Trigger Happy
apocalyptic music of hundreds of new games on display. This is where videogame companies show off their latest glories of manipulable son et lumiÈre, with hundreds of PlayStations, Dreamcasts and Nintendo 64 consoles hooked up to television monitors running soon-to-be-released products. Sony’s triumphal stand features thirty-foot-high inflatable models of cutesy game characters Spyro the Dragon and Um Jammer Lammy (a cartoon girl who plays heavy-metal guitar, obviously). Nintendo’s section of the hall projects the playable images of Star Wars, Episode I: Pod Racer onto, yes, a cinema-sized screen, while a room given over to Perfect Dark features helpful blond women gliding among the gamers, dressed in black PVC and white jodhpurs and suggestively stroking their leather whips (Perfect Dark, an espionage-themed first-person shooter, is strictly speaking not a game about horseriding, but I don’t see anybody complaining). Elsewhere, a Planet of the Apes videogame is promoted with the help of a bamboo cage imprisoning semi- naked women in animal-skin bikinis.
Refreshed or repeled by such marketing schlock and an endless supply of burgers, hot dogs, soft drinks and coffee over the four days of the show, journalists, designers, retailers and publishers scurry around the
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