purely from a style standpoint this is, to me, one of the most incredible accomplishments I've ever seen a video game achieve. as far as the actual story and gameplay go? pretty much bog-standard early 2010s third-person shooter with a compelling and shocking, if fairly straightforward, plot. but the lengths the developers went to emulate a documentary shot on video? the constant teasing, fourth-wall breaking implication that there's an actual cameraman shooting from your perspective? all the tiny little minutiae of vhs details are stunning. the soundtrack for the game has to be experienced to be understood (highly recommend doubling the music volume, it was apparently reduced by the publisher later in development). playing through this with a friend, we probably spent a good hour just looking at all the tiny little details in each of the environments in between the shootouts. each setting has hundreds of models and tiny, superfluous details that you'd totally miss normally. so much that would have been passable, would have been completely overlooked without its own unique texture or model. it's a game that begs to be looked at through a microscope. all in all one of the most incredible atmospheric games I think I've ever played, even if the game itself tends a bit towards style rather than substance

"Nós compreendemos esta fome que o europeu e o brasileiro na maioria não entende. Para o europeu é um estranho surrealismo tropical. Para o brasileiro é uma vergonha nacional. Ele não come, mas tem vergonha de dizer isto; e, sobretudo, não sabe de onde vem esta fome. Sabemos nós – que fizemos estes filmes feios e tristes, estes filmes gritados e desesperados onde nem sempre a razão falou mais alto – que a fome não será curada pelos planejamentos de gabinete e que os remendos do tecnicolor não escondem mas agravam seus tumores. Assim, somente uma cultura da fome, minando suas próprias estruturas, pode superar-se qualitativamente: a mais nobre manifestação cultural da fome é a violência."
Glauber Rocha, Eztetyka da Fome

Sou Colonizado e Quero Continuar Sendo: O Jogo

Mundo aberto genérico da Rockstar/Ubisoft, ou seja, não dá nem pra chamar isso de GTA brasileiro

Lame humor, poor voice acting, and an embarrassingly constant reuse of the same assets make Sam & Max Save the World a disappointing continuation of one of the most impressive adventure games of its day. Playing this immediately after Sam & Max Hit the Road only makes the later game's weaknesses that much more pronounced. While the earlier game was hilarious, stylish, and found new ways of elevating the form, this is just a hacky retread with some of the laziest attempts at humor I've ever seen.

Rather than six episodes, this really feels more like six stitched together unfinished fan-made demos. The fact that there are only a handful of character models reused over and over only heightens the firmly established amateurish vibe, like someone put it together using some kind of cheap game making utility. The voice acting isn't all bad, but the line readings of both main characters mar an already weak script. The actors just don't have any feel for the characters beyond the extremely broad strokes, with a stultifying lack of energy (especially Sam) and a dearth of comic timing (especially Max). I'd be perhaps a bit more inclined to forgive it as a relic of mid-2000s low quality voice-acting if it weren't for the fact that Hit the Road's actors nailed it so awesomely a decade earlier. Sadly, that downgrade in voice acting goes hand-in-hand with a general depreciation in graphics, atmosphere, visual style, and ambition.

But ya know what? I don't hate it. As much as the game often annoyed me, there were still many bright spots scattered throughout all the episodes and constant glimmers of good ideas, like Max as president, that in more talented hands could have really shined. The puzzles were mostly not bad - generally not too challenging (especially given the pathetically tiny size of the game world), but usually still fairly satisfying to solve. Some of the characters were even quite good, such as the game's final villain, who is one of the most unique and amusing bad guys I've seen in ages. So yeah, this game has a few things going for it. But goddammit, it could have been so much better.

Rough ranking:
Episode 6: B-
Episode 5: C+
Episode 2: C+
Episode 4: C
Episode 1: C
Episode 3: C-

Overall: C


Also, the Machinima sketches are dreadful

(de)mythologisation of the West at its most self-aware — looks, feels, and plays all vibrant and 3D Space Invaders-y (gangly bodies running at you, flashing things flying at you) as an arcade game so as to avoid in every way possible competing with Red Dead (which itself snuck in while Call of Juarez was attempting modern-day war on drugs type westerns instead). You know the world dies as soon as you leave the level, but such is the nature of a story as a series of discrete events, and such is the nature of a memory which is fallible and constantly alluded to in its fallibility (a conversation between the narrator and his audience manipulates the landscape surreally or just calls bullshit). I would love to say that it's more important than it is satisfying to play, but time so far has not been kind to Call of Juarez: Gunslinger either. I'm sure it'll be featured in post-Western histories somewhere down the track and it'll deserve its place there. For now, who knows. That's the problem with concept-driven work, I suppose.

