"It's just shapes and colours!"
That title is exactly what an old schoolmate of mine said about a game I'd recommended back in the PlayStation days. That game was Tempest X³, and the moment in question changed my videogame trajectory forever. I was reminded of it playing Tempest 2000 on my newly-bought copy of Atari 50 just now, because it's actually one of my favourite the best videogames ever and I won't hear arguments to the contrary.
But that eye-opening moment, from a friend who (presumably) could only accept the then-realistic (oh, how graphics tech changes and dates) blocky-textured origami PS1 3D models over something made of wireframes and particles (and framebuffer blurring, a thing I've been somewhat obsessed with since I first saw it here) but from those screenshots on the back of Tempest's case, he couldn't see the fun. Because you can't. It's impossible to show someone how bonkers and enjoyable Tempest 2000 (and its differently-named PlayStation cousin, functionally still pretty much the same game) really is unless they're willing to hold a controller and just sink an unexpected hours into its twitch-shooting glory. It's a hard sell, actually.
And that was my trajectory change, I guess. It wasn't much of one, since I was already willing to play a slice of interactive abstract art such as Tempest, but it pretty much solidified to me the idea of the mystical and (seemingly) undefinable of 'gameplay', subjective as it is, being king of all things videogame; over the graphics, story, sounds, whatever.
Besides which, mate, aren't all videogames just shapes and colours, really? (crossposted from my CoHost)
