Max Payne vs Harry Du Bois

Welcome to season one of Character Select. How many seasons will there be? Shut up, you don't even know the rules yet. 

Character Select is that thing you do with your mates when you sit around the TV watching a bad movie and one of you has a sudden attack of stonerbrain and asks: "Who would win: The Hulk or The Meg?" Except we're doing it for PC game characters and our match-ups will be funnier. 

On top of pitting two videogame characters against one another in an unspecified yet likely violent form of competition, we'll also tell you what arena they'll face one another in. It is up to you, the filthy commenters, hollering from the stands of this trashy coliseum of popular culture, to decide the winner of each conflict. 

I have a small stack of these face-offs prepared and ready to publish every week. I'll be honest, I invented this brawling column as a quick and dirty means of covering my article quota while I am away changing nappies on paternity leave. But don't think about that. The point is: many characters you know and love will die. It's now, or it is never now. Select your character!

This week, a desperate battle between two chemically dependent cops. It's... Max Payne versus Harry from Disco Elysium. The hard-drinking cop with mental health troubles is not a small community in wider pop culture, but in videogames these are the two clear frontrunners. There is a time and a place for a thoughtful comparative analysis between these two difficult men, their traumas, and their respective coping mechanisms. But this is not it. Today, they fight. Only one comes out alive.

The case for Harry Du Bois

He does not know where his gun is, or his badge, or his patrol car, but he gets the job done. I mean, yes, there are all those times he does not get the job done, but he has his reasons. All 24 reasons, shouting for attention inside his head. What the disco dancing detective lacks in firepower he may make up for in messy luck, psychogeographical insight, or an inexplicable connection to the uncanny. He might also just roll a natural 20.

The case for Max Payne

Max has the ability to slow time and also many many Uzis. It is unfeasible that he ever arrives at a fight, or even a nice dinner, without at least five firearms strapped to various parts of his body. Depending on the time of his life we encounter Max, he may be a skinny broken cop with nothing to lose, or a beefy bald bruiser with, uh, nothing to lose. He has one inner voice and it only speaks in Chandlerisms.

The arena

A pharmacy.

Select your character!

All right, this is where you readers can go ham. Who'd win? Comment with your reasoning and we'll announce the winners at the close of the season. Jank reserves the right to pick a winner based on sheer numbers of supporters, or to blithely decide the victor based on a single eloquent expression of head canon. Don't get carried away, I ain't reading any more than a paragraph from each of you. I have diapers to change here!