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A nice new preview/interview posted at GameSpot talks with Petri Järvilehhto and Sam Lake of 3D Realms about their upcoming 3rd person shooter Max Payne. Already in development for nearly four years, the game contains an impressive list of features like photorealistic textures, deformable terrain, volumetric particle system, intelligent AI, and a little idea called 'Bullet Time.' The interview goes into all of these and more when talking about Max Payne. Bullet Time is a mode which basically let you slow down the action (ala Matrix) to get out of a sticky situation. If you saw the recent movie trailer for the game, you understand how that looks. You will actually be able to 'earn' Bullet Time, so you'll have to make use of it wisely.

The enviroments will also have some destructability by larger weapons, and you should be able to interact with many of the items on the screen as well. The team is also trying the impressive feat of variable skill levels. Read the clip for more:

Throughout the game the environments are filled with things you can interact use, things you can break. The game has fully self-adjusting skill levels. There's no longer anything like Easy, Medium or Hard to start with. You start the game, and we're constantly monitoring what the player is doing in the game. If you're a hardcore Quake gamer, you're doing really well, then we're cranking up the skill levels, giving you a more challenging gameplay experience than if you're playing shooters for the first time in your life. And we're trying to make sure that the player is constantly having fun and a challenge, but not too much of a challenge. Once you have completed the game, we're unlocking further modes of gameplay. We're unlocking skill levels, we're unlocking the timed mode, which we're calling "New York Minute". In this mode you have an arcade style timer counting down, there's something like sixty seconds to finish each map. If the timer gets to zero, you're dead. Every enemy you take out gives you fifteen seconds more time. So It's sort of like a Time Crisis variation. And we're shipping the tools with the game, so people can modify the content, do whatever they want to. And lots of other things.

Max Payne Preview/Interview at GameSpot

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