Trigger Happy
choose game modes or to save and load game data or preplay mission briefings—all the prerequisites to play (which Shigeru Miyamoto calls a game’s “labor”) that surround the action at the heart of even the simplest modern game.
G-Police 2: Weapons of Justice (1999), for example, is full of glowing green grids that sketch out a virtual graph paper background to screens full of weapon and mission information; text spells itself out letter by letter accompanied by rapid high-pitched beeping. Control panels are given a metallic, quasisolid sheen by the old effect of bas-relief, which renders the illusion of raised and hollowed surfaces with simple lines of highlight and shadow. The effect of all this is deliberately retrogressive, harking back to an early 1980s era when such visual asceticism was in fact the technological cutting edge, for instance in the moody green-and-gray bas-relief of the brilliant shoot- ’em-up Uridium for the Commodore 64. The modern Omega Boost, too, plays with screens full of crude, dancing alphanumeric characters, green wireframe data screens and deliberately fuzzy, old-school voice synthesis in its mission clips.
It is clear that videogames must differentiate themselves from the interfaces of “serious” software:
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