Métaphore /20

On pourrait parler longtemps des apports de Max Payne 1 aux TPS en général ou des raisons qui font qu'un shooter aussi vieux est encore parfaitement jouable en 2025, comme il l'était à sa sortie. On va se contenter de dire que voir Sam Lake jouer avec les codes du noir c'est juste cool, et lister les meilleures punch' sépulcralement débitées par James McAffrey.

- A house across the river, on the Jersey-side. A beautiful wife and a baby girl. The American dream come true. But dreams have a nasty habit of going bad when you're not looking.

- I didn't like the way the show started. But they had given me the best seat in the house. Front row center.

- Outside, the mercury was falling fast. It was colder than the Devil's heart, raining ice pitchforks as if the Heavens were ready to fall. Everyone was running for shelter like there was no tomorrow. It didn't get any better when I got to the subway. The feeling hit me like a point-blank shot straight in the face.

- Collecting evidence had gotten old a few hundred bullets back. I was already so far past the point-of-no-return I couldn't remember what it had looked like when I had passed it.

- There was an old telephone switchboard in the back room of the reception area. The kind that made phone tapping child's play. It wasn't hard to picture a fat pimp sweating with headphones on, listening to his hookers talk dirty and fake orgasms over the web of party lines; the blood veins of New York. Right now, there was a different set of moans and groans going on...

- The headlines were screaming bloody murder. The storm was a screaming duet with the approaching prowl car sirens. It was all a scream when you were down for the count and wanted for murder.

-The cops arrrived, sirens singing in the off-key harmony of a manic-depressive choir. I had a few minutes while the SWAT team would go through their usual routine. By the time they had busted in, I needed to be long gone.

-Vinnie Cognitti was running scared. He could run, but with a bullet in his stomach like a broken bottle of Tobasco, he was quickly running out of time. He knew where his boss was, and I wanted to square things up with Jack Lupino. Cognitti would be moving fast. I don't know about angels, but it's fear that gives men wings.

- This was my second train ride of the night. The way it started didn't promise anything better than the last one. Freezing wind tearing at my face like sandpaper and razors. Icehard and slick under my hands and feet... And somewhere in the background the wail of sirens, the city howling after me.

- Cognitti ran out of steam in a dead end alley with steam boiling out of the sewer grates like all the fires of Hell were burning high beneath us. It was shakedown time.

- There was no glory in this. I hadn't asked for this crap. Trouble had come to me in big dark swarms. The good and the just were like gold dust in the city. I had no illusions, I was not one of them... I was no hero. Just me and the gun, and the crook. My options had decreased to a singular course.

- Ragna Rock was as inviting as a headache, flickering and flashing to a machine gun beat. The belly of the nightclub was a gothic theme park that began with bondage games and led to the nasty stuff from there... As subtle with it's dark message as a cop killer bullet through the heart. Like father, like son. Just like Jack Lupino.

- The backstage area led to Lapino's inner sanctum. The hot air inside was like an invisible wall, thick with incense and something else. A sickly-sweet smell that made you gag. This was the rotten core of the Big Apple. Lupino lurked somewhere ahead, like a spider at the center of his web, waiting. The vapors in the air started to make my head swim.

- I woke up in a bad dream. My head felt two sizes too small for my brain. There were enough corpses to put a mass murderer to shame.

- Vladimir was one of those old-time bad guys with honor and morals, which made him almost one of the good guys. None of us was a Saint. The Brooklyn riverfront was a maze of rusty containers, sharp-boned cranes looming up from the snow storm. On a night like this you couldn't help but to think of the dark army of dead men sleeping with the fishes, cement shoes in line. No minotaur lurked in this labyrinth. but somewhere out there, on the clanking deck of his Cargo Freighter, the Skipper of the Charon was waiting, like the ferryman of the river Styx.

- Pissing Punchinello off was a dangerous game, but when people get mad, they make mistakes. I should know. That's where I wanted Punchinello, mad enough to trip over his own feet, preferably into a grave.

- Punchinello's restaurant had seen better days. Snow was falling like ashes from post-apocalyptic skies, but that was outside. Things would soon get hot in the Don's restaurant. I knew it was a long shot, Angelo Punchinello actually showing up, but there was no crime in hoping.

- Punchinello was burning to get me. The feeling was mutual. He was trying to put out my flames with gasoline.

- The word on Lisa Punchinello was that she was a bit of a witch... The Tarot cards on the kitchen table fit the picture. They weren't my kind of cards, but I was willing to take a crack at the hand Mrs. Punchinello had dealt. The first card was the Tower. Maybe that was supposed to be the Manor. It got easy after that. The Devil was the master of the house, and death was me, coming for him.

- You'd find that Lady Luck was really a Hooker, and you were fresh out of cash.

- Out in the night, snow fell like confetti over the Devil's parade. The storm was anything but over.

- How to turn off that small voice inside your head that started to whipser that you should be glad... that now, if not before, your revenge was justifiable on any conceivable moral scale. That small voice proved, beyond any doubt, that I was damned.

- Mine wasn't the most original approach to the problem. It wasn't as if it hadn't been all done before. An eye for an eye, the first principal of revenge. Old as dirt, still going strong. The cardinal rule in going after someone with an intention to kill was not to make it personal... Which it almost always ended up being anyway. It did with me. I took my time, cruising around the city in the snow. There was no hurry, I knew what I had to do now. I took my time, thinking about it, building up the rage.

- A gunshot boomed and she fell down in slow-motion. She was a nice girl, not really a stone-cold killer, and now she was stone-cold dead.

- Valkyr had been meant to be a white-winged maiden that would lift you to a warrior's heaven. But it had turned out to be a one-way demon ride to Hell.

- They were all dead. The final gunshot was an exclamation mark to everything that had led up to this point. I released my finger from the trigger. And then it was all over. The storm seemed to lose it's frenzy. The ragged clouds gave way to the stars above.

- My ghosts released me from their haunting. Down below, New York City glittered like diamonds on black velvet.

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