Our latest feature on the wide range of high-powered weaponry from Max Payne 3′s awesome arsenal focuses on the Mini-30 rifle – a deadly piece of kit that’s built like a tank and packs the punch of one too. Whether at a distance via scope or at close quarters, the rapid fire and lightweight nature of this rifle makes short – and messy - work of enemies.

Explore the video module above to see its brutal stopping power, impressive range and precise accuracy in action, along with detailed 360-degree renders that show off all of its individually modeled components and a selection of all-new screenshots.

Previously:
Max Payne 3 Official Site Launch Featuring the 608 Bull Revolver Feature & Video

Rockstar Games News Wire

Today, check out the debut selection of screens from the PC release below – and look for many more to come, including as part of the first hands-on previews of Max Payne 3 hitting next week. And stay tuned for more detailed information including special graphics hardware support and enhancements – as well as system specs to be announced a bit closer to game release.

Click each image below to open it in full high-definition or view via the screens section of the official Max Payne 3 website.

Muzzle flash as Max dual-wields a silenced PT92 and Micro 9mm.

Max prepares to enter the favelas.

Max in a tense showdown with a member of a shadowy paramilitary group known as the Crachá Preto.

Rockstar Games News Wire

Recently, when we released the music from the Head Radio and Lips 106 stations in Grand Theft Auto III on iTunes, some fans asked when the Liberty City Stories incarnations of the original music from those stations might also become available.

Today we’re happy to announce that those tracks have also been remastered and are up now on iTunes for download – with individual songs priced at only .69 each and each station’s complete 7-track album at .99.

Lips 106: Complete Album

• Rudy La Fontaine – “Funk in Time”
• Sarwarr – “Love is the Feeling”
• Sunshine Shine – “Mine Until Monday”
• Credit Check – “Get Down”
• Cool Timers – “Tonight”
• Nina Barry – “Bassmatic”
• The Jackstars – “Into Something (Come On, Get Down)"

Head Radio: Complete Album

• Conor & Jay – “Train”
• Cloud 19 – “The One For Me”
• Purser – “Feel the Pain”
• L-Marie (feat. Raff) – “Free Yourself”
• 15 Ways – “Drive”
• Rosco Stow – “Welcome to the Real World”
• Vanilla Smoothie – “Keep Dreaming”

Additionally, Official Playlists featuring all the other music stations found in both Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories and Grand Theft Auto: Vice City Stories are also now available – containing all of the individual tracks that are currently on iTunes. Stay tuned for more digital soundtrack releases in the future and grab songs by visiting the links below.

Vice City Stories Playlist | Liberty City Stories Playlist

Previously:
Grand Theft Auto III: Head Radio & Lips FM Station Albums Now Available on iTunes

Rockstar Games News Wire

Certainly, Max as a character owes a debt to the great tradition of moviedom’s brooding action-heroes who walk softly and wield a big stick with uncanny precision. At its best, the experience of playing any Max Payne game, but especially this new and evolved entry in the franchise, is meant to take that passively vicarious thrill of seeing a cool and unflappable hero dispense justice and revenge – and turn it into an adrenaline-pumping first-hand sensation of action. Imagine the ante being upped with the prospective of going online to face off against a lopsided army of assailants in a multiplayer mode like Payne Killer, and you’ll have a pretty good sense of how we’re aiming to take inspiration from these sorts of classic shootouts and faceoffs into an epic videogame experience.

Without further ado, enjoy this chronology of some of our favorite scenes and trailers from classics and guilty pleasures alike…

Paul Muni in “Scarface” (1932)

Over 50 years before De Palma’s landmark remake, Howard Hawks pushed the envelope in this original Pre-Code era crime classic of the early 1930s. If you’ve only ever seen the remake, we highly recommend you look up the original which tracks very closely story-wise – including the finale where immigrant gangster Tony Camonte and his beloved sister are sieged upon in a bloody and bullet-laden life-or-death standoff. 

