Stylised breathlessness for stylised aceness.
By Fuseball

“If you have no confidence in self, you are twice defeated in the race of life. With confidence, you have won even before you have started.”

Marcus Garvey

It begins.

Three cryptic logos chime and slink past before you can register them and…

Clong! The biggest reverb you’ve ever heard begins sucking you into the screen.

Airfix fragments of plastic and metal and polygon tumble to the end or the beginning.

Time drags backwards, barrels forwards, percussively jitters and shudders. A battery of synths grumble and glide, swelling and howling to climax.

Before and after drawn to the point of impact. A brilliant spasm of blinding white noise/light. The flicker and blur of impossibly sleek technology. A love letter to velocity. A hymn to the gleaming spires of an imagined future metropolis. The future is now. No explanation needed.

Cold dark matter tessellating. Reforming itself. The shrieking crescendo secedes to a juddering thrum.

Time stays in reverse for a moment as we strobe and flutter between pure design and reality. A blink-and-you’ll-miss-it glimpse of yesterday’s dreams of tomorrow.

Snaking back around, over a hill crest and fade to white.

F7200 Racing League, Goteki 45, Pirhana-A, Icaras, Feisar… A dizzying procession of idents – all muted colours, perfect curves and clean lines… “Let’s be friends.”

We have arrived.

This isn’t FMV. This is foreplay.

I don’t want to be spoon-fed storylines. I don’t want edgy characterisation. I want my games lean and hungry, cool and minimalist. I want to see confidence and conviction up there on the screen, and I want to believe it’s all real.

If the year 2116 doesn’t look and sound and feel like this, I want my money back.

April 2005

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