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"Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne" (Rockstar)

Jeff: I love Max Payne.

Tom: He of the stiff leather trench coat and Raymond Chandler-esque delivery.

Jeff: It's hilariously bad writing, but it's brilliant: "They were all dead. Love kills. Did I love her? Was there a choice? The past is a gaping hole."

Tom: Max Payne is your basic renegade cop with a slaughtered family, a price on his head, and an alarming painkiller-addiction problem.

Jeff: That was the best thing about Max Payne. The way you got your health back was by finding painkillers. This made scenes of Max rummaging through criminals' medicine cabinets especially poignant.

Tom: I actually attributed all of the first Max Payne to an extended, painkiller-induced hallucination. I don't even believe he's a cop. He's just some mook from Great Neck.

Jeff: As I keep saying, the cut-scenes of these highly narrative-based games always have problems. The voice acting may be excellent, but they're often clumsily animated and way, way too elaborate. Witness "The Getaway." The creators of Max Payne have stepped around all this by making its intersticial sequences comic-book-panel-style art. Max, I am here to say, has a lot of style.

Tom: And this new "bullet-cam" gives it more head shots than a 17-year-old model.

Jeff: And, weirdly enough, dream sequences. Do you remember the nightmare from the first game where you had to follow a bloody trail to the scene of your family's murder while your baby frantically screamed?

Tom: You had to talk me through that one, if I recall. The thing to point out is that Max Payne is so thoroughly grounded in story -- even if it is an irreversibly dorky story -- that its violence feels a lot less objectionable than that of, say, "True Crime."

Jeff: I just love Max Payne. He's not just a rogue cop like Nick Kang. He's a massively tormented man plausibly dealing with real problems.

Tom: Plausibly?

Jeff: Don't try to understand Max Payne. You'll only embarrass yourself. Now, Part 2 is similar to the first game: creepy, interactive environments; tons of fun gunplay and excellent slo-mo; a clean, uncluttered screen; and a well-paced plot.

Tom: This game, which does look and play terrifically well, is called "The Fall of Max Payne." Let's see, the first game ended with Max's family dead, his career in ruins, his painkiller addiction ruinously untreated, and his tendency to throw Molotov cocktails at unarmed junkies unchecked. How much further can this guy fall?

Jeff: I'm playing until I find out.

"NBA Live 2004" (Electronic Arts)

Tom: Best sports video-game commentary I've ever heard -- and I've had a lot of well-known sports commentators judge my video-game performance.

Jeff: You really can't improve on Marv Albert and Mike Fratello. They've set the standard here, constantly leavening the action with trivia. If you want to know where Steve Nash grew up in Canada, or by how much Mike Bibby's three-point shooting has improved since 2002 -- and who doesn't? -- "NBA Live 2004" is your game.

Tom: Great, sneaky little bonuses here. For instance, old uniforms, like the Mavs' classic green jerseys from the late 1980s or Washington's pre-Wizards Bullets jerseys, and an all-star team from the 1950s. Bob Cousy, for two!

Jeff: The shot-block sound effect is something E.A. has been trying to get right for several generations now. It's gone from a thud to an explosion to hardly any sound at all. But listen to that thock as I stuff you. Perfect, beautiful and utterly humiliating.

Tom: The free-throw interface is much improved, play calling is better, there's a lot more controllable, off-the-ball movement, you can knock away lazy passes, and you don't have to squint as hard to make it look like an actual NBA basketball game.

Jeff: I would feel remiss and dishonest if we didn't mention another little game here, called "Street Ball," which may be my favorite sports game of all time.

Tom: Alas, we should. And this is no "Street Ball," which is also an E.A. game.

Jeff: It's really hard to get excited about these expert renderings of hoop realism when, in "Street Ball," you can go off the forehead of Dominique Wilkins, cross over, jump, bounce a pass off the backboard to street legend Stretch Monroe, and watch him do a Honey Dip dunk.

Tom: "Street Ball" has basically devastated my ability to enjoy this game. Once you've gone off the heezay of Isaiah Thomas and dunked on James Worthy, you can never go back.

Jeff: Yes indeed. Strangely, having the actual abilities of Stephon Marbury and Rick Fox pales.

Tom: And it's a little sad, because I can see a lot of love and effort went into this.

Jeff: In the ongoing battle between video-game realism and cartoonish fun, realism is once again routed.

Manhunt (Rockstar)

Jeff: I've just played the first board of "Manhunt." I feel about how I did when I walked out of Harmony Korine's film "Gummo."

Tom: From the makers of "Grand Theft Auto" comes what is quite possibly the biggest fuck-you to the protective parents and concerned educators of America ever. Here's what the intro screen says: "To best experience Manhunt you should ... Turn off the lights ... Close the drapes ... Lock the door ... Then get ready to kill!" I'll say this: "Manhunt," at the absolute least, is honest.

Jeff: Delightfully, the difficulty levels are called "Fetish" and "Hardcore." Let me give everyone a little Manhunt gameplay clue: Pick up a shard of glass, a sickle, a plastic bag, or any number of blunt and/or hideous instruments, find some shadows, hide in them, wait for someone to happen by, and press the X button.

Tom: Whereupon, if you're really lucky, you'll see an execution cut-scene.

Jeff: Which as often as not will involve the game's "camera" being sprayed with arterial blood.

Tom: All of it somehow narrated by the great actor Brian Cox, who is, unsurprisingly, the best thing about this game.

Jeff: Would I feel better about "Manhunt" if its hero were not a convicted murderer? If its milieu were not the undiscovered country of the snuff film? If the slickness of presentation were not equaled only by the pointlessness of its provocation? It manages to be both shocking and boring. It's the video-game equivalent of a Bret Easton Ellis novel.

Tom: As the old critic said, there is much in "Manhunt" that is good and new, but the stuff that's good is not new and the stuff that's new is not good. And I finally fear that playing too much "Manhunt" could well cost someone his or her eternal soul.

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