Trigger Happy
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interestingly warped chessboard spaces—but its
combination of a first-person viewpoint with precise
platform-jumping gameplay was staggeringly inept.
Like so many games, it was great to look at but a pig to
play.
The eagerly awaited follow-up to Goldeneye,
Perfect Dark (2000), a sci-fi first-person shooter, was
compromised as a single-player game by numerous
faults identified throughout this book. Play was
bookended by a panoply of badly written and nastily
animated narrative cut-scenes; the lazy sci-fi fetishism
of its character design, in PVC-clad heroine Joanna
Dark, was a blatant and doomed attempt to steal the
thunder of Lara Croft; incoherencies of function and
space abounded; and the game’s inadequate temporal
resolution—owing to a wrongheaded choice to
privilege visual detail over frame-rate—made it
unplayable at higher difficulty levels.
On the other hand, Warren Spector’s brilliant
firstperson game Deus Ex (2000), was a rare example
of a designer offering the player enormous creative
freedom. Using an RPG-like system of
“nanoaugmentations,” the player can effectively choose
among various skill sets in order to allow her to play
the game in the way she prefers. Nearly anything
