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I‘ve got SYNTMANIA!
After hopefully emotionally destroying the producer of the subject of my last review, I felt I was due a serving of a decent Counter-Strike movie; and the powers that be did provide with this nice little frag fiesta. Despite being short, "SYNTMANIA" is definitely worth a download. It‘s no Ruination or "Jaegarn X", but it does show pretty damn good production values.
You‘re Crazy...
As you probably know very well, there‘s nothing I like more than to point out flaws in anything so I‘m going to need to get those out of the way first. The thing that let this one down the most, I feel, was the introduction. Again, foreigners continue their unstoppable streak of really bad English whilst trying to set up for a cinematic feeling. I know, I know, it‘s not their fault and I probably couldn‘t speak a single word of their language but I‘m not trying to impress the world with a frag movie am I? 350 Million people speak English in the world, and I think there‘s about a bus-full of people that speak Finnish. The ratio has tipped our way a little bit there, so please try and accomodate for it next time -- thank you.
I‘ll get the rest of my whining done now to allow for an uninterrupted stream of praise afterwards. This movie very obviously lacked any sort of transition, and was about as rigid and rocky as a cliff face. Every clip just seemed to cut into the next instantaneously, out of the blue. I feel sorry for the doctors of the world, because anyone frightened by loud sudden noises is about to have a stroke. The paltry amount of transitions that do exist were preset stock Vegas effects and really wouldn‘t have set the producer back that much to fiddle with them a little.
My Diagnosis... SYNTMANIA!
Now the aspects worth issuing praise for, of which there were many which offered a nice change. The beauty of this production lies in the heaps of effects laced into the footage, but were handled in a very tasteful way (despite one clip of dust2 looking like an invasion of the Red Planet by a score of extra terrestrial counter-terrorists). Watching Syntmania, you‘ll notice things are subtlely flashing every which way, with a gentle blur and a few colour tweaks over it that is just "pretty", for lack of a more appropriate word. All footage clips were presented at just the right speed for the soundtrack (which I can be sure is just an MP3 of recorded car alarms - or trance music, whatever you call it) and were synced fairly well.
One needle in this gaming haystack I found and will remember is about 4 minutes and 30 seconds through, where the camera shakes to a little melody within the soundtrack. As simple and unnoticeable as this is, I felt it served as a very good time-waster while the subject was just waiting with an M4 without absolutely nothing happening. Following that, more immaculate synchronicity when your darkened screen is slowly uncovered - literally "to the beat" by little coloured circles! I thought it was quite a nice idea. I‘m sure it has been done before, but so has everything else in a CS movie.
Kanezki offers a cure...
"SYNTMANIA" ends with a smooth pan and zoom out and cuts to the credits set to some Cypress Hill.As it happens, SYNTMANIA is one of the better recent frag movies. Whilst not being up to scratch to the cream of e-sports "cinema", as it were, it was still worth the bandwidth used to download and I suggest you all do the same. Good job on this, let‘s see if you can improve with your next release, Mr. Kanezki! |
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5.0 |
Intro
It was alright. Nothing ground-breaking. |
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8.0 |
Sound
In-game sound, on-top of trance. Yum. |
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8.0 |
Content
Frags were nice to watch and presented well. |
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8.0 |
Effects
Lots of thought went into the movie here. |
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6.5 |
Outro
Wasn't much of it, but still ok. |
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7.1 |
Overall
Whilst not setting any standards, I liked it. |
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