From Claude's scrunched up face to his black jacket and weird green pants and the water that churns the colour of concrete, there is a heaviness to Grand Theft Auto III that more serious entries (IV) never matched. But there's also a brutal clarity to the space, where we are always able to see objects in relation to one another, and where collisions seem active instead of incidental. It's just a genuinely explosive game, from the way it looks to the way it controls. I heard someone say it's the purest of the series, and it's also one of the purest games. Where it lacks in atmospheric effects its distinctive grime textures carry the weight of the whole city, and if that's not enough there's the radio permanently tuned to the haunted vibrations of Scientist Rids the World of the Evil Curse of the Vampires.

Removes the visual noise and circular paths from its predecessor and flows like an aqueduct. That it is one of the more linear games of its kind and yet also still feels more expansive than most is a thing of great mystery. Really it just does everything so well. To me it's the perfected rhythms of tension and release, of incentivizing forward momentum through novel affordances (weapons and vehicles), and of pure audiovisual affect: the game knows when to reveal a horizon or a sunset, and when to leave you buried or with the sun fading in the wrong direction, feeling in the shadows trapped and alone.

Intrigante. Em alguns aspectos me faz lembrar de "Um Homem Com Uma Câmera", clássico do cinema de Dziga Vertov.

Vertov era um raro tipo de gênio que só surge uma vez em cada geração: um cara extremamente pretensioso que tinha talento o suficiente para transformar suas pretensões em realidade. Através do cinema ele pretendia elaborar o conceito do "Kino-Glaz", que pode ser traduzido como "cine-olho" ou "kino-olho". Mais do que um instrumento de captura da realidade, a câmera funcionaria como o terceiro olho do homem, permitindo, através da recriação de imagens em movimento interligadas, ver coisas que nossos olhos naturais não seriam capazes de ver. Mas a manifestação desse "kino-olho" através do cinema só seria possível se esse meio artístico fosse destilado e purificado. Apenas quando o cinema deixa-se de se escorar em outras formas de comunicação mais tradicionais como teatro ou literatura e criasse uma linguagem própria é que ele nos permitiria vislumbrar essa realidade alterada. O aviso que precede "Um Homem Com Uma Câmera" deixam claros os intentos de Vertov: "Esse filme é um experimento em comunicação cinemática de eventos reais. Sem a ajuda de intertítulos. Sem a ajuda de uma história. Sem a ajuda de teatro. Esse trabalho experimental almeja criar uma verdadeira linguagem internacional do cinema baseado em sua absoluta separação da linguagem do teatro e literatura." A conclusão a que Vertov chegou e que sua magnum opus demonstra com eloquência é que o cinema, em sua forma mais pura, é a seleção, manipulação e mistura de imagens em movimento. Diálogos, atuação, trilha sonora, enredo... Todas essas outras coisas são absolutamente desnecessárias para se fazer um filme.

Passados 93 anos, a pergunta que muitas artistas se fazem não é mais "qual a linguagem própria do cinema?", e sim "qual a linguagem própria dos videogames?" - pergunta em partes motivada pelo curioso fato de que, assim como o cinema de outrora parecia se escorar bastante nas artes cênicas, os jogos eletrônicos de hoje em dia pegam bastante emprestado do próprio cinema, com muitos sendo literalmente vendidos como "cinematográficos". A resposta a que Brendon Chung chegou parece ser "controle": games em sua forma mais pura são espaços audiovisuais em que o jogador tem o controle de ir e vir. É usando ao máximo esse elemento que Thirthy Flights of Loving tenta contar sua narrativa, dispensando inteiramente diálogos e logs em texto ou áudio e fazendo uso negligenciável de cutscenes ou seções em que o jogador não tem controle algum.

Brendon Chung não é nenhum Dziga Vertov dos games, então apesar de suas intenções louváveis, o impacto e qualidade de sua obra são limitados. Mas, por outro lado, é injustiça culpar alguém por não ser tão talentoso quanto Dziga Vertov. Apesar de suas limitações, Thirty Flights of Loving ainda é uma obra intrigante e que merece atenção.