Max Payne had a fairly complex plot for a video game. Detective Max Payne comes home one day and finds junkies in his home, and kills a couple of them before discovering that they’ve murdered his wife and infant child. He decides to transfer to the DEA as a result, and later discovers that there is a link between the pharmaceutical company his wife used to work for, the junkies, the mafia, and dirty DEA agents. The game was also infamous for featuring scenes inside Max’s head: there’s the constant sound of a baby crying, and you have to walk along a blood trail on the ground suspended over a dark void. If you fall off, Max fully loses it, goes nuts, and dies. To this day the “baby levels” are still used as examples of nightmare-inducing bad game design.

The Mark Wahlberg-starring movie, which opens today, tries to simplify the plot, and ends up differing from the game quite a bit. However, those changes are for the worse. What was a dark and gritty video game full of gunplay becomes a stylistic mess where the director tries to imitate other movies.

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