Hello, people visiting Playthroughline! My name is Craig and I'm an author of abridged scripts on The Editing Room, where Joannes’ movie parodies are published. Joannes has kindly allowed me to contribute a Short Script to his site, and I have chosen the classic third-person shooter Max Payne. I was originally going to use this space here to go through one of my recurring video game rants, to be specific, a defence of linear gameplay. After all, games don't come much more linear than Max Payne. But the thrust of that particular rant is the idea of tight narrative focus, and in abridging Max Payne, one thing I realised was that "tight narrative focus" is not a term you'd use to describe it at all. If it were to focus on its story, it'd probably last about half an hour. Instead it rambles, inventing an endless series of feeble justifications for action set pieces which have nothing whatsoever to do with the central story. The restaurant fire, the robbery of the Charon, the parking garage showdown, the hotel drug deal, all of these things and more could be lifted right out and you'd hardly notice the difference.

And the more I thought about it, the more this little diatribe changed its topic to the bewildering question: why in the world do I like this game so much?