It's a Mod, Mod World
Max Payne

Max Payne: Kung Fu Edition
As a fan of kung fu stars like Jackie Chan, Jet Li, and Bruce Lee, University of Toronto student Kenneth Yeung immediately thought of ways to infuse his passion into Take-Two's third-person action game Max Payne. "When I got my hands on [the game], the first thing I thought was 'Whoa, this is so cool, it's just like being in an action movie!'" Yeung said. "And of course my kung-fu-polluted brain immediately followed this with, 'If only there were crazy acrobatics and frenzied hand-to-hand combat with slow-mo spin kicks, that would be awesome.'" The result is Max Payne: Kung Fu Edition--the same game as the original but modified to include a cinematic kung fu fighting system. "There's nothing quite like the rush during those crazy fight scenes in those classic Hong Kong action movies," said Yeung, who studies kung fu himself in his spare time.

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Move over Max. Here comes Jackie.
Yeung says he experimented with the editing tools that came with the game, and he eventually created the custom animations that allow Max Payne to perform backflips and butterfly kicks. This mod replaces the shooting action with quick punches, and the dodge buttons release kicks in the direction of the dodge (in the three forward directions). If enemies are hit with the proper timing, quick kicks will generate automatic combination attacks, releasing a flurry of even quicker and deadlier kicks. The same system applies for a stick weapon that players get later on in the game. Along with the changes to the combat, the mod adds a number of acrobatic moves to the game, including the ability to flip off walls or run along them for a limited time. Development of the mod began in August 2001, and after what Yeung describes as "a month and a half of incredibly fun animating and coding," he released the code he had finished as the first version of the mod.

Version 2.0, the latest version of Max Payne: Kung Fu Edition, launched in time for Christmas 2001 and introduced a bunch of new features. Version 3.0 is in the works--a trailer is available for it here. The latest news and downloads for Max Payne: Kung Fu Edition can be found here.

The Authentic Lobby Shootout
Needless to say, the blockbuster 1999 film The Matrix had a significant influence on Remedy Entertainment's gritty action game Max Payne. Now, one of the most widely downloaded mods for the game is The Authentic Lobby Shootout, which was designed to reenact the action-packed lobby shootout scene from the movie. In the mod, players assume the role of Neo (Keanu Reeves' character from the film, complete with trench coat and sunglasses, and blast their way through a few groups of guards while tearing the place apart and diving here and there in slow motion. Neo is joined by a computer-controlled Trinity, who helps ward off the guards while pillars crumble, chairs topple over, and monitors explode. The mod's author is 20-year-old Ezra A. Hanson-White, a full-time art student who is majoring in multimedia and Web design at the Illinois Institute of Art, Schaumburg.

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Dodge this.
"I'd already been thinking of [writing a mod] for Max Payne before the game was out," Hanson-White said, "and it seemed obvious that it just had to have The Matrix lobby as a level to play--the two just fit perfectly together." The creation of the mod took about two weeks, and Hanson-White studied the scene from the movie frame by frame in an effort to re-create it as accurately as possible. "I went through various versions of the map, rebuilding it a couple of times, trying out different ideas for breaking the pillars and walls," the author explained. "At one point I had each individual tile completely breakable--it was a great effect seeing chunks of tiles falling off all over the place--but caused the game to play very slowly with more than 300 dynamic objects." The Authentic Lobby Shootout mod was released on August 17, 2001.

There is no official site for the mod, but Max Payne owners can download the zipped file from this site.

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