“Max Payne 3″, as a game, is polished to a ridiculously high sheen. But it’s also stuck somewhat in the past. Is the content here really enough to make the game worth sixty bucks?

“Polished” is not an idle adjective here: there’s a lot of love for the franchise packed into this game, and it’s pretty clear it was never left idle at any point in its development. Right from the Rockstar logo (which, by the way, is a hoot), you can tell Rockstar made this because they wanted to put it out. Sure, they knew it’d be something resembling a hit. But that wasn’t the point.

The problem, though, is that like it or not, in some ways, Rockstar has moved well beyond games like “Max Payne”. And that’s the tricky part: has Rockstar managed to bring Max to the modern day?

Short answer: not really. Whether or not that matters is up to you.
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Poor IGN. They’re trying, they really are. They conducted a survey that shows seven in ten of gamers (well, gamers that respond to IGN surveys) have no problem with gay relationships being an option in video games.

All well and good. Unfortunately, they made the mistake of posting it on the Internet and letting people comment on it.

Normally, I complain a lot about how everybody thinks the hobby that I love is chock full of ignorant bigoted morons. And then something like this comes along, and demonstrates that, oh wait, there really are plenty of gamers who happen to be ignorant bigoted morons.  And even more people who think pretending to be an ignorant bigoted moron is funny.  And even more of them who are apparently just completely clueless, whether they mean well or not.

And then we all get lumped in with the ignorant bigoted morons. So thanks, guys. Thanks a lot.

Well, except for the troll pretending to be a virgin who does nothing but play PS3. That dude’s just funny. He is trolling, right?

A few of our “favorite” comments, under the cut.
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It’s been a while since we’ve heard or seen much from Sony and Naughty Dog’s The Road The Last of Us, but late yesterday they finally gave us another trailer. No gameplay footage yet, but according to Sony the trailer was executed using the game’s engine, so yeah, this game is going to look pretty damn amazing.

Check out the trailer and some new hi-res screenshots after the jump…

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I’m still a little loopy from playing “Diablo III” for six hours, but I took a nap and got a little time in playing the second most anticipated title coming out today.

And honestly, it’s a little less stuck in the past than the first. But only a little.

From the first two hours, it’s not likely “Max Payne 3″ is going to win any Game of the Year awards, but it’s a lot of fun. The new cover mechanic is definitely useful and adds another strategy aspect, but this is still “Max Payne”; you’re still leaping in slow motion and shooting, and you do not have a bunch of convenient waist-high walls to hide behind to build your health back up. Eventually, you’re going to have to charge out from cover, and I suspect people who are getting their first time with Max will not take it well at first.

On the bright side, this is a very smooth and well-paced game: you go from cutscene straight into the action. It’s a welcome change of pace to see no loading screens, although it makes it hard to break off from play, or figure out where the checkpoints are.

Still, one thing that pops out about this game is that, well, all there is is the shooting. It’s incredibly refined, balanced, and challenging shooting, but it’s not very deep. You can poke around for clues and evidence, although the game will tell you to hurry up, but there isn’t much of those. Compare this to, say, “L.A. Noire”, which mixed gunplay and point-and-click adventure gaming, or “Red Dead Redemption”, which has essentially the same gunplay and mechanics, but a vast open world to explore and lots of ways to distract yourself, and this comes up short.

We’ll have a full review later this week. For now, if you wanted more Max, this’ll do you.

So, we haven’t brought you many stories about new Kickstarter projects lately, because frankly there’s just too many of them to keep track of at this point. Basically, around the time a Kickstarter for a new Leisure Suit Larry game popped up, I lost the ability to keep track and/or care.

Thankfully a couple MIT students have come along and roused me from my Kickstarter coma. These guys are looking for funds to put together an invention kit called MaKey MaKey that will let you turn almost anything into a video game controller. With this kit you’ll be able to make controllers out of Play Doh, fruit or coolest of all in my opinion, just draw a controller on a piece of paper and have it work. How do they do it? Don’t ask me, but it’s pretty damn cool.

Check out a video of MaKey MaKey in action after the jump…

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We’ve previously featured the work of Sam Gorski and Nick Pueringer of Corridor Digital when they made awesome fan films based on Battlefield 3, Call of Duty, and Team Fortress 2. They also ventured into sci-fi with the short film Prism. Their newest video, “Art of the Instakill”, pits the characters of several video game series against one another, with only their game’s “instant kill” move in their arsenal.

The winner is exactly who it should be. I won’t say who beat whom, as that would spoil it. The list of games in order of appearance is below the video.

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