James Cagney in “White Heat” (1949)

"Top of the world, ma!" One-man-army standoffs in the movies don’t get much more iconic than Jimmy Cagney’s Cody Jarrett defiantly shooting it out til the bitter, raging, and literally explosive end against an entire police force.

Victor Mature & Lee Marvin in "Violent Saturday" (1955)

A great, tense technicolor Noir starring Victor Mature and Richard Egan as small-town folks that get caught in the middle of a vicious bank robbery perpetrated by a scheming crew of hoods. It all leads to a climactic showdown at a local farm just outside of town, with Mature holed up in a barn fending off the crooks with help from Amish farmer Ernest Borgnine.

Franco Nero in "Django" (1966)

Long before it became fashionable in the 1980s for lone movie heroes to indiscriminately rain down a bulletstorm on legions of baddies, and several years before Sam Peckinpah would disturb the traditional order of the Western genre with his ultraviolent "The Wild Bunch", this spaghetti Western starring Franco Nero as an Eastwood-esque gunslinger set the stage. Not to be confused with the recent Japanese rendition or the upcoming Tarantino homage. 

Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry in "The Enforcer" (1976)

The morally complicated, snarling archetype of no-nonsense trigger-happy detective as iconically portrayed by Clint Eastwood (a role originally offered to both Frank Sinatra and John Wayne). Hardly a practioner of prudence and mercy, Dirty Harry employs a machiavellian approach to policework and the satisfaction he seems to get out of blasting a crook with Mr. Smith and Mr. Wesson is palpable.

The legendary Sam Peckinpah takes on the art of the war film with the same brutally visceral approach he pioneered with "The Wild Bunch". While stark depictions of the violent savagery of war have been an appropriate tradition of war films from "All Quiet on the Western Front" through "Saving Private Ryan" and beyond - this one was surely a turning point for the genre.

Originating as a slightly more subdued thriller and bit of social commentary adapted from Brian Garfield’s 1972 novel about a liberal NYC accountant who turns into a merciless vigilante after a violent attack on his family – the series went full-on Rambo by the mid-80s with Bronson taking on an entire neighborhood of caricaturish thugs straight out of a Police Academy movie. Check out the multiplayer videogame-esque scene from Part III above.

Bruce Willis in “Die Hard” (1988) and “Die Hard 2” (1990)

The 1980s brought us a barrage of brawny, heavily-armed action heroes gunning down foreign villains with steel-jawed seriousness – from Stallone’s Rambo, to Schwarzenegger’s "Commando", to Chuck Norris’ busy 80s filmography (special acknowledgment as well of course to Jack Howitzer). And while Arnold had been known to crack wise on occassion, it was Bruce Willis’ John McClaine that turned the action hero from a humorless self-righteous killing machine into a much more relatable, and likeable witty character – leading to a new trend and trope of jokesters in the throes of gun battle. The sequel featured the franchise’s most epic gun battle seen above.

John Woo’s “Hard Boiled” (1992)

We previously had featured "The Killer", as an exemplary reference point of the Hong Kong action film vibe that’s inspired the Max Payne franchise since the beginning. We’d be remiss not to include this one as well in our lineup – neck-and-neck with "The Killer" as the best of the John Woo / Chow Yun Fat collaborations. Tense and very stylized – the scene above is a standout as a long take of Yun Fat and Tony Leung Chiu-Wai shooting their way through a hospital.

Tom Berenger in "Sniper" (1993)

Taking cues from the lone warrior soldier craze of the 1980s and a tagline lifted from Christopher Walken’s "one shot" motto in "The Deer Hunter", this one refines the Rambo mold to be a sniper expert – dispatched on a mission duelling against enemy forces and rival sharpshooters in the jungles of South America. Some classic Don LaFontaine voiceover work in this 1990s trailer.

