Stranglehold vs. Max Payne 2 Graphics Comparison

From the demo, I would say Stranglehold is too little too late. I doubt this game will sell well.

Sigh. Max Payne 2. Still a game I play once about year. They don't make action games like they used to.

I'm not sure what the graphics comparison is supposed to reveal, but everything (not just the graphics) looks very similar. Textures, tones, environments, situations, play mechanics, etc. The only thing that I can tell will be significantly different (after watching many Stranglehold previews) is the higher polygon count on the character models.

But I'm not holding my breath that it'll be anything like the awesomeness and immersiveness of Max Payne 2. I'm with danieljw; I still play through the game at least once or twice a year (PC, not the crappy console version). One of my all-time favorites.

I'd say that there's quite a bit of difference. The lighting is much better, the textures are cleaner, and the character models are much much better. Plus you're forgetting that the environments are practically completely destructible.

I'd say there's quite a bit of difference, too, but I think it's more in the subtleties. The destructible environments is a huge plus, too. But I can't help feeling that the game has been done before when it comes to Max Payne and Max Payne 2, both superb titles. When I heard about Stranglehold initially I was quite excited as I am a huge John Woo fan, but after I saw the first gameplay vid, I was admittedly disappointed because I felt like I had already seen all of it (save for a few doves and some exploding tables) in the Max Payne games.

I won't be picking up Stranglehold on day one unless some people here give it absolutely stellar reviews. There's way too much other good stuff coming this fall. The drought ending means no more "half-full" approach for me.

Hmm, I don't remember Max Payne 2 looking as good in my crt tv as in these pics

Could be shots from the PC version. There was a PC version of 2, wasn't there?

The strangehold release date on the PS3 is now Sept25. Yes, Agent Tequila is being sent on a suicide mission.

must be a "DOCTORED' PC screen. Payne 2 does not look as good as stranglehold. Any reasoning that it does is silly, PLUS, payne 2 didnt have all the interactivity. It had bullet time, thats it. Oh and you could knock over a few paint cans off the shelves. Im not bashing payne 2 but games have evolved from then, be it the same concept or not stranglehold is better than max payne in all respects. Grow up and quit living in the past.

*edit*
Check real screens here
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Pay...l_of_Max_Payne

Also I was watching that gamehead game show on Spike this past thursday and the producer of stranglehold said, the max payne guys got alot of ideas from John Woo movies so........

Ouch. Cranky much?

Can't speak for others, but my point was that the two really don't look much different (I'm assuming we're referring to the vastly superior PC version of Payne). The untrained eye would have a hard time distinguishing them. "The past" has nothing to do with it.

Don't get me wrong; I'm excited to play Stranglehold. Anything that so closely resembles greatness can't help but be good. If it manages to up the ante, more's the better for all.

And: for those who played the Payne games on consoles (especially the piss-poor PS2 ports), you missed something truly special on PC.

facial expressions are important.

Um, the graphics should be a lot better on Stranglehold as Max Payne 2 is like ancient by video game standards. The types of shading and poly counts were not even possible back then.

The setting and scenes and gameplay might be similar, which in my opinion is a good thing even if it is a Max Payne clone so long as it is a quality clone. Since Max Payne is one of the best all time vid games a good clone once in a while is welcome. There hasn't yet been a good clone to date. The game looks worth playing to me.

Hard Boiled was around a long time before Max Payne. If anything the person who had the idea for Max Payne wanted to copy the Hong Kong style movies like what John Woo does and threw in a little Matrix bullet time for effect. I liked Max Payne 1 & 2 and I owned both, but everyone saying that Stranglehold is a rip off of Max Payne is being ridiculous. Stranglehold looks visually better to me than Max Payne and that's why I already preordered it, but this childish banter is getting to be annoying. Get a life, it's a game based on a movie.

a lot of people have no clue about John Woo, Hard Boiled, and The Killer. it's rather sad when they see something like this come out after Max Payne and think it is Stranglehold ripping off max payne when it was the other way around. many ppl here in the U.S. simply have no idea of great entertainment titles overseas. ppl even thought Infernal Affairs was a rip-off of The Departed.

Edit: in additon for the uneducated, anytime you see someone firing two guns (sometimes while flying through the air or falling/jumping backwards) in a game or movie, John Woo started it. latest homage paid to this style i've seen was in Hot Fuzz. for more references see "a better tomorrow 1 and 2", "the killer", "hard boiled", "face/off".

I'll probably buy the Collectors edition. I like the idea of watching a movie, then playing the sequel. That's usually what I think when I'm watching action movies anyway.. "This would be more fun if I had a controller" (and yes, I realize this is the internet, and someone is going to make a sex joke out of that)

Max Payne is the standard even if it was trying to capture what had been only accomplished in Woo movies before it. It was the first vid game to capture a movie type cinematic feel combined with comic book story telling and Woos bullet time. Will Stranglehold push it further? I don't know, would be cool if it can. Max Payne is the standard Stanglehold is going to be measured against not the other way around. It's kinda been done already and done exceptionally well. So I guess you can pick the chicken or the egg, it doesn't really matter. Both get credit.

the ai is pretty dumb in stranglehold, all you need to do really is run around and shoot people. Cover pretty much is not a concern in this game........

Is the movie only available in the Collectors Eddition or in the standard also?

If you want to argue about who did what first, Woo didn't invent much. He simply had a good eye for how to combine styles and techniques from earlier filmmakers (Seijun Suzuki, Sam Peckinpah, French New Wave, Japanese New Wave, American Film Noir, Hong Kong action/martial arts cinema, and so on). Even down to his "trademark" two-gun wielding hero ('70s American B-movie action cinema and New Wave cinema) and stylized Mexican stand-offs (Peckinpah and Leone). All existed well before Woo. Of course, Woo is brilliant for how he brings all of these things together.


I doubt anyone who doesn't know about international cinema has even heard of let alone seen Infernal Affairs. And most Americans who have heard of it or seen it probably know it as the movie that The Departed was based on.

I also don't think Stranglehold is "ripping off" Max Payne. Both are influenced by similar cinematic traditions. Max Payne, though, returns to the thematic and stylistic roots of Film Noir, while it appears that Stranglehold tries to recapture the flavor of '80s Hong Kong action cinema. Hell, nobody's even pointing out that Max Payne's "bullet time" was a direct rip-off of The Matrix rather than of Woo. It's exactly this sort of chain of cultural "borrowing" or "influencing" (sounds so much better than "ripping off," yes?) that makes these movies and games so rich and full of coolness. The Matrix by itself did more to bring Asian cinema to the attention of Americans than any other film (Asian or American) ever made.

And for my money, American Film Noir is more fertile for evoking a mood, style, and story; Hong Kong action cinema is more fertile for evoking freneticism, movement, and people shooting people. Max Payne 2 (better than 1) fully captured the feeling of Film Noir. If Stranglehold does what it could, it'll stick closely to its roots and be a spectacular game.

The fact that Stranglehold and Max Payne look so much alike is fantastic. It shows how complicated and rich the traditions are that these games come from. I think it's great that they look so much alike; it tells me just how seriously games should be taken by the public. All this talking is making me really itchy to play this game.

Once people start talking film history (it's my day job), I get all ruffled. Apologies.

I tend to agree. Art tends to be more a matter of recycling and combining already existing ideas in new ways. Nothing is truly 100 percent original. Nothing is truly built completely by scratch.

I've only seen the "Includes Hard Boiled Movie" listed with the CE.

The title of this thread should be play mechanic comparison. It is the movement of the characters that is similar. I see nothing wrong with this, it is the natural progression of art. Like music and painting we take good ideas and make them better.

I enjoyed the Demo more than I expected. I found that I was finding a lot of new ways to take the enemy out after three or four plays. When you beat the demo it opens up more tequila time slots and it starts to get even better. The one I love is the dead eye shot. Everything stops and it brings us a cross hair to get a perfect aim on the enemy. Another cool thing about this is that the character animation is reactive to where you hit the enemy. Hit the jaw and he grabs his mouth in pain, hit his groin he falls to his knees, hit his eye and he gives you a pirate look, the knees falls to the ground. Fun stuff. Worth the long delay I feel.

I'm playing through Stranglehold right now, and trust me, it looks much better than Max Payne 2 did. The way characters look, move, and the way the environment explodes is way better than Max was.

max payne 2 was great,i just hope they release a 3,still alot of unfinished story left,anyways stranglehold is fun,i played the demo on my 360,i just hope they would hurry up and release the ps3 demo already

stranglehold was ok, kinda disappointing graphics wise, but other than that it was pretty fun.

i still liked max payne 2 more though, especially since i bought it for $2.99, lol

Wow. We were all being generous in assuming Stranglehold had even slightly improved graphics over Max Payne. I just spent some time with the demo, and boy does it belong in the crapper.

Some of the style effects are cool (standoffs and precision shooting in particular), but otherwise it just plain blows. Environments are too full and too busy so the framerate drops often to unplayable levels. Yes, it's just a demo, but according to reviews, this happens in the final product also.

Character models look like crap. Facial textures are ok, but the lighting effects make it look like each character bathed in electrified oil (some of that oil must have gone into greasing Tequila's butt since he slides on everything).

There's absolutely no AI to speak of. The demo level is presumably an early level, so I can somewhat understand guys just standing and shooting, but these baddies are less interested in self-preservation than a target at a shooting range.

Level design (at least in the demo level) is just silly. Lots of empty, useless space (hallways) followed by a couple of square areas full of people and stuff to shoot.

In order to help out the camera, the game suffers from intense clipping issues. But it doesn't really help me at all, since I think I'd rather not see all the crap in front of me.

This game needed a lot more time in the cooker because it went straight to the crapper. Too bad.

Am I the only one that had the demo playing in 480p? It's the first time I've seen that happen with the PS3, but I noticed it immediately. I didn't see anywhere to force it to display in an HD resolution. When I went back to the dashboard, everything was back to 1080p, but that demo was outputting 480p only.

- Nevermind. I turned off 720p at some point and forgot it doesn't scale up like the 360. I never noticed because the last two games I've played on the PS3 were 1080p (and it's rarely used for games).

Are you talking about the ps3 version? the 360 demo had no frame rate problems (unless your referring to bullet time, if so...your special). Since stranglehold is based off of ut3, it probably doesnt run as smooth as the 360 version would.