Magnavox Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution Trigger Happy manual

Trigger Happy

incommensurable sort of pleasure to that of Goldeneye the film. For the moment it is hard to see how videogames and movies could ever converge without losing the essential virtues of both. The cinema— especially good action cinema, which, as we have seen, has the closest links with videogames—is first and foremost a ride, like a fairground rollercoaster, part of whose pleasure is exactly that you are not steering, and you cannot decide to slow down. A videogame, on the other hand, is an activity. Watching someone else with a videogame, to non-players, is terribly boring. And even watching the most “cinematic” of videogames is still like watching a really bad, low-resolution film. A videogame is there to be played.

There is one exception to the rule that videogames are boring to watch, and it is exemplified by the inventive beauty of the Crash Bandicoot games. Here it is apparent that, for all the talk of war between videogames and movies, the former have already won a stunning victory over one genre of film: the animated cartoon. The golden age of Looney Tunes was always a fertile ground from which videogames could reap certain mechanical ideas: the comedy of Mario and

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