Pacino, DeNiro, Kilmer etc in “Heat” (1995)

Perennially atop many lists of all-time great shootout scenes, this 10-minute, unrelenting sequence of Kilmer, DeNiro and their gang facing off against Pacino and his police force at the scene of a bank heist is indisputably one of the best. Above is a pretty neat behind-the-scenes feature looking into how the scene was made – watch the original sequence here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZL9fnVtz_lc].

Steven Spielberg’s “Saving Private Ryan” (1998)

The last great American war film. A standard-bearer in the footsteps of "Platoon" and "Full Metal Jacket" a decade earlier – this one shocked audiences’ and critics’ sensibilities with its unrelenting, and honest, depictions of the horrors of war. With scenes like the jarring sniper sequence above, it featured a level of violence very against type for Best-Director-winning Spielberg, and helped to spark a resurgent trend of war epics through the early 2000s ("Black Hawk Down", "Pearl Harbor", etc).

Finally, at the dawn of the millennium came this blockbuster action shooter with a surreal, sci-fi slant. The stylized shootout in the lobby with its balletic slow-motion, impossible physicality, and innovative technical camerawork took the cues of Hong Kong action cinema to a entirely new level.

Rockstar Games News Wire

As promised, today we present part 2 of this week’s Asked & Answered session, with even more of your questions taken from the Newswire comments, Twitter replies, Facebook messages and emails to our Mouthoff inquiry inbox… If you missed it earlier, you can find a link to our previous official responses to questions about Max Payne 3, Grand Theft Auto V and more right here.

“I’ve waited nearly 10 years for this. Will Max Payne 3 feature any driving this time around? I know you guys avoided it so it doesn’t seem like a version of a Grand Theft Auto game but since Max is 10 years in and established as its own, will you add that in?” – Dymez510
“Max is there more in-depth hand-to-hand combat with interaction of environment?” - zell92i75

As we’ve stated in the past, we’re working very hard to ensure that we’re being faithful and true to the heritage of Max Payne – and the heart and soul of Max Payne gameplay has always been as a pure shooter. Apart from some pretty cool melee kills that can be triggered when in close quarters with an enemy (check out the very end of the latest Design and Technology video for an exemplary pistol-whipping), we have no intention of betraying that to introduce driving/racing or brawling elements. Just get ready for some of the most cutting-edge, advanced and insane shooting gameplay you’ve ever experienced. If you want driving, we do make some other games. This game is all about story driven gun play.

“With the trend of video games becoming ‘easier’ to complete to cater to the casual market in the hope of everybody completing the game, can we expect a challenging hardcore Max Payne game? I remember from previous Max Payne games, there being tough levels with intense shoot-outs. Can we expect the same with MP3?” - ILikeVideo-Games

Yes – while we’re not going to go into too much detail about the specifics of it just yet, we can answer that there will indeed be varying optional difficulty levels for players to play through the single-player story with – so that the game can be a challenging, satisfying and fun experience for players of all skill levels, and special rewards for completing on harder difficulty levels – we will have more details soon.

“Thanks for answering my Max Payne 3 question! Ok… I know I’m making a stupid request but… somehow, in Max Payne 3, could you please put some producers and writers commentaries? I wanna know everything you got inspired with, how you did it and why you did it. Some fans would appreciate this idea too!” - received via Mouthoff

Not a stupid request at all! Although we most likely won’t be including development chronicles or commentaries within the game itself, if for no other reason than we rarely have much spare room on our game discs, we’d definitely recommend you pay close attention to some of the content online that will continue to hit in the lead-up to game release – including our behind-the-scenes Research posts and Rockstar Recommends series here at the Rockstar Newswire, the continuing Design and Technology Series of videos, and exclusive interviews we’re giving with gaming sites discussing the development of Max Payne 3.

“@rockstargames Wow, I have a lot of questions. Are you going to be divulging the full list of classic characters for Max Payne 3′s Special Edition?” - DrDeanDarko (via Twitter)

Yes, we will be confirming the full list of characters in Max Payne 3 Special Edition’s Classic Character Multiplayer Pack soon.

