I thought I'd post again after completing some more of the games I mentioned. Here is the order I would put the games in, in terms of which is most enjoyable to play:

1- Max Payne 2
2- Prince of Persia
3- Mario Kart DD
4- Viewtiful Joe

Many might be suprised at my choice for Mario Kart. Well, considering how insane the computer player is in single player mode, the fun is sometimes missing from the game. I haven't, however, played it with friends yet, which is really the only reason I wanted it. But for single player, it isn't that great.

Max Payne 2 was just so much fun. For example: in MP2, I got to climb onto the ledge of an apartment building with the objective to land on the awning a story below, "shootdoge" (slow-motion dive while shooting) backward, falling a story while eliminating the gunmen on the ledge below before landing on the ground. Things like that made it a hell of a fun game, as did the ability to choose how hard the game was.

Like some people have said, I don't want to spend a lot of time playing video games, so playing the same level over and over is not my idea of fun, especially if the gameplay sucks. In MP2, I could have played through the game using the automatic quicksaves after every cutscene, or I could do what I did, which was save after every successful room clearing

Prince of Persia amazed me in two ways: how fun repetitive actions can be sometimes, and in the way that a lot of the game simply felt cheap in quality. By the first statement, I mean that you don't do a wide variety of things in the game, but what you do is really fun. I never once got tired of running along walls. However, you do fight enemies that can be difficult even with the ability to rewind time. Several times I would be killed, try to wind back time, and was only able to wind it back a second or two, to instant I was hit. Out of battle it's possible to rewind time 10 or 15 seconds. And here's one for people who've played the game: did you have difficulty with the "haste" spell? There were several instances where I desperately wanted to use it, but it simply wouldn't trigger. You would think an action like R+L would be easy to perform, but time after time I would try to trigger it, nothing would happen, and I'd get hit for my troubles. All my tanks were full, but I was unable to get it to work. So, despite that, I had a fun two days playing through the game, which is yet another game I haven't had to cheat my way through, so that made it fun.

Viewtiful Joe inspires me to get an Action Replay. Seriously, this game is unnecessarily hard. That isn't fun to me. I'll have twice as much fun cheating my way through it.

So, to reiterate, get Max Payne 2 now. It's seriously fun. I suppose Bitt is right, the story didn't seem tongue-in-cheek at all, except for funny stuff unrelated to the story, like "Lords and Ladies" and Baseball Bat Boy, but that didn't matter to me. I liked it. I will definitely check out the first game.