So I dropped most of my Christmas money on game discs and .. more guns. The only thing that stopped my spending spree was discovering that all the rest of the games were super expensive and also that my laptop power supply broke, so I had to spend the rest of my money on that.
The purpose of this page is to share with you all my info and skills on being awesome with a lightgun, so you can impress all your friends and win over all the gamer people at the arcade to respect you. I'll also give you info on some of the traps that are waiting out there; games that seem to be light gun games but aren't really, and things like that.
Evaluation of the guns:
The Super Cobra looked a lot cooler, but the gun was also much much heavier to hold than the Lunar Gun. This might not seem like