Rock, Paper, Shotgun

It’s going to be a quieter Christmas than we were expecting. A bundle of big-name games have announced in the last few days that they’ll no longer be bulging Santa’s sack, but instead offering themselves in the colder months of 2010. This year your Christmas tree will not be towering over 2K games BioShock 2, Mafia II, nor Max Payne 3. Indeed they’re not alone. A smattering of console-only titles have also slipped, as well as Activision’s Singularity. What’s a jolly-bellied man to do this holiday season? Deliver Modern Warfare 2 an awful lot, it seems.

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(All the images in this post click through to the full size version.)
Mr Payne is older, twelve years older, and living in Brazil. He’s no longer a cop with nothing to lose, and instead is a bodyguard for a wealthy Sao Paulo family. Rockstar have sent over a bunch of images of the new game, showing our favourite emotionally-tortured slow-mo diving dude in the process of dealing with Brazil’s unpleasantly-armed urban underworld. The game is being developed with the RAGE engine which powered GTA4, although with some modifications, including “brand-new particle physics technology to deliver spectacular, highly advanced close-quarters combat” and “an intelligent cover system”. Rockstar also report that “Bullet-Time, an addiction to painkillers, mature themes and Max’s ever-present internal monologue” will all be present in the new game. So that’s good.

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At least if the gossip spinning out of an alleged Game Informer cover story is to be believed. Via VG247, we have a low-res photo of said possible cover, showing Mr Payne looking more than a little worse for wear. A follow-up story on Deeko condenses what it claims are the salient points of the feature – our Max is down and out in Brazil, addicted to painkillers and living in a “fully-destructible world.” Sound plausible? And if it does, how do we feel about Rockstar moving the poor lad from his traditional home of New York to Latin America? Sounds good to me: potentially very colourful, as I’m not sure I can stand many more grim’n'gloomy-looking shooters.

Rockstar drops the first hint about the next installment of the grandaddy of slo-mo man-shoots:

Do you like beards? What about scars? Blood? A possible hint of a shaven head? Oh, we could talk about this for hours.

Um.
Hmm.
No, that’s it.