Ugh, I had a snack right now Time Crisis and I was very pleased. Oh wait! An afternoon of vice Point Blank… Here are stored a PSX with all its cables, both games with its immaculate box and a brand new one Guncon. Too bad I don't have a tube TV.
Nothing good can come of such a thought on a Saturday afternoon. So whether it be out of pity, out of laughter, out of empathy or out of curiosity, accompany me on my fall to a pit of lamentation in a spiral of nostalgia, abandoned forums, Kickstarter projects and tears. Many tears.
Longing to have an arcade at home
I don't know how I got to that point and what motivated it, but there I was, jumping from forum to forum through links that were too old to end up leading to something good. The thing is, I really wanted to Time Crisis -with an emphasis on a lot of desire- and meeting people with the same desire was not making things easier.
Crying about how Namco he had abandoned his plastic pistols for PlayStation after a third edition of his mythical Guncon on PS3 they still resonate at the dawn of the internet and, as in the case of the plastic instruments that probably helped its disappearance, the return of the peripheral is a cloud of rumors
The last game in the saga, Time Crisis 5, appeared in the form of an arcade for the Japanese market back in 2015 and, to find any glimpse of the franchise on consoles, it is necessary to go even further back, until 2010 with the launch of Razing Storm in PS3.
The company clung to even the oddities to try to keep the flame alive. Came to launch a game for iOS that could be controlled with another device, like a gun with a specific application. Nothing to do with the original experience and also not something that would become the salvation of the saga.
The Fashion of Light Guns
For those of you who missed this wonderful idea, the light guns were a peripheral that captured in fractions of a second where you were aiming at the screen and reacting to the shot. The invention, an idea with 70 years behind it, became the protagonist of arcade rooms to make way for home versions of almost all consoles.
Spectrum had its own, NES too, and almost every console from that era that comes to mind had a similar clunker, from Megadrive to Dreamcast to the first Xbox. But with permission from all of them, and the Nintendo Zapper
For its precision when shooting, even to be able to kill a fly in mid-flight in one of the minigames of Point Blank, the Guncon It became one of those peripherals that any arcade fanatic should have.
Exchanging the pedal you found in the saloon machines for a button on its side, games like Time Crisis They would allow you to peek out and hide at pleasure on the parapets to protect yourself from bullets. Shooting off the screen, you reloaded the weapon to continue eliminating putties, final bosses and fighting the clock.
The nail in the coffin
If you have never had the opportunity to try a pot like this, I assure you that it is as fun as it sounds. So much so that consoles, especially in the case of Guncon and PlayStation, were filled with titles intended to take advantage of it.
15 franchise-based titles like Resident Evil, The Crystal Jungle or Ghostbusters they landed on the first PSX. PS2 was followed by a similar number but, in the case of PS3, the catalog of compatible games decreased in a brutal way because it was in the wrong time and place.
The Gun Pack and the Game Time Crisis 4 He had the bad luck of jumping from the arcade to the console in the middle of the fever of the early years of Wii, and the novelty of Nintendo ended up poking at the classic shooting without leaving even the remains. A grave he just dug Playstation move, device compatible with two of the three games released on the machine.
"We had planned to create a new one, without cables. We did not get to do it because of the arrival of Move around the same dates. It was useless to do something that would only serve for one game, while with Move you can enjoy many".
The GunCon 3 It was the only pistol to jump from tube TVs to plasma and LCD screens thanks to markers that were placed to the left and right of the TV, but it had nothing to do in a revolution that had already been crowned by detection cameras. and bars with sensors.
Alternatives to GunCon
At this point one could imagine that, even without a light gun but with Playstation move, there is some way to replay these classics, but nothing is further from reality. Not even the tricks based on emulators, bars with a USB sensor and the use of the Wiimote on PC have managed to create a drinkable experience to enjoy these games.
After much diving and encountering details about precision, calibration and accessories, any burning nail to hold on to vanished in my hands as I jumped from link to link. Using the mouse as a pistol in the case of PC, or Wii games that tried to keep fashion alive, are the only two drinkable options and moderately accessible today.
The great hope is now placed in the virtual reality, which has somewhat maintained that spirit of rail shooters with more or less similar experiences, but they are still a patch far from what one might expect.
Fortunately, there are still brave people with resources capable of turning the omelette around. The project Sinden Lightgun Kickstarter, a pistol compatible with LCD screens with a system similar to that of GunCon 3, could have us playing the also rumored remakes of House of the Dead sooner rather than later, but for now the only thing we can hold onto is hope. Cross your fingers and don't lose faith.
Oh, and if you have a tube TV, save it as gold in cloth.
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