The criminal lack of next-gen light guns and gun games

[Timstuff]

Remember back when you bought a game system, it came with a plastic laser gun? Nintendo used the Zapper peripheral to utmost efficiency with the NES to sell the system to retailers, since it was only by selling the NES as a gun game that they could get retailers to stock it after the video game crash (also, Rob the robot helped too, since he made it into a "robot toy" rather than a "video game"). Sega likewise followed suit and gave eager soon-to-be gunslingers a Zapper-esque peripheral packaged with the Sega Master System. The 16-bit era was hard for gun games, because the peripherals were all expensive and had very poor precision, but after that things seemed to be going pretty well.

But now what's going on?

There is only ONE gun peripheral availible between the Xbox 360 and PS3, and it came with Time Crisis 4 (for PS3 only). And IT SUCKED! It was ugly and horribly designed with a stupid Wii nunchuk-esque dongle permanently fastened to it. It's a piece of junk that the Wiimote laughs at in terms of precision, and it only has one game that it can be used with, which is also a piece of junk.

It really shouldn't be that hard: take a plastic gun and put some of the Wiimote's guts in it. Best of all, it can now be wireless to make it feel even more 'gun like.' SIMPLE! The Wii Zapper is a piece of crap, but at least there are third party alternatives out there that effectively replicate the experience of using a real light gun.

What really ticks me off is that there is a huge wealth of arcade games, both classic and modern, that are getting completely skipped over by today's consoles because there are no good gun peripherals out there, much less ones that the mass market can afford. Sure, you might one day find a port of the Terminator 2 arcade game on Wii's virtual console, but there are a lot of new games that we probably will never see on there because of graphical limitations. I WANT TO PLAY ALIENS EXTERMINATION IN MY LIVINGROOM, DANGIT! *sigh,* for now I'm afraid, light gun games are an endangered species. The fact that Time Crisis 4 sold like a butt sausage probably didn't do any favors for the genre, either.

 

[Havok83]

I never cared for this genre

 

[ttotheusher]

I have fond memories of playing House of the Dead 2 in the arcade, I'd love to replicate that experience with my PS3.

 

[GL1]

With the size of screens we have nowadays, I don't see why this isn't a bigger deal. I'll admit, I wasn't big on light guns for the past couple generations, but if they make it fun, I don't see why not.

It seems a lot of people are getting this kind of viscerality from FPSes though. For the light gun format to "compete" they'd have to offer some kind of innovation, or a game with a lot of polish. I mean, who'd have thunk we'd all have 2 guitar controllers in our closets 5 years ago? The light gun just needs a flagship, and it'll be back in full force.

 

[Soapy]

The only time I've ever enjoyed on-rails shooters was playing them in an arcade with a bunch of friends. After the arcades started disappearing I bought a couple of them for consoles and played at home . I played with the basic controller and it was lame. I bought a light gun and it was still lame. Unfortunately this is a genre that just doesn't work well outside of an arcade.

Sorry, but in my opinion, on-rails shooters for consoles = fail.

 

[ProjectPat2280]

The only time I've ever enjoyed on-rails shooters was playing them in an arcade with a bunch of friends. After the arcades started disappearing I bought a couple of them for consoles and played at home . I played with the basic controller and it was lame. I bought a light gun and it was still lame. Unfortunately this is a genre that just doesn't work well outside of an arcade.

Sorry, but in my opinion, on-rails shooters for consoles = fail.

Yea, i agree with this. Id have a great time pumping quarters into the House of the Dead 2 machine but for some odd reason, that enjoyment didn't translate when i bought the game and gun for my DC. Maybe it was because i knew i could just reboot the system and keep playing, yet in the arcade, once you ran out of qtrs, game over.

 

[StrainedEyes]

I loved Time Crisis on my PS2.

 

[Why Are You Crouching Spock?]

More games need to use parallax mapping.

 

[SouLeSS]

Some of my greatest moments in gaming was playing the hell out of House of the Dead II for the Dreamcast using those bigass pistol lightguns they sold.

 

[Spidey-Bat]

They don't make them because they sucked back then and no one wants to play them.

 

[SouLeSS]

**** that, can you imagine how awesome a Time Crisis type game only you're constantly on the move (say pretty slowly awlking through caves and **** automatically) with this generations graphics.

 

[DACMAN]

They were too limiting. They're ok once through. But to own them? It's going to be the same path over and over. Shelling over 60 bucks for a game that might be fun only once through is asking alot. A game would have to re-invent the genre first.

 

[Timstuff]

And that's part of the problem-- no one wants to try. In Time Crisis 4 they added dumb gimmicks like FPS mode, but it sucked horribly. Part of me drools a little at the prospect of Wii-style FPS controls being done correctly with a light gun peripheral (as opposed to incorrectly, which would be Time Crisis 5), but I think that it's more important to refine the rail shooter genre than it is to try and mash it together with FPS, which already works fine the way it is. Light gun games haven't evolved much because in the arcade, they don't need to. You pop in a quarter, blast at something for a few minutes, and then you usually jump over to the next machine (unless you're a hardcore player). The games are usually only played for a few minutes, so "getting old" is not an issue.

