Wild Gunman
NES Game Reviews #28 – Wild Gunman
CRT televisions have many advantage over modern displays when it comes to retro gaming, but the ability to play light-gun based games is perhaps the most obvious. Light guns work by manipulating the scan-rate of a CRT tele. Wild Gunman has a target on screen. When you press the trigger, you cause the screen to flash briefly. If your aim is true you’ll hit the marker. There is no scan-rate for a flat-screen tv, so the game is unable to know where you’ve aimed at the screen, ergo you’ll always miss.
Light gun games were a staple of the early systems and The NES had a handful of compatible games, most fondly remembered is of course Duck Hunt, however to start things off I went with Wild Gunman.
The premise is very simple: Wild West gunslinging duel. Beat your opponent in a quick fire duel to the death! (Well not death actually, this is Nintendo, you simply shoot off their hats or somehow knock their trousers down).
Having chosen the single player duel, I was tasked with completing 99 duels in a row in order to complete the game. After phase 99, the games simply reverts back to phase 1. There’s no end screen to congratulate you, just back to the start. While you will need to pay attention at first, after a while you release the game is limited to duel no faster than 0.40 of a second. So as long as you can shoot faster then that (my average was around 0.28) then you’ll win everytime. Occasionally if I let my concentration slip too much, i’d find myself hitting as slow as 0.70 but luckily that was never against a faster opponent and 0.70 was sufficient.
Really, completing 99 phases is merely more of an endurance test than a challenge. I slipped on some vinyl and muted the game sound. I fear that later light guns may not be so forgiving!
Since besting this I realize it was unnecessary to beat up to phase 99. Instead beating the fastest duel of 0.4 of a second would have sufficed as that’s where the gameplay will loop presumably.
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