Trigger Happy
seems possible: you can specialize in computers and hacking and infiltrate the enemy installations that way, or you can become an expert lockpicker, or a lethal sniper, or just rock in, all guns blazing. No strategy is privileged over another. The terms of the semiotic conversation in Deus Ex are unusually and laudably broad.
Among other aesthetic gems was the extraordinary style of Jet Grind Radio (2000), Sega’s in-line skating, graffiti-spraying game. While its detailed, Tokyo city environments are built in standard “realistic” polygonal fashion, the lovable teen-tearaway characters are given heavy black outlines to resemble hand-drawn cartoon figures. This “cel-shading” technique, as it became known, provides a glorious fusion of traditional anime style with high-powered computer rendering. Together with its excellent soundtrack of Japanese hip-hop, Jet Grind Radio had one of the most coherent design personalities of any videogame in history.
Meanwhile Rez (2001), also developed by Sega, was perhaps the first real work of abstract art that videogamers experienced running on next-generation hardware. Harking back once again to the futuristic wireframe aesthetic of Battlezone, but this time in
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