Resident Evil Umbrella Chronicles tried to mix things up a bit with the genre, but IMO the results were poor. The characters were way too chatty, and the laser pointer made the game not require enough aiming skill. And on top of that, the game didn't even play all that differently from arcade shooters, so the changes Capcom made to the formula were mostly trivial.

The two big things that need to be done to revitalize the shooting genre IMO, are 1) increase interactivity and 2) increase immersion. The idea that you're simply watching a path scroll along while shooting needs to get changed up. Perhaps the player should be given a degree of control over where they move in between skirmishes rather than having nonstop action, and then when the fight gets going the computer takes over to let you focus on shooting? And, perhaps the game's scripting could allow for more scenarios that involve the player being in an "on rails" scenario, like riding in a subway while blasting at a horde of baddies- and destructable environments are a must, because that would both increase interactivity and immersion. Basically, they need to make the player feel more involved, and more in control, instead of making them feel like they're just watching a screen while shooting at it. In that sense, I think that the light gun genre could stand to borrow a few cues from its FPS cousins.

 

[SouLeSS]

If they had a light gun for the wii, and it had an attachment nunchuka with the movement pad to move around would be heaven.

 

[Timstuff]

If they had a light gun for the wii, and it had an attachment nunchuka with the movement pad to move around would be heaven.

There are some pretty nice gun controllers for Wii floating around, you just need to know where to look (eBay and Amazon are typically safe bets)

Or you can go the crazy nerd route and mod one, but be warned: re-wiring controllers is not for the faint of heart!

 

[SouLeSS]

Well I mean the game would have to be set up a certain way but it would still be cool.

 

[ttotheusher]

Yea, i agree with this. Id have a great time pumping quarters into the House of the Dead 2 machine but for some odd reason, that enjoyment didn't translate when i bought the game and gun for my DC. Maybe it was because i knew i could just reboot the system and keep playing, yet in the arcade, once you ran out of qtrs, game over.

Maybe they could have it so that if you die, you have to start from the beginning.

 

[Mentok]

Sin and Punishment 2

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NgXSq2J1YL8

 

[Timstuff]

Heh, almost forgot about Sin and Punishment. It looks about as arcadey as any game I've seen in an upright cabinet, which is cool by me. It actually looks kind of like a spiritual successor to Space Harrier.

Still, I really want a game that makes you feel like your deep in the action, holding a plastic gun and blasting at anything that comes into your field of vision. I always loved the shooting range feel that you got from a good light gun game, only with more action. Duck Hunt, which is probably the first shooting game most of us ever played, was more or less a shooting range simulator where you got to "practice" shooting at ducks or clay pigeons. Although primitive, those were the first steps into the kind of immersion that got me to drop oh-so-many quarters into Time Crisis 2 and House of the Dead 2.

 

[Gatchamanjp]

Timstuff, I agree with you that light gun shooters are extremely cool yet undervalued. Hopefully Microsoft will release a light gun so 360 players can get a home release of Sega's newest LGS...Rambo. Maybe Sega could release Rambo in a compilation package with their older light gun shooters like GunbladeNY.

 

[Timstuff]

If Sony and MS are really worried about needing a Wii-like peripheral to compete with Nintendo, they should just make high quality light guns with Wii-like sensor technology. It would be the perfect "Trojan horse" to introduce the technology onto their systems without appearing to rip off the Wii mote directly, and if they really wanted they could even go the NES route and start packing them in with console bundles.

 

[bored]

Know what was a great game? "Lethal Enforcers".

 

[the_ultimate_evil]

i remember reading something along the lines that any new "light gun" game would need a wii like sensor bar as lcd and plasma tv can't register the gun like older tv's

 

[Fading]

Light gun games are so much fun, yet so underappreciated. Not sure how much money I pumped into Time Crisis 2 at arcades lol. Lethal Enforcers and Duck hunt were a lot of fun too. I also devoted a lot of time to Time Crisis 1 on the PS1. I remember how you could set one of your controllers on the floor and step on it to duck like you did in the arcades.

It's sad to see so many genres getting lost in the shuffle tho. While we get FPS after FPS, the RPG, 2D sidescroller, Light gun, and quirky games are getting forgotten. Even platformers are seeing less and less development time. It takes retro games like Megaman 9 and Bionic Commando Rearmed to show ppl that old genres are still relevant and fun.

Edit - BTW I think part of the reason is the near ban of plastic toy guns in the US. You have to make guns unrealistic and give them with awful bright nerf gun colors for them to be allowed for release. Heh, developers are probably too embarrassed to release such crappy looking guns.

 

[Timstuff]

Yeah, something seriously has to be done about that stupid toy gun law. I don't think that bank robberies have decreased since the 80's, despite the fact that Megatron doesn't turn into a a Luger anymore. It's not illegal to paint a toy gun realistic, but it's illegal to sell them without a permanently attached orange tip (unless it's gotten worse since I last checked).