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Trigger Happy
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random rather than pleasurably challenging. What is
left of the platform game, then, is just the defining
physical ability that Shigeru Miyamoto gave to his
original monkey-battling woodworker. Go ahead, jump.
Sometimes you kick
Ah, how good it feels to boot a friend in the head
several times before applying an armlock and hurling
him to the ground. Especially if he’s bigger than you.
Fighting games allow players to battle each other’s
characters onscreen with an array of absurdly
exaggerated martial arts moves; with fists and feet or
with swords and flame. Of all the videogame genres,
the fighting game, or beat-’em-up, is one where the
solo, or player-against-computer, mode is most
pointless. It’s a two-player genre.
Early beat-’em-ups were particularly popular on the
home computers of the day. Way of the Exploding Fist
or Yie Ar Kung Fu (both 1985) took, as did most early
fighting titles, a relatively sober approach to martial-
arts gameplay, with a possible sixteen different