Most video game cut-scenes are pretty terrible; they tend to be static shots of two characters yammering at each other with occasional arm waves or somesuch. Rockstar games, especially the more recent ones, at least tried to emulate movies — in that the camera moves around, or the characters actually pace around or engage each other during a conversation. While previous Max Payne installments featured comic panels as a storytelling device, the newest installment, Max Payne 3, opts for an interesting fusion of traditional in-game engine cut-scene and said comic panels.
It’s a fusion because rather than use either cut-scenes or comic-panels-with-voiceover, these storytelling moments unfold as cut-scenes that get divided into panels. During an early sequence where Max discusses the kidnapping of Fabiana Branco (the wife of Max’s new boss, Sao Paulo real estate mogul Rodrigo Branco), the conversation would unfold like a traditional cut-scene, but then the visuals would pause and undergo a quick color shift. That moment then gets locked into a panel on left side of the screen while the rest of the conversation continues forward uninterrupted before another pause, or color shift, or camera change gets locked into another panel. In addition to slicing and shifting a conversation from cinematic to on-screen comic page, the game also emphasizes key points by telegraphing words and sentences on the screen (which reminds me of the way Tony Scott played with subtitle usage and placement in his movie Man on Fire). It all results in a distinct visual style that hasn’t been explored very much (the closest analog I can think of is the Ultimate Spider-Man game, and that was much more cartoony and resembled traditional comic art), and makes what would be a normal cut-scene stand out as something