“R* are you planning to make DLCs for mp3 in the future ?
I’m looking forward to this game, because Max Payne 1 and 2 are one of the greatest games and game experiences for me this game will be awesome !!!!! ” – Maxx-Paiin

Thank you. It’s great to see hardcore Max Payne fans such as yourself getting excited for the game’s release – as we’ve said before, we’re working very hard to ensure a faithful but still fresh and new Max Payne title for you all. As for future looking downloadable content, it’s a bit early yet for us to confirm exactly what shape Max Payne 3 DLC might take as we’re still in the planning stages for that, but yes we do plan to support Max Payne 3 with content post-release to properly extend the game experience for fans.

“Okay, question time!
Will we see the nifty TV shows from the previous two in Max Payne 3?” - ABoyandHisX

Very possibly…

“In footage of the game, we see Max in both São Paulo and back in New York City. Are the New York city parts solely at the beginning of the game, or are they perhaps a part of flashback missions throughout the story?” - received via Mouthoff

We don’t want to give too much away about the game’s narrative structure, but the game is about Max coming to terms with his experience in São Paulo and the events that took him there, so they are spread throughout the game, like memories triggered by events in São Paulo.

“Any news about Max Payne on iOS?” – avbros

Yes – following the release of Grand Theft Auto III for iOS (and Android devices) late last year, the original Max Payne will be our next release for mobile devices. We will have an official announcement soon confirming the release date, but you can expect it to finally be released sometime in the next couple months.

“Rockstar, if I may ask, what is the relationship like between you and Remedy?” – received via Mouthoff

Remedy are great long-time friends of ours – they may be an external development studio not part of the internal Rockstar system, but we’ve always loved what they create, and their passion for games, and feel a certain kinship in that they are a studio not afraid of creating original and unique story-driven game experiences very different from the norm. We admire and respect all game makers who stick to their guns and make interesting and original games, and in particular ones like Remedy that we’ve had the pleasure to work with ourselves and know to be good guys as well. As creators of the Max Payne series, we’ve been honored to have them directly involved with us in the making of Max Payne 3 and at the same time, it’s been a thrill to be in the loop along the way seeing what they’re up to with Alan Wake and the new American Nightmare release coming out. If you’ve never checked that game out, we definitely recommend having a look.

“Are there any hopes of us getting a Bully 2? I loved the original and it’s been, what, 5 years? Please make another one.” – siim2200
“Hey, and Bully 2? It’s Real? Please make Bully 2! The world needs a Bully 2” - Julio Cësar (via Facebook)

We absolutely love that over 5 years later, we’re still seeing so much enthusiasm for Bully – all we can say is to see the answer from Monday’s Asked & Answered about L.A. Noire! We really love Bully ourselves and may also make a sequel at some point.

Rockstar Games News Wire

A new title update is available for the PC version of L.A. Noire: The Complete Edition, including the addition of support for DirectX 11. See below for a list of changes:

• DirectX 11 support added for improved performance on many Windows Vista and Windows 7 setups using DX11 graphics cards
• Option added to game launcher allowing switching between DirectX 9 and 11 renderers
• Additional checks added that make sure a selected video resolution is fully compatible with L.A. Noire

If you have any technical issues with the game, head right over to the L.A. Noire PC Technical Support page. If you don’t see your problem listed, submit a request to our Support team via http://support.rockstargames.com, and they’ll gladly help out.

Rockstar Games News Wire

By popular fan demand, we have set aside fifty Max Payne 3 Preview Booklets exclusively for members of the Rockstar Games Social Club to win. Recently this printed booklet has shown up on Ebay as a hard-to-find collector’s item sought after by Max Payne fans and collectors. With Social Club members from the US to the UK and beyond (special acknowledgements to Fjordson, NYPDMAXPAYNE, and ILikeVideo-Games) trying to hustle one up, we’ve found 50 of them that we’ve set aside for a special giveaway for fans.

