Steve Mundy.

It's a tacky house, and its owners have a nasty secret. Visiting this night are a half-dozen pretty girls, "co-eds'' they're still called, dressed just provocatively enough to lend a soft-core flavour to the film. Not a wise visit - a half dozen other girls disappeared without a trace from this very house only recently.

Oh, well.

My mission, should I decide to accept, is to protect this sexy-tet from harm.

My weapons are a house-wide video-audio surveillance system and a series of cunning traps.

While hordes of skulking ninja types penetrate the home, the girls are, what else? dancing together in the parlour, playing air guitar on a tennis racket, using its grip as a, microphone. Then they are shown to their rooms. And the music gets heavy. Friday the 13th heavy. Texas Chainsaw Massacre heavy.

It's just a movie. It's just a game. It's just both. It's called Night Trap and represents the latest mutation of what began, for me, as a simple black and white electronic ping-pong game called Pong my brother and I played at our father's curling club in Toronto.

Then it was Space Invaders, Donkey Kong and Pac Man. Galaga and Ms Pac Man moved things a bit further. There was a brief fling with interactive fully-animated cartoon games which gave the player the chance to decide the outcome of sequences by making the right choices at just the right time. But they never caught on. Too difficult, too repetitive - too boring.

Atari made a stab at home video games. You can still find them occasionally at church auctions and rummage sales. The passion for gaming without quarters skyrocketed with Nintendo's 8-bit home systems in the mid-1980s. The other Japanese giant, Sega, discovering it couldn't catch up, leapt ahead with its 16-bit Genesis game. Nintendo followed suit, now they split the market pretty evenly, says Marius Dier, of Island Satellite Systems, the Island's main supplier.

Sega is the first with "the next level'' - CD-ROM, (computer games on CD) though Dier says rumour has it Nintendo is about to release its own version.

Dier is happy enough about the booming games industry. His company has been selling about $400,000 a year worth of games and related merchandise in Bermuda since he sold his first Nintendo in October, 1989.

This year, he predicts, will be his biggest yet.

One of the reasons for that is the new genre of game, Sega CD, like Night Trap which combines laser disc technology and big sound with arcade controls. This particular game has been dropped by some toy stores (Toys R Us) in Britain and Canada because of its graphic content. It has inspired Sega to introduce a ratings system, similar to movie ratings for its games. An MA-17 (adults only) stamp is bound to keep the tykes away, wot? Because a compact disc offers a massive amount of storage space, the games it carries can use lots of real video action. Where a 16-bit cartridge could at best hold a few seconds of live action, a CD-ROM, with more than 500 megabytes (millions of times more than the cartridge) can carry hours.

And tunes.

In Night Trap the screen is mostly filled with a live action film, of the soft-core hack 'n' slash variety. Underneath is a table listing the different rooms of the house. You select the room to view, and the action changes. It really is as if there's a video camera under your control mounted in each room.

Occasionally a character will talk to you. An undercover cutie will whisper the new access code which allows you to control the traps. The head of the SWAT team will bawl you out for missing too many bad guys.

Some have warned that video-game violence is too realistic for impressionable young minds, that interaction to this degree draws children far too deeply into the fantasy. Certainly Night Trap has the appearance of being that kind of film. You know, the kind you keep watching because you know sooner or later one of the lovely lasses is going to find herself minus clothes and screaming.

But according to gaming fan Stephen Cabell, 19, the violence is merely implied and there is no nudity. Sorry to spoil it for you, kids.

Victims are dragged off screen to be killed, he says. "It's like a made-for-TV movie, no violence, no cursing.'' But he admits the game draws one in. "You have to stay on your toes. You get the feeling you're in the game ... they're like real people. It might give the kids a scare.'' This correspondent couldn't confirm -- the head cop relieved me of my duties barely five minutes into the game each of the three times I tried. Dang it! So far Genesis CD has about 25 games to choose from (the standard Genesis is up to about 150 titles). The CD game unit sells for $359, the games cost from $59 to $79 apiece.

Also popular are the CD music video games which allow the player to remake rock videos by artists like INXS, Kriss Kross and Marky Mark, adding different special effects and graphics.

Games based on real movies are always a hit. Films that have been gameified by either or both companies include Bram Stoker's Dracula, Aliens, Star Wars, Batman, The Terminator, Hook and more. And of course, due out this summer, is Sega's offering of Jurassic Park, the video game (on Genesis and Sega-CD).

To create the game, Sega's boffins used clay models and stop-motion photography. The animation is said to be spectacular. And just for the slightly twisted, the game offers players the chance to be either Dr. Grant, fleeing the dinosaurs, or a dinosaur (Velociraptor) fleeing the park, ripping up the human guards on the way.

The Genesis and Super Nintendo 16-bit systems are both highly rated, says Marius Dier. Sega has a faster processor while the Nintendo features more colours and slightly better graphics, he says.

"This is a big business,'' Dier says. "When you go to the electronics shows at least a third of the merchandise is this stuff. People don't realise how big it is.'' By modest estimate, he says, half the homes in Bermuda with children have some type of video game equipment.

The hand-held games market, dominated once again by Sega and Nintendo, is also booming. Nintendo's endearing and immensely popular Game Boy is somewhat outclassed by Sega's Game Gear, which sports full colour and can also be used as a normal television set.

But the games' senseless violence, ever-more realistic, has its detractors, and Sega's self-imposed ratings system may not be enough to placate them. Sega announced earlier this summer that it will assign games one of three ratings beginning in August: GA for general audiences, MA-13 for mature audiences with parental discretion advised, and MA-17 for adults only.

"We are particularly concerned that parents buy games appropriate for their children's age,'' said Tom Kalinske, Sega chief executive, told American news agencies.

Sega said it was particularly concerned about the level of realism offered by its new CD game machine, which he pointed out enabled participants to interact with movie-quality clips of real actors instead of animated figures. Nintendo, Sega's archrival, does not plan to introduce ratings. It believes Nintendo's game-development guidelines - which ban nudity, sexual violence, profanity and drug use - are sufficient.

Dier says the interactive, live film games are the latest step on the inevitable path to so called "virtual reality'' games. Right now a form of virtual reality is available at "the arcade level''. New rides at movie studio theme parks employ the technology, a combination of hydraulic seats and 3-D glasses.

At a recent electronics show Dier saw the next mutation, virtual reality for home consumption. Sega gave guests a try at its Sega VR, a helmet that attaches to its game machine and makes a player seem surrounded by the animated game. They're due out in the fall.

"We'll probably bring a few in. You've always got your fanatics who want everything that comes out.'' At the same show, big crowds checked out Virtual Vision Inc.'s eyeglasses that project a television in front of the wearer.

It's the dream gadget for the sports fan who just can't miss the game. Dier predicts the graphics will "keep getting better and better, until they're virtually real. That's not far away, probably the next year or two.'' Computer and video game sales are expected to hit $7 billion this year, so exhibitors of such products took up large displays. Two companies to watch for, he says, (apart from Sega and Nintendo) are Philips and a new company called 3DO, a conglomerate of Panasonic, Mitsubishi and Electronic Arts.

3DO went public in May and its stock went from $18 to $37 in two weeks, even though it's months from releasing its first product. Says Dier: "It's geometric growth - both in the technology and the sales.'' Royal Gazette sub-editor Steve Mundy is a frequent contributor to RG Magazine. He wrote about comic book artists Quad Depot in last month' s issue.

Sinister scenes from Night Trap, Sega's latest CD game.

AUGUST 1993 RG MAGAZINE