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Trigger Happy
62
moves.
10
As videogame consoles and arcade machines
became more technically accomplished, however, the
temptation was to show off the graphic power with ever
more visually appealing displays, and never mind the
realism. Street Fighter II (1991), the first of the really
modern breed of fighting games,
11
featured enormous
blue light trails from swishing limbs and fireball
attacks, while Mortal Kombat (1992) attracted
vituperative noises from the American Senate and the
British Parliament for its terrifically gory “death
moves,” where a victorious character would rip out his
opponent’s spine and hold it bloodily aloft.
One of the attractions of modern beat-’em-ups is
the player’s ability to choose to play as any one of
numerous different characters, each with his or her
own strengths and weaknesses but all lusciously
pictured and animated. Do you want to be a blond,
sandal-wearing Greek woman in a miniskirt, or a
supernatural pirate with two enormous broadswords
(Soul Edge)? A Croatian behemoth or a Hawaiian
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10 With exceptions such as Barbarian, in which your friend could be
graphically decapitated with a broadsword. There was media criticism of
this game—not, however, for the violence, but for the fact that it featured a
semi-clad model in its advertising.
11 In terms of visual excess, that is. Street Fighter’s legacy otherwise
continues in a cult sub-genre of the fighting game that eschews
threedimensional, “solid”-looking characters in favor of a flat-plane,
comicbook style with characteristically jerky animation.