Trigger Happy
screen and must be rotated and laterally shifted so that they all fit together at the bottom. When they do, the horizontal line that they complete vanishes, and you have a bit more breathing space. Your job is to clear all the blocks away for as long as you can. Simple, but one of the purest, most addictive videogame designs in history. Where are you in the game? Nowhere. You are pure mind, engaged in a purely symbolic struggle. As in Space Invaders, you know that you can never win, that eventually the blocks will descend so quickly that the screen will be filled with a hideous jumble. Still you try, for maybe this time you will do just a bit better. Herein lies the demonic power, stripped naked of graphical tinsel and
Family fortunes
This scoot around videogame genres is not meant to be utterly exhaustive. But it’s a working sketch, a snapshot. There isn’t room here for many videogames through the years that defy easy genre categorization, such as Deus Ex Machina, Parappa the Rapper, Skool Daze, Nights or Ecco the Dolphin.
But one useful lesson is that the videogame ecology is one rife with
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