Magnavox Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution Trigger Happy manual

Trigger Happy

a steering wheel. The cybernetic possibilities are rich and largely unexplored.

A tennis game, for instance, could use one stick for your character’s movement over the court, and the other to control directly the movement of the racquet arm when playing a shot. Move the stick faster, and you play a more powerful stroke; move it in a curve, and you impart spin. Similarly, in a boxing game, each stick could be programmed to control directly the movement of an arm. This seems such an obvious idea that it is astonishing that software companies do not so far implement it generally. The first, and so far only, use of the idea occurs in the splendid gadget-festooned exploration game Ape Escape (1999), in which the player must row an inflatable dinghy downstream by rotating both sticks, each controlling a separate oar; sub-games offer direct control of skis or, indeed, arms in “Monkey Boxing.” Analogue control is becoming a new standard. The standard controller for Sega’s Dreamcast console only provides one analogue stick instead of Sony’s two, which is a bad oversight, although its dual triggers are both analogue. Sony’s PlayStation2 controller, meanwhile, boasts analogue response on all its buttons, opening up intriguing new gameplay possibilities.

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