Favorite Light Gun Games?

mikey.shake · March 27, 2016

The sounds and "feel" of Duck Hunt are burned into my brain, but when I was a kid, I thought "Mode B" in Hogan's Alley was the best. It was like having a real shooting gallery on your TV! Maybe a little more variety than Duck Hunt, and without some weird user interface like Gumshoe. I might not have remembered my love for Hogan's Alley so clearly, but just yesterday in the wild, my wife was digging through a stack of dusty black-label commons and found a four-dollar copy of Hogan's with an undiscovered Famicom converter in it (!), so I played it for a while last night, and it's still great. One of my favorite light gun games, for sure.

As an adult, I discovered that I've had a lot of fun with Freedom Force on the NES, and even though it's not much as a game, Chiller can be kind of trashy fun if you're in the right frame of mind. And Wild Gunman is always going to be fun. Even if you have to use your hands. Like a baby's toy.

My wife and I seemed to play a lot of late-'90s arcade shooters when we were dating (movie theaters, etc) -- and so I've still got a soft spot for the early House Of The Dead games, Carnival, and Area 51. The "House Of The Dead 2 & 3" compilation for the Wii is pretty good too, with that crazy voice acting and translation -- though the games themselves are un-retouched. We always fall into a cackle of laughter when a lady being chased by a zombie is clearly trying to communicate "Go away!" but keeps yelling "Don't come! Don't come!". We're childish, but it's funny, and the Wiimote setup works better than I would have expected for the game.

I've got a Master System (well, the box just says Base System, *hangs head*) and a Light Phaser, so I've been looking to try more of those games, but have only really spent time with Safari Hunt. It's a lot of fun, but I feel like the aim on the gun requires a little more weird precision, so I'm getting used to it. The way people talk about Rambo III makes me want to go pick it up, along with Missile Defense 3-D.

Edited March 27, 2016 by mikey.shake