Magnavox Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution Trigger Happy manual Sometimes you kick

Trigger Happy

random rather than pleasurably challenging. What is left of the platform game, then, is just the defining physical ability that Shigeru Miyamoto gave to his original monkey-battling woodworker. Go ahead, jump.

Sometimes you kick

Ah, how good it feels to boot a friend in the head several times before applying an armlock and hurling him to the ground. Especially if he’s bigger than you. Fighting games allow players to battle each other’s characters onscreen with an array of absurdly exaggerated martial arts moves; with fists and feet or with swords and flame. Of all the videogame genres, the fighting game, or beat-’em-up, is one where the solo, or player-against-computer, mode is most pointless. It’s a two-player genre.

Early beat-’em-ups were particularly popular on the home computers of the day. Way of the Exploding Fist or Yie Ar Kung Fu (both 1985) took, as did most early fighting titles, a relatively sober approach to martial- arts gameplay, with a possible sixteen different

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