Max Payne Q&A
We talk to Remedy Entertainment about bringing Max Payne to the Xbox.
Rockstar's upcoming conversion of Max Payne to the Xbox is defying conventional wisdom with its quality. First announced this past
GameSpot: How did you approach bringing Max Payne to the Xbox?
Petri Jarvilehto: To begin with, I'd like to mention that Neo (an Austrian game developer) did most of the kick-ass work for the Xbox version. Our role was to help them out as much as possible and make sure that the game meets (and exceeds) the expectations of the Xbox gamers.
About halfway into the PC development of Max Payne, we realized that Max is the perfect console game, and from that point onward, we were careful to design it as a console-style game, even though it was going to debut on the PC. You can see this in the simplicity of the controls, the easy-to-understand interface, and the upward scalability of the graphics, which only top-of-the-line PCs can take advantage of, but all Xbox players will see in full detail and action-packed glory.
A big concern was getting a PC game to function on an Xbox controller flawlessly. A lot of PC titles make their way to consoles, and while many have the look, they fail to correctly implement the controls in a proper fashion. Our mandate was, "If we need a mouse and keyboard to play our console version, then we failed."
GS: Did you have to make any changes to the game to get it to fit?
PJ: We did have to split the levels up. The Xbox has a good amount of RAM for a console (but never enough for a developer), but given that the PC version required 64MB of RAM (not including VRAM), and the Xbox has a total of 64MB of RAM, we had to make some changes. Being that the levels in Max were so huge, we were able to split them so they fit into the memory and maintained the game's already fast pace.
GS: Did you make any enhancements to it?
PJ: We added a lot of gameplay enhancements in the form of auto-aim assistance, a slower bullet time to make aiming easier on a control pad, and selectable crosshairs, among others.
We also tweaked the AI to ensure that a new player can jump right in without getting his or her head blown off. The console market is a new and broader environment, so the game must be "pick up and play" from the start. We could have spent a great deal of time making the game look "X" times better, or changing the story at points, but our number-one goal was gameplay. The game played very well on a PC, but we had to be certain that a new console player had absolutely no issues jumping into this title. Take a gander at the options screen to get an idea of what I'm talking about.
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