#and it's too bad there was less graphic novel stuff in it. this boring cutscene could have been a comic page!

[theskoomacat]

I wrote "i'm not obsessed with anything atm" in that ask game and then lost myself completely in Remedy content not even a day later. clown behavior

Anyway Max Manpaynes 1 and 2 were ok, ppl say 3 was also okay but it's too far from other Remedy stuff so i'm not dissecting it. So here's the easter eggs from MP1 and 2 for people who haven't played them (reverse easter eggs rather because the stuff they were referencing did not not exist yet. what's first, an easter egg or an easter chicken?)

(at this point i realized that i've lost all my screencaps to a power outage. aye killing meself.)

The biggest most obvious thing were the TV shows. I guess the one thing you can trust Remedy to do is to put a fictional TV show in their game. Address Unknown was a wild ride. In MP1 the show is an obvious reference to Twin Peaks, it features the main character, a mental hospital patient, witnessing his double conversing with a backwards-speaking pink flamingo in a place with red drapes.

In MP2 this story evolves: we learn that the main character is tormented by his evil serial killer double, John Mirra, who frames mc for his murders. (hmmm sounds familiar)

(The fact that Sam does "acting" for all the series is the icing on the cake. draw Scratch like this challenge)

He is forced to look for Mirra, following the trail of his murder scenes into an alternate Noir York City, because Mirra has kidnapped his gf. He gets put into that mental institution from MP1's episode and is forced to kill his doctor self-defense and flee. He laments that through killing he has become John Mirra himself - maybe he has been Mirra the entire time. The series ends with him receiving a phone call from himself. (Naturally, the entire series is heavily focused on the concept of mirrors, including citing a poem by the poet Pool on the same topic).

Watching all this made it all click for me because I have seen but have not processed a snippet of an interview with Sam Lake where he said that he enjoyed Twin Peaks season 3: The Return (hello??) that also featured an evil double plot and the mc returning from another dimension after many years. The only thing that is different is that afai remember, evil Cooper was not Cooper himself - unlike how it happens in Address Unknown and Alan Wake 2. So it's extremely fun to see that after 20 years Sam has managed to turn these doodles on the margins into an entire AAA game, love it for him.

Another pretty fun meta moment when Max get heavily drugged:

(There is another note that tells him that he is a computer game character, to his dismay, but I like it less.) I know it was just a typical 4th wall-breaking joke back then but in the context of AW this becomes way cooler.

Other minor stuff that made me go leo_dicaprio_pointing.png:

665 and 667, the neighbors of the beast, are used as codes in both games.

one of the characters seemingly gets shot in the head in the first game, and in MP2 this conversation happens: "I saw you take a bullet to the head." "Maybe it's still there. Keeps me focused." - kind of taking a note of this for AW3.

MP1 constantly references the American Dream, the first part is called that as well - in contrast with the American Nightmare.

The whole thing with "Odin" - no real connection with AW but just fun to see Remedy putting heavy scandinavian mythology symbolism in the game unprompted.

man i can't remember more without the screencaps, this is so tragic. Nightingale was mentioned but iirc with no hidden meaning. here you go.

Anyway, I hope I have at least managed to enlighten the people who haven't heard of Address Unknown because in the context of AW2 this stuff is bonkers