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1. Anatoly Shashkin💾 (dosnostalgic@mastodon.social@mastodon.social)'s status on Wednesday, 14-Feb-2024 18:07:11 UTC Anatoly Shashkin💾

   Last year someone finally (after 22 years!) made a patch to disable the broken adaptive scaling algorithm from Max Payne's starting difficulty setting. Playing the game with it is like playing it for the first time. Final levels are no longer an exercise in patience and savescumming. I recommend it highly.
   https://www.moddb.com/games/max-payne/downloads/mpadaptivedifficultyremover

   • Anatoly Shashkin💾 (dosnostalgic@mastodon.social@mastodon.social)'s status on Wednesday, 14-Feb-2024 18:08:56 UTC Anatoly Shashkin💾

     in reply to

     For those who don't know:
     Max Payne's initial difficulty has 7 different levels that affect enemy & your damage factor, hit points, pickups, etc. You start in the middle (level 4), & if you're doing good the game ups the level. If you die quickly, it drops it. BUT in order for it to determine you died the entire slow mo death animation has to play out. That never happens. So by the mid point one ends up with difficulty higher than the highest manually selectable one. That can be really annoying.

   • Anatoly Shashkin💾 (dosnostalgic@mastodon.social@mastodon.social)'s status on Wednesday, 14-Feb-2024 18:17:04 UTC Anatoly Shashkin💾

     in reply to

     It's somewhat okay now when it takes a second to quickload, but I *really* could have used this patch back in the early 2000s when Max Payne took actual minutes to load on my Cyrix machine. 😭

   • Jari Komppa 🇫🇮 (sol_hsa@mastodon.online)'s status on Wednesday, 14-Feb-2024 19:34:36 UTC Jari Komppa 🇫🇮

     in reply to

     @dosnostalgic but.. you're not supposed to save scum, you're supposed to die a lot. =)

   • Anatoly Shashkin💾 (dosnostalgic@mastodon.social@mastodon.social)'s status on Wednesday, 14-Feb-2024 19:34:36 UTC Anatoly Shashkin💾

     in reply to

     • Jari Komppa 🇫🇮

     @sol_hsa I die a lot inside on the daily basis, I don't need to add any more to that.

   • Anatoly Shashkin💾 (dosnostalgic@mastodon.social@mastodon.social)'s status on Wednesday, 14-Feb-2024 20:14:10 UTC Anatoly Shashkin💾

     in reply to

     • Jari Komppa 🇫🇮

     @sol_hsa It's broken because it gives you an option AND A PROMPT to reload *before* it counts your death towards the adjustment. That's why it's broken. Otherwise it wouldn't be an issue.

   • Jari Komppa 🇫🇮 (sol_hsa@mastodon.online)'s status on Wednesday, 14-Feb-2024 20:14:11 UTC Jari Komppa 🇫🇮

     in reply to

     @dosnostalgic I mean, I cheat a lot in games just to get through them, and as far as I recall I didn't need to in order to get through the game... I just gave the difficulty scaler enough data that I suck.

   • Jari Komppa 🇫🇮 (sol_hsa@mastodon.online)'s status on Wednesday, 14-Feb-2024 20:14:11 UTC Jari Komppa 🇫🇮

     in reply to

     @dosnostalgic So why is it broken? Because you have basically two kinds of players:

     1) careful, not too good players, who save and load a lot
     2) Not-careful, possibly good players who don't save and load a lot.

     From the scalers point of view, group 1 never dies, so... they must be great! Up the difficulty! And group 2 dies every now and then (because, honestly, some rooms are total BS) so, drop the difficulty.

     Group 1 complains the game is too hard, group 2, too easy. Nobody's happy.

   • Anatoly Shashkin💾 (dosnostalgic@mastodon.social@mastodon.social)'s status on Wednesday, 14-Feb-2024 20:19:22 UTC Anatoly Shashkin💾

     in reply to

     • Jari Komppa 🇫🇮

     @sol_hsa So its intent is quite literally broken. Because in order to meet the condition for lowering the difficulty you have to die FIVE times within 180 seconds, and you have to watch the 10 second death animation *to the end* & not press any keys, despite the game prompting you, every single time. What human being would do that?

   • Anatoly Shashkin💾 (dosnostalgic@mastodon.social@mastodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 15-Feb-2024 13:53:23 UTC Anatoly Shashkin💾

     in reply to

     • Jari Komppa 🇫🇮

     @sol_hsa When was the last time you played through the game? Or are you going on 20+ year old pleasant memory of it?

   • Jari Komppa 🇫🇮 (sol_hsa@mastodon.online)'s status on Thursday, 15-Feb-2024 13:53:24 UTC Jari Komppa 🇫🇮

     in reply to

     @dosnostalgic I apparently did ;)

   • Anatoly Shashkin💾 (dosnostalgic@mastodon.social@mastodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 15-Feb-2024 14:55:22 UTC Anatoly Shashkin💾

     in reply to

     • Jari Komppa 🇫🇮

     @sol_hsa And are you always playing on the first difficulty?

   • Jari Komppa 🇫🇮 (sol_hsa@mastodon.online)'s status on Thursday, 15-Feb-2024 14:55:23 UTC Jari Komppa 🇫🇮

     in reply to

     @dosnostalgic I've played max payne 1 through several times over the years; can't remember the last one though, maybe 5 years ago.