Trigger Happy
encompass a far wider and more creative range of subjects, from gardening to schoolday romance.
Role-playing elements are creeping crabwise into any number of other genres, as a way of bolting on a framework of narrative drive to the old repetitive game style. Even arcade-style driving game par excellence Ridge Racer: Type 4 (1999) is an RPG, in that the player is required to complete a full Grand Prix set of races with a particular team manager, who comments on your performance and reveals his or her own fictional preoccupations. And ever more complex roleplaying games will be possible with the increased storage and visual capacities of future hardware. Sega’s fabulously ambitious Shenmue (2000), which chooses the 1980s as a historical period so that the characters wear leather blousons and acidwashed blue jeans, points the way forward. And Japanese software giant Namco has set up a whole department dedicated to producing RPGs for the PlayStation2. From the genre’s trollish beginnings, wonderful things may yet emerge.
We can work it out
While playing videogames may not constitute an intellectual pursuit, they do challenge the mind in a
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