Trigger Happy
371
In an ideal world
But a good illusion must be cogent. The fabulous,
unreal world that we are given to play with must seem
to be perfectly real on its own terms. A strange new
world is a thing of awe, but of course there is also a
certain pleasure to be had from playing in recognizable
environments. Tomb Raider II famously included a
“Venice” level, in which Lara pilots a speedboat and
spectacularly crashes through the windows of an arched
walkway above the water—although it wasn’t modeled
on a real part of Venice. TOCA 2, however, lets you
drive sporty sedans around accurate models of British
racing circuits like Brands Hatch or Silverstone.
Metropolis Street Racer (2000), following the lead set
by Driver but exploiting the greater graphical muscle of
the Dreamcast system, goes even further by
synthesizing information from street maps, thousands
of photographs and hundreds of hours of video in order
to let the player drive around faithful recreations of
one-and-a-half-square-mile sections of actual cities: the
Shibuya district of Tokyo, central San Francisco, and
tourist London. If you played this game a lot, and then
went for a spin in the real Shibuya, you’d know your
way around. It’s that good.
