(clique aqui para a versão em português)
This version, much more than fixing bugs and fine-tuning gameplay, completely reimagines the game, modifying some central elements and adding a lot more content. It feels almost like a sequel to the 2021 ZX Spectrum game. When I created the MSX version, I added some content due to the extra memory that the MSX compiler allows. I wanted to somehow bring the ZX version up to par, and in the end, I made something much bigger, not only by adding the extra content from the MSX version but by expanding the game into practically a second one.
The game is now divided into two chapters, with the first one containing almost all the content from the 2021 game, plus additional music and areas, and a second chapter with more new music, areas, and bosses. In the first chapter, or Side A of the tape, you play in the "Top Purgatory" and recover Virgil's abilities. The "Low Purgatory" is the second Chapter, where you continue with the same abilities from the end of the first (double jump and automatic head return), have to find some keys to progress, and face other bosses. The second part is a bit more linear, although it still requires you to return to areas with keys, specially to collect all the chips.
Graphics have been improved, extra details and colors have been added while maintaining the overall aesthetic of the 2021 version. Controls and gameplay mechanics have been enhanced, especially the head attack when you pick up the power-up that makes it automatically return to the body.
Now, the hearts, which increase your vitality gauge, are no longer scattered throughout purgatory, and you increase your heart gauge by 1 for each boss you defeat. In place of the hearts, there are now chips, 5 in each chapter, for you to recover Virgil's memories when he was alive. At the end of each chapter, the game will tell you how many chips out of the total you managed to collect.
Key Features of Version 2.0:
- Nearly Double the Gameplay Time
- 3 New Stage Bosses in Addition to the Existing 4
- 3 Extra Music Tracks, Totaling 7 as in the MSX Version
- Numerous New Enemies, in Addition to the Existing Ones
- 50 New Screens Arranged in a New Area, the Low Purgatory
- 10 Chips to Collect (5 in Each Chapter) to Uncover Virgil's Origin Story
- New Graphical Details in Existing Scenarios
- New Loading Screens, One for Each Chapter
Below some screenshots and an extra text on the end of the post:
A few more words, now in 2023:
Just below is the text I wrote in the "readme" of the 2021 version of the game. It has been intense years, for better or worse, with so much happening in life and the world. In just a few years, it seems like a significant accumulation of everything has occurred: historical events, emotions, highs and lows, but also wisdom and knowledge.
Rereading the text below, I see the connection between what I was doing, the work of my friend and intellectual/artist Luiz Souza, and what culminated in the Gang do Lixo (Trash's Gang) group and the Anachronistic Art Manifesto. It was already in my mind that 2022 was important due to the 100th anniversary of the Week of Modern Art in São Paulo, and that its ideas needed updating for the super-connected Babylon of the 21st century.
I couldn't do this alone, and it was in partnership with Luiz Souza and contributing to the Gang do Lixo group that we managed to synthesize what were once disconnected ideas into an aesthetic proposal and an understanding of the social state of art in our time. It may seem really ambitious to say this, coming from a game developer known only to a niche within a niche, in a already limited medium in terms of aesthetic reach (not due to the language itself, but the cultural industry and its focus on entertainment). But life is made of such things, including the need to think big.
So here's another version of Virgil's Purgatory, something that is no longer just my work, thanks to the contributions of Luiz Souza, who wrote "Virgil's Song," and the relationship of my work, with the Anachronistic Art proposal. Read the manifesto, it's on my blog, or "just Google it," it's not hard (Just in portuguese for now, I hope to change that someday).
________________________________
A few more words about the narrative and context of this game (2021 text):
I'm never tired of saying that my games are my art products, and that I see it as an aesthetic language, with its peculiarities as much as movies, comics, visual arts, literature, or whatever you can call art. I'm on this "research" to understand and explore this language and its possibilities for quite some years by now, learning both the more "technical" part (programming, the design of interaction between player and game, etc.) and the more artistic part. Not just making the music and graphics but understanding how it all articulates in the game's narrative, therefore, the chosen theme for the narrative is very important in this equation.
Virgil's Purgatory is (it was in 2016 and it is again,more consciously now) my manifesto that a Brazilian game can address regional themes without necessarily being "regionalist" or traditionalist. When I choose to take elements from the history of “cangaço”, folk “cordel” literature with all that goes along, and find parallels with Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy, I mean that one is not essentially more valuable than the other in cultural terms. It’s Important for me to approach the native subject without reducing it to any ghetto or margin, on the contrary, making the move to insert them into the universal human culture. Ignoring our own culture would feel like impoverishing myself artistically.
In 2022 the "Modern Art Week in Brazil" will be 100 years old. Its importance does not fit in this paragraph, but in short, the Brazilian Modernists made it clear that it was necessary to "anthropophagize" the foreigner, "eat them", and thus give birth to the new, even if in a chaotic way. It is not enough to rely on cultural tradition, which is important, but it is necessary to go further. Subsequently, the "Tropicalia Movement" updated this understanding, and made it even clearer that the opposite does not serve us either: just mimic the foreigner culture as a neo-colonized one is perhaps even more miserable and culturally poor. In more recent times, the Mangue Beat Manifesto, headed by Recife bands such as "Nação Zumbi", in the 1990's, made a head way on Modernist Anthropophagy.
It is without fear of the stature of these great ones that I enter this same quest. So I restate, "Virgil's Purgatory", my little retro, independent, obscure, known just by a few, game, is my manifesto on this matter.
(English text revision Thanks to Erico "Fued" Monteiro).
You can read more about the historical facts and culture that inspires this game on my blog, follow the link:
http://diarioartografico.blogspot.com/2021/11/english-translation-for-virgils.html
Have fun
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