The lost art of composition

I was reading the fantastic film blog today called Antagony and Ecstasy, and reading through his articles, it dawned on me how many spectacularly composed shots from my favourite films still resonate with me today. I've been watching Minority Report in my morning English class, and there's an astonishing two-shot, where Samantha Morton has her head draped over Tom Cruise's shoulder. It's incredibly simple, but due to the lighting and the staging, says so much more than any dialog would be able to.

I read an article by Daemon Hatfield, who's possibly my least favourite gaming critic on the interwebs, saying that "3D games should never have fixed cameras." I can't remember what game he was reviewing, but it warmed my heart to see so many commenters rip into him for that one.

How many games have really dynamic, well-composed shots within their gameplay framework (and not in cutscenes, which is an entirely different beast)? Well, quite a few that I can think of, but here's the thing – almost all of the games I have in my head right now are pre-2000s. I'm not saying it's impossible to create an incredible "shot" in a game – think back to the first time you saw Hyrule Castle in Ocarina of Time, for instance, or the majority of Shadow of the Colossus. But it's seemingly much more difficult to do so with fully rotatable, 3D camera movement in a lot of cases.

I'm actually all in favour of removing some player autonomy to let them "do what they want." Watching my girlfriend's nephew play the Terminator: Salvation game on his XBox 360, for example, I noticed that he was able to shoot at the head of his commanding officer while he gave orders, and without consequence. Now, that's probably a pretty shitty game, but I think that developers shouldn't feel bad about limiting player freedom for consequent strength of their artistic sensibilities. Hell, that's why killer7 is such a provocative experience.

I'm not advocating for all games to be on rails or anything, but dear readers, tell me, what was the last fully 3D game that had spectacular mise-en-scene that you've seen? I don't have an encyclopedic knowledge of such things, so it is actually a legitimate question.