Magnavox Trigger Happy Manuel D’Utilisation

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Trigger Happy 
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watching, you’re doing.  And when videogames are at 
their best, what you’re doing is something vastly more 
creatively challenging than watching a docusoap or a 
quiz show. Your reasoning, reflexes and imagination 
are tested to exhilarating limits. That hunk of molded 
plastic, that PlayStation or Dreamcast, is a magic box 
that allows you to play with fire. A Prometheus engine. 
 
Bad company 
Fire is not necessarily an unqualified good. It can burn. 
Back in 1982, U.S. Surgeon General Dr. C. Everett 
Koop declared that videogames were evil entities that 
produced “aberrations in childhood behavior.” Then, 
videogames were abstract pixellated contests of timing 
and skill, but now they offer superbly detailed 
animations of blood and gore while you shoot an 
opponent’s head off in Kingpin or mow down 
pedestrians in your car in Carmageddon. The latter 
game was grudgingly granted the equivalent of an NC- 
17 rating in 1997 by the British Board of Film 
Classification, on the condition that the victims’ blood 
was changed in color from red (too human) to green 
(acceptably zombie). 
People are worried by such exultantly bad-taste 
imagery. Such scientific investigation as has been done