Trigger Happy
In an ideal world
But a good illusion must be cogent. The fabulous, unreal world that we are given to play with must seem to be perfectly real on its own terms. A strange new world is a thing of awe, but of course there is also a certain pleasure to be had from playing in recognizable environments. Tomb Raider II famously included a “Venice” level, in which Lara pilots a speedboat and spectacularly crashes through the windows of an arched walkway above the water—although it wasn’t modeled on a real part of Venice. TOCA 2, however, lets you drive sporty sedans around accurate models of British racing circuits like Brands Hatch or Silverstone. Metropolis Street Racer (2000), following the lead set by Driver but exploiting the greater graphical muscle of the Dreamcast system, goes even further by synthesizing information from street maps, thousands of photographs and hundreds of hours of video in order to let the player drive around faithful recreations of one-and-a-half-square-mile sections of actual cities: the Shibuya district of Tokyo, central San Francisco, and tourist London. If you played this game a lot, and then went for a spin in the real Shibuya, you’d know your way around. It’s that good.
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