Magnavox Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution Trigger Happy manual

Trigger Happy

Core enthuses over the possibilities offered by the next technological standard:

There are far more things you can do with Lara’s hair, and with her clothing . . . The leaves that you’re going past or the vines are all moving and animating, and there may be water dripping off them on to a pool which is making a ripple effect. PlayStation2 can do this camerablurring where you can home in on the central character and the view-distance at the back is blurred. Can you imagine the possibilities that that’s going to open up? It’s going to give you a depth of field that’s so huge it’s just like opening up a whole new door into gaming. Games are gonna have great depth—depth and atmosphere. Superb!

It certainly looks as though the more able a game is to draw an atmospheric, beautiful world—as in the frankly stunning Shenmue—the more willing the player will be to shuffle off his or her chthonic shackles and swim happily into that world, where he or she can then get to grips with its symbolic play.

What have we decided? That underneath the flashy graphics, cinematic cut-scenes, real-time physics, mythological back stories and everything else, a

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