Trigger Happy
interestingly warped chessboard spaces—but its combination of a first-person viewpoint with precise platform-jumping gameplay was staggeringly inept. Like so many games, it was great to look at but a pig to play.
The eagerly awaited follow-up to Goldeneye, Perfect Dark (2000), a sci-fi first-person shooter, was compromised as a single-player game by numerous faults identified throughout this book. Play was bookended by a panoply of badly written and nastily animated narrative cut-scenes; the lazy sci-fi fetishism of its character design, in PVC-clad heroine Joanna Dark, was a blatant and doomed attempt to steal the thunder of Lara Croft; incoherencies of function and space abounded; and the game’s inadequate temporal resolution—owing to a wrongheaded choice to privilege visual detail over frame-rate—made it unplayable at higher difficulty levels.
On the other hand, Warren Spector’s brilliant firstperson game Deus Ex (2000), was a rare example of a designer offering the player enormous creative freedom. Using an RPG-like system of “nanoaugmentations,” the player can effectively choose among various skill sets in order to allow her to play the game in the way she prefers. Nearly anything
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