Philips Magnavox Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution Trigger Happy - Manual (Page 77)

Trigger Happy
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encompass a far wider and more creative range of
subjects, from gardening to schoolday romance.
Role-playing elements are creeping crabwise into
any number of other genres, as a way of bolting on a
framework of narrative drive to the old repetitive game
style. Even arcade-style driving game par excellence
Ridge Racer: Type 4 (1999) is an RPG, in that the
player is required to complete a full Grand Prix set of
races with a particular team manager, who comments
on your performance and reveals his or her own
fictional preoccupations. And ever more complex
roleplaying games will be possible with the increased
storage and visual capacities of future hardware. Sega’s
fabulously ambitious Shenmue (2000), which chooses
the 1980s as a historical period so that the characters
wear leather blousons and acidwashed blue jeans,
points the way forward. And Japanese software giant
Namco has set up a whole department dedicated to
producing RPGs for the PlayStation2. From the genre’s
trollish beginnings, wonderful things may yet emerge.
We can work it out
While playing videogames may not constitute an
intellectual pursuit, they do challenge the mind in a