Van Burnham

I should have enjoyed this book but I'm afraid it just left me cold. One of the best books I ever read regarding this era was Martin Amis's "Invasion of the Space Invaders", which I got at the time it was published and although some of the contributions in here seem to try aping his style, they can't quite pull it off.

It's also unfortunate that for a book subtitled "a visual history of the videogame age" that so many of the renderings of in-game screens fail to capture the spirit of the game in question. The awful depictions of the vector-based systems are a real shame, especially when the texts describe the beauty and crispness of the system they're commenting on.

In short, there is a really comprehensive and engaging tome to be written about the golden age of video gaming but I have to say (and despite wishing otherwise) that this isn't it.… (mer)