Two Rail - Shooters - Game Invaders: The Theory and Understanding of Computer Games - page 43

Chapter 5

Two Rail - Shooters

So far so good. We have developed theories for genre, activity profi ling, and aesthet-
ics and we have used them to analyze a group of fairly recent games in the context
of genre and activity profi ling and some retro classics in the context of aesthetics.
One reason for the latter is that our analysis of genre, and particularly the central
role of agency in computer games, seems to suggest that the underlying nature of
games is not developing as fast as their mode of presentation. In other words, the
graphics has become a lot more sophisticated but in many ways the gameplay has
not developed nearly as much. Our observations on the development of the adven-
ture genre would seem to bear this out. It is also the case that many early games
were developed on a far less grand scale and are thus easier to analyze than many
contemporary ones.
On the other hand, we have no intention of suggesting that there are no new
developments in contemporary games nor that we have no need to study or analyze
them. Let's make a start now by looking at a genre over time and studying two rail -
shooters in depth, using all our theories to date. In doing so we will also show how
genre, activity profi ling, and aesthetics complement each other in our analyses.

STAR FOX AND REZ

Rail - shooters go back quite a long way. Their origins can be traced back to so-called
tube shooters , which were an early attempt to introduce three dimensions into games
by constraining the player to a fi xed path. This allowed demands on real-time 3D
graphics processing to be managed. Atari's Tempest from 1981 is a very early
example of such a game. The next step was to allow the player to follow a specifi c
path as if he or she were on invisible rails rather than inside tubes or corridors. This
means it looks as if you can be fl ying quite freely through an open scenescape of
whatever sort. Clive fi rst came across rail shooters through the excellent Star Fox 1
released for the SNES by Nintendo in 1993.

1

Released in Europe as Star Wing for legal reasons now resolved.

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