The Max Payne 3 preview booklet was created to inform fans and retailers about the highly-anticipated return of Max Payne and features fourteen cover stock quality pages that are loaded with original full color artwork and in-game screens, along with technical highlights, story notes, and more.

Visit the contest page at the Social Club to enter for the chance to score one and for Official Rules and details – you’ve only got until Friday, February 24th, 2012 to enter. The prize winners will be chosen at random and announced sometime in early March.

Don’t have a Social Club account? Signing up is easy and free, and you’ll get access to exclusive unlockable game content, multiplayer events, stat tracking, progress checklists and much, much more.

NO PURCHASE NECESSARY. Void in certain countries and where prohibited. Must be 17 year or older in the US and Canada, and 18 years or older elsewhere. Ends Friday, February 24th, 2012. See Official Rules and Privacy Policy for eligibility details.
 

Rockstar Games News Wire

The explosive, brand new official trailer for Max Payne 3 is here – revealing more of the game’s story, beginning with the kidnapping of Rodrigo Branco’s beautiful young wife, Fabiana, while under Max’s protection. Max fights to uncover the truth and return her to safety amidst a treacherous web of lawless street gangs, ruthless paramilitary units – and his own personal demons. Watch the new trailer now in high-definition here at the Rockstar site Videos section and at the Max Payne 3 official website.

Max Payne 3 arrives for Xbox 360 and PlayStation3 on May 15, 2012 in North America and May 18, 2012 in Europe, with the PC version launching on May 29th, 2012 in North America and June 1st, 2012 in Europe.

For lots more including videos, screenshots, features on weaponry, gangs, and much more – check out http://www.rockstargames.com/maxpayne3.

Rockstar Games News Wire

Max Payne 3 Official Trailer #2 is coming. Tomorrow February 16th at noon Eastern. 

Look for it to debut at the Rockstar site Videos section and the Max Payne 3 official site.

More Max Payne 3 Videos:
First Trailer
Design and Technology Series #2: Targeting and Weapons
Design and Technology Series #1: Creating a Cutting Edge Action-Shooter

Rockstar Games News Wire

Niko Bellic (Grand Theft Auto IV)
From Eastern Europe with Love… Even though he puts most of his effort in trying to win over Kate, the maiden of the McReary clan, that doesn’t stop Mr. Bellic from trolling the internet for tail.

Jimmy Hopkins (Bully)
Now if he had spent as much time hitting the books…
At Bullworth Academy, Jimmy Hopkins certainly played the field. A serial flirt who moves between cliques with the greatest of ease.

Carl Johnson (Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas)
Before the ladies were blowing up Niko’s Badger in GTAIV, there was another preeminent GTA ladies man – Carl "CJ" Johnson from San Andreas.

John Marston (Red Dead Redemption)
Up there as an all-time heartthrob, the ladies definitely seem to love cool John Marston. A rugged reformed outlaw and a truly loyal husband, during his epic quest, Marston is driven by a love for his family, and avoids the many temptations of the frontier. And when Abigail is turned into a flesh-eating zombie in Undead Nightmare, he does what any gentleman would – he ties her up and goes searching for the cure…

Fernando Martinez (Grand Theft Auto Series)
The Romeo of the radio dial, Fernando Martinez got his start as a roving reporter during the heyday of Vice City’s beloved power ballad station, Emotion 98.3 and has been a paragon of relationship advice for decades since.

Max Payne (Max Payne Series)
Last but not least, lest we forget the softer side of Max Payne – hardboiled as he may be, he was not immune to the charms of Mona Sax in the series’ sequel Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne, dubbed "a film noir love story". Alas, quite lucky with a dual-weld automatic pistol – tragically unlucky in love.

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Rockstar Games News Wire