Magnavox Trigger Happy Manuel D’Utilisation

 

Trigger Happy 

142 

 

is activated, providing an opportunity to relax and rest 
those tired wrists. FMV sequences can be graceful and 
beautiful in their own right (especially in the Final 
Fantasy games, where they alone can eat up $4 million 
of the budget), but they are something of a red herring. 
These sequences are simply there to be watched; they 
cannot be played with. They are merely tinsel around 
the real gameplay. 

The question remains: what kind of cinematic 

action happens, not as self-contained intervallic 
episodes, but in the thick of videogame play itself? 

 

When videogames were flat, two-dimensional affairs, 
the player was furnished with a God-like objective 
viewpoint. The gameworld of Pong or Space Invaders 
is laid out flat before the eye; everything takes place in 
the same horizontal plane. You can see everything at 
once, because you can see the entire universe. The 
problem once three-dimensional games became the 
norm was that in a solid world every viewpoint is 
subjective, and no viewpoint enables you to see 
everything. So videogames began to offer the player a 
choice of windows on their worlds that could be 
switched at will, depending on the task in hand. In a