Magnavox Trigger Happy User Manual

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Trigger Happy 
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some pretense of monetary exchange—you might shoot 
enough ducks and win a cuddly toy—Time Crisis 
finishes the job begun by Pachinko, and offers nothing 
but purely sensual and psychological rewards for your 
cash. Another lightgun game, Point Blank, explicitly 
acknowledges this heritage by including a number of 
fairground-style shooting ranges to play at. 
Fairground games in general, which are tests of 
skill packaged in a fizzingly son et lumiÈre 
environment, are obviously another set of precursors to 
modern videogames. So, too, are fairground rides, in a 
different way, for they offer a very convincing illusion 
of danger: on a rollercoaster, you feel you must be 
plummeting to your death, but you know it is safe. 
Shigeru Miyamoto has said he is constantly playing on 
his audience’s “desire to realize something exhilarating 
but impossible in real life.” 
A good example of this is Gran Turismo, which we 
touched on at the end of the last chapter. Now, not only 
will we rarely have the chance to race a Dodge Viper 
around Tokyo at two hundred miles an hour, but it 
would be extremely dangerous to do so. Doing the 
same thing in a videogame, however (practicing the 
same  form) ensures that if we crash, we do not die or 
get burned to death, but only lose the race and live to