PC

Is Max Payne a straight‑laced noir yarn or a delirious bullet‑ballet fever dream with a painkiller addiction? (Trick question, like a good detective novel, the answer keeps lighting cigarettes in shadowy corners and refusing to testify.) Dropped onto PC hard drives on July 23, 2001, Remedy Entertainment’s debut feels at once traditional, hard‑boiled narration, grieving cop, endless snowfall, […]

Is Aliens versus Predator 2 the unsung hero of the early‑’00s shooter renaissance or a B‑movie sideshow that happens to be interactive? (Spoiler: it moonwalks somewhere between the two while licking acid off its own mandibles.) Released in late 2001, Monolith’s sequel still feels like the gaming equivalent of juggling chain saws on roller skates, dangerously show‑offy yet

What happens when a Spanish studio condenses every WWII action‑film cliché, U‑boat sabotage, POW breakouts, cigar‑chomping berets, into a single isometric playground, then dares you to finish the whole affair without tripping a single alarm? (Spoiler: it involves more quick‑loads than coffee breaks and at least one keyboard hurled in righteous indignation.) Commandos 2: Men of Courage is at once

Is it possible for a first‑person shooter to feel simultaneously like Isaac Newton’s fever dream, a Volkswagen commercial set on the moons of Saturn, and the most elaborate game of capture‑the‑flag ever smuggled onto a LAN‑party hard drive? (Answer: obviously, otherwise I’m wasting a healthy chunk of carpal‑tunnel mileage.) Tribes 2 is that contradictory chimera. Released

Is there a stranger cultural chimera than a 1997 PC game that straps bazookas to muscle cars, swaddles every firefight in wah‑wah guitar, and manages, against all odds, to turn disco facial hair into a unifying game‑design motif? (Answer: doubtful, unless you count Daikatana’s ad campaign, and even that lacked the righteous sideburn.) Interstate ’76 is both bizarro and classical: bizarro