'The bug isn't good enough'

[Administrator]

Eugene Jarvis is talking a mile a minute, standing on the show floor at the PlayStation Experience in the unnatural and on-brand blue light within Anaheim's Convention Centre while overlooking his first foray into arcade shooters in well over 20 years, Housemarque's Nex Machina. He's already been talking for 30 minutes before I remember to hit the record button on my dictaphone, our animated chat about Donald Cammell's twisted sci-fi horror film Demon Seed while Jarvis waxed lyrical over the film's shape-shifting robo-cock lost to the ether.
It's probably for the best, all told, though it goes some way to illustrate some of the schlock that gives Jarvis' games their heart, and that have lent them an enduring appeal. He's the godfather of a certain strand of video game that's endured to this day, a recognised pioneer who's not quite the medium's Hitchcock or Welles. Instead, he's something more exciting than that; a Stuart Gordon or John Carpenter, a purveyor of joyful violence that's perfectly intoxicating. Ask anyone who's ever got drunk on the chaos of Jarvis classics such as Defender, Robotron 2084 or Smash TV and they'll testify as much.
Ask Housemarque, for one, the Finnish developer that's carved a niche making games clearly in thrall to those same classics, from the slick Defender cover version that is Resogun to the twin-stick pleasures of Super Stardust and Dead Nation. Nex Machina, which Housemarque are taking lead on while Jarvis consults, is a marriage forged in heaven.
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