Philips Magnavox Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution Trigger Happy - Manual (Page 96)

Trigger Happy
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is a thoughtful, stern consistency based on properties of
physical substances: Link’s hookshot will bounce off
stone, but if it hits wood it will sink in and let him
swing up. And the player can be sure that a burning
stick will always light a torch, wherever it may be
encountered.
The third type of incoherence is that of spatial
management. Tomb Raider III adds to its heroine’s
series of possible moves—which already include
implausibly high jumps and rolls—a crawl, so that the
player can move around in low passageways. But at a
certain stage in the game Lara finds herself at the end
of a low tunnel, giving out onto a corridor. Try as the
player might, it is impossible to get Lara out into that
corridor, owing to the game’s basic construction around
a series of uniformly sized blocks. If the tunnel
entrance were a full block above the corridor floor,
Lara could get out. But the getting-out-of-a-tunnel
animation requires her to lower herself fully down the
side of the block while hanging from her hands, and the
tunnel exit does not achieve the required altitude. So
the move becomes impossible. This sort of
inconsistency also rears its gory head in Resident Evil,
where the player is not allowed simply to drop
unwanted objects on the floor, but must stow them