[SamandMax]

As much as I love the first two Max Payne games, I never felt that they were genuinely great pieces of noir. What I like about Remedy is that they can sincerely pay homage to a genre they love without having to abandon a sense of humour about it. They tell dark crime stories with the Max Payne games but they also pepper in little tongue-in-cheek moments along the way that keep it from taking itself too seriously, knowing what they're making is the equivalent of a pulp fiction comic. It was the same thing with Alan Wake - that was a dead-serious ode to the horror of Stephen King that happened to be as funny as it was tense.

I'm excited for Max Payne 3 because, while I love Remedy, I can't wait to see what a developer as talented as Rockstar is going to do with this series. Judging by what we've seen, they're clearly bringing their own take to it and I honestly don't know what else you could want from a sequel than that.

To use a noir parable, I see this like the different approaches that were taken bringing Phillip Marlowe to the screen. You've got an iconic 40's-set movie like The Big Sleep with Bogart as Marlowe but then you've also got Robert Altman's The Long Goodbye, a semi-revisionist take with Elliot Gould playing Marlowe in the 70s, both completely different yet both brilliant in their own right.

We had one great developer play around with the world of Max Payne and now we've got another offering their own vision of it. How could anyone have a problem with that?