Trigger Happy
52
rewind; we’ve gone too far.
8
True, I have a certain
fondness for Vanguard, a game I could happily clock as
a nine-year-old on a family vacation in Wales (you
could shoot in four directions and the beepy tunes were
evil mind-limpets). Clearly, however, Goldeneye, a
first-person shooter for the Nintendo 64 console which
lets you play the role of James Bond, is a much better
game.
One genre that certainly refutes this nostalgiatinged
argument is the racing game. In most sorts of
videogame, “feel” is at base more important than fancy
graphics or speed for its own sake. But in the racing
game, graphics and speed are part of the “feel.” Every
increase in technological power enhances the genre’s
unique pleasure: the feeling of hurling a vehicle around
a realistic environment at suicidal velocities.
Conversely, because of this intimate relationship
between hardware base and software superstructure, a
racing game has very often been used as a seductive
showcase for new technology: the Sony PlayStation
was the mouth-watering machine of the future on its
release, just because of the unprecedented speed and
solidity of one of its first releases, Ridge Racer. That
_________________
8 “Video Killed the Radio Star” (1979) by Buggles, a deathless masterpiece
of popular song, the
KindertÖtenlied
that on the one hand revels in
modernist sonic synthesis but on the other mourns the passing of the 1970s
and of youth itself.
