This is the aptly titled Max Payne, a new third-person shooter from Finnish studio Remedy and U.S. publisher GodGames. The story of one wronged cop’s revenge on the New York underworld, it’s been a hit since the moment it went on sale in early August. The PC game already has a movie adaptation in development, and near-universal acclaim from gamers.

In the last few years of its development cycle (it was in production as far back as 1996), it’s sort of been the evil twin to “Black & White,” Peter Molyneux’s long-promoted, oft-delayed game, which promised all kinds of innovation that would totally reinvent the standard of future games.

But where Black & White was always billed as a conceptually ambitious game that would play on themes of morality and the nature of religious belief, the promoters of Max Payne made no such airy claims. Their innovations were all about body-count coolness — Max Payne was a game that would not only replicate the two-gun heroics of John Woo’s classic Hong Kong films, but also the “bullet time” scenes from “The Matrix,” every bullet path articulated, every combatant slowed down into a three-dimensional action stance. No moral deliberation going on here. Just an excess of exit wounds and bullet casings; which, judging by the popularity of story-free, shoot-happy “twitch” titles like Quake III and Counterstrike, is the way just about every gamer wants it.

But that’s not exactly what they got.

“How to turn off that small voice inside your head,” Max muses in a voice-over late in the game, after finally unearthing the individual behind a horrific conspiracy and his own personal tragedies, “[which] started to whisper that you should be glad, that now, if not before, your revenge was justifiable on any conceivable moral scale?” He’s referring to himself, but he could just as well be addressing the player, who has spent all this time ventilating scores of henchmen with little remorse. “That small voice proved, beyond any doubt, that I was damned.”

The game delivers on the ultraviolence and slo-mo bullet time, to be sure — but even then, not satisfied to let the player wallow too much in this kill-fest, it pauses to comment on its own absurdity. Wracked by a night of demonic hallucinations, at one point, Max imagines that his murdered wife lets him in on the truth: “You’re in a computer game, Max.” And for a crazed moment, all his inexplicable actions up to then make sense to him: “[T]he endless repetition of the act of shooting, time slowing down to show off my moves. The paranoid feel of someone controlling my every step.”

Interwoven with a realistic, compelling story, a postmodernist’s sense of ironic wit and, even more startling, a strong moral tone, Max Payne is the kind of shooter that most gamers have been avoiding for years. Sure, other titles have infused the first- and third-person shooter with substance. The story-driven Half-Life was a critical and commercial success — while still anchored to the sci-fi, “Alien”-esque elements recycled by developers since Doom. Gameplay in the cerebral, award-winning Deus Ex is so open-ended, it doesn’t even qualify as a shooter (you can complete it without firing a single bullet), while the stylish, tongue-in-cheek No One Lives Forever was a critical favorite (although at retail, only a modest success). But if the initial sales deluge holds up, Max Payne may be the one that finally advances the genre, and our expectations for it — and in the process, it may be the game that finally forces the industry to grow up.

Admitting this doesn’t come easy for me either, as it turns out. Max Payne was one of the games I slagged a couple of years ago (it was then in development), in a post-Columbine essay on the gaming press’s oblivious fawning over gory exploitative shooters. My initial distaste was bolstered by the game’s provenance as a title from GodGames. The publisher was notorious for its failed releases, for its failed promises to transform the industry and above all for its annually embarrassing Promised Lot, which had little to do with promoting its games, but did end up becoming a perfect microcosm for new economy excess, in which socially inept techno-weenies bankrolled strippers and rock groups in a desperate attempt to effect coolness. For the longest time, the long-gestating Max Payne seemed part and parcel of all that, a dimwit shooter with little appeal to anyone outside the deathmatch-and-Cheetos subculture of hardcore gamers.

I was disabused of that assumption pretty much the moment Max Payne began: As related in flashback, the New York detective returns to his New Jersey suburban home to find his life eviscerated. Upstairs, rage-high drug addicts are slaughtering his wife and child. While Max tries to save them, he’s sobbing. This must be an industry first: While they’ve endured every variation of physical pain with scarcely a grunt, has there ever been another action protagonist struck with enough emotional trauma during gameplay to actually cry? I can’t recall any.