Two Rail - Shooters - Game Invaders: The Theory and Understanding of Computer Games - page 44

The game requires you to pilot a star fi ghter through various, very simple, 3D
obstacles and shoot up enemy installations along the way. Sometimes you are actu-
ally in a tube at breakneck speed confronted by sliding doors that partially block
your way or close right up in front of you. Sometimes you are outside over a land-
scape of buildings and giant ground machines and fl ying enemies of various shapes
and sizes. It was a level based game, much like the standard platforms of the day,
and, like the majority of them, the obstacles and baddies would be in the same places
each time you reran a level.
In terms of interaction, you had more freedom than a platform but not as much
as in even an early shooter like Doom or Castle Wolfenstein. As you fl ew down the
preprogrammed path, the rail, you could only vary the position of your fi ghter within
the view at any one time but had no control over direction or speed. There were two
reasons to vary your up/down, left/right position at any time:
• to avoid obstacles and therefore avoid crashing and failing the level, and
• to aim and fi re your weapon to destroy buildings, ground machines, fl ying
machines, and so on along the fl ight path; some of which might attack you.
In its day the rail - shooter was a way of escaping the platform mode that was so
prevalent at the time but without accepting the full demands of a true 3D game
environment. Star Fox escaped the technological limitations of the day by having a
3D graphics accelerator chip built into the game cartridge itself. Stunt Race FX was
another Nintendo game that used the same technology. Star Fox has turned into a
successful franchise for Nintendo and there have now been fi ve versions of the game
released on four different platforms. Three of these games follow the classic rail -
shooter format but of course the graphics have improved immeasurably.
Released in 2002, Rez was one of the hit games of that year and won its devel-
opers a host of prizes. We can see that Rez has many of the characteristics of a
typical rail - shooter : you fl y down a set path, you can move up/down, left/right within
the current view, you have to shoot stuff, you can get power-ups, you can get killed,
there is a big boss to kill at the end of each level, and so on. Again, it also has many
of the characteristics of platform because each level appears much the same each
time you play it. Audio-visually Rez is stunning, a treat for the senses. Pumping
trance beats are generated by the player's selecting and destroying objects fl ying
toward the screen. Simple wire frames visualize most of the objects encountered,
overlaid with beautiful multicolored explosions.
Yet Rez is something of an enigma; it means different things to different people:
to some it's a shooter , to some it's a music game , to some it's an old form revived,
to some it's new and revolutionary; many love it and many hate it. That makes it
an interesting game to study. We will learn more when we look at its activity
profi le.
Later on we will look at what the game's lead developer, Tetsuya Mizuguchi,
has to say about it and see how that fi ts in with our understanding of the game itself.
We'll also attempt to understand both Rez and Star Fox in a more objective way
using relevant theory and suggest further answers to our question, “Why do people
play games?”