Trigger Happy

from the cinema: the player’s point of view is explicitly defined, as we saw, as that of a “camera,” whose movements can often be controlled as if the player were a phantom movie director, floating about on an invisible crane.

The external view of the player’s character, although putatively less “realistic,” is very often more desirable in gameplay terms than the fashionable firstperson view. Just as old-school blasters like Asteroids or Defender are only playable games in two dimensions, because the player is given an overview of the action surrounding his ship, so Tomb Raider enables the player to navigate far more easily and intuitively around the playing areas, because she can see immediately how close Lara is to a side wall, or just how far away that nasty spiked ditch is, in order to navigate its edge safely.

235

Page 233
Image 233
Magnavox Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution Trigger Happy manual