Philips Magnavox Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution Trigger Happy - Manual (Page 189)

Trigger Happy
191
plant monster bars the way: go find some weedkiller
that you can splash on it. You must collect three books,
or some crystals, or combine some herbs, or get more
ammo for your gun. The only difference is that instead
of typing in commands, you directly control the
movement of your character, select items and use them
by pressing specialized buttons on the joypad.
Resident Evil is in this way somewhat less
sophisticated than Zork or Snowball, or any number of
classic text adventures. Nostalgia aside, the comparison
is instructive because of the ways in which each game
executes aspects of a story. Adventure games on first
sight seem to be very close to traditional stories. They
were, after all, in the same medium: text. And their
descriptions of locations and scenes (often very well
written) stimulated the mental imagination in exactly
the same way that the prose of a novel does.
Yet even they did not tell an “interactive plot”:
locations were all prescripted, and though you had
certain freedoms to explore, you were still exploring a
determinate, linear world. And just as with more
modern games, the uses and combinations of objects
available were only those that had been deliberately
foreseen by the designer. Resident Evil, on the other
hand, imitates a different medium altogether: as we’ve