Philips Magnavox Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution Trigger Happy - Manual (Page 342)

Trigger Happy
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choose game modes or to save and load game data or
preplay mission briefings—all the prerequisites to play
(which Shigeru Miyamoto calls a game’s “labor”) that
surround the action at the heart of even the simplest
modern game.
G-Police 2: Weapons of Justice (1999), for
example, is full of glowing green grids that sketch out a
virtual graph paper background to screens full of
weapon and mission information; text spells itself out
letter by letter accompanied by rapid high-pitched
beeping. Control panels are given a metallic, quasisolid
sheen by the old effect of bas-relief, which renders the
illusion of raised and hollowed surfaces with simple
lines of highlight and shadow. The effect of all this is
deliberately retrogressive, harking back to an early
1980s era when such visual asceticism was in fact the
technological cutting edge, for instance in the moody
green-and-gray bas-relief of the brilliant shoot- ’em-up
Uridium for the Commodore 64. The modern Omega
Boost, too, plays with screens full of crude, dancing
alphanumeric characters, green wireframe data screens
and deliberately fuzzy, old-school voice synthesis in its
mission clips.
It is clear that videogames must differentiate
themselves from the interfaces of “serious” software: