Magnavox Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution Trigger Happy manual

Trigger Happy

more primitive, kinetic way—in much the same way, in fact, as playing sports. Yet the closest thing to sport in videogames is not necessarily a sports game. Reflexes, speedy pattern recognition, spatial imagination—these are what videogames demand. This is perhaps their fundamental virtue. If so, the king of videogame genres is arguably the most abstract, the least representational, the most nakedly challenging: the puzzle game.

At the most basic level, a videogame puzzle presents the player with a required action that cannot be performed directly. You must therefore find the intermediate steps and execute them in the right order. Puzzle elements abound in all sorts of game genres. As we mentioned earlier, Tomb Raider is in one sense a puzzle game, in that it requires manipulation of blocks in 3D space to unlock certain passages or secrets. Object-manipulation or switch-tripping puzzles abound in classic platformers like the early Mario games. Even a shoot-’em-up like Defender in one sense poses very high-speed puzzles measured in fractions of a second.

But a great puzzle game in its own right requires a combination of perfect simplicity (both in terms of rules and gameplay) and lasting challenge. Classics of this particular genre are therefore thin on the ground.

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