games that support the latest hardware. Wine with a directX layer is a pretty good substitution but I would love to a see a version of Half-Life or the newly released Max Payne as a Linux binary. I would be willing to forego open source code of the games as long as it is stable and well supported. Of course Loki Games sells Linux distributions of popular games, but they are always so far behind the normal distribution that it makes it far less appealing.