Magnavox Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution Trigger Happy manual

Trigger Happy

moves.10 As videogame consoles and arcade machines became more technically accomplished, however, the temptation was to show off the graphic power with ever more visually appealing displays, and never mind the realism. Street Fighter II (1991), the first of the really modern breed of fighting games,11 featured enormous blue light trails from swishing limbs and fireball attacks, while Mortal Kombat (1992) attracted vituperative noises from the American Senate and the British Parliament for its terrifically gory “death moves,” where a victorious character would rip out his opponent’s spine and hold it bloodily aloft.

One of the attractions of modern beat-’em-ups is the player’s ability to choose to play as any one of numerous different characters, each with his or her own strengths and weaknesses but all lusciously pictured and animated. Do you want to be a blond, sandal-wearing Greek woman in a miniskirt, or a supernatural pirate with two enormous broadswords (Soul Edge)? A Croatian behemoth or a Hawaiian

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10 With exceptions such as Barbarian, in which your friend could be graphically decapitated with a broadsword. There was media criticism of this game—not, however, for the violence, but for the fact that it featured a semi-clad model in its advertising.

11 In terms of visual excess, that is. Street Fighter’s legacy otherwise continues in a cult sub-genre of the fighting game that eschews threedimensional, “solid”-looking characters in favor of a flat-plane, comicbook style with characteristically jerky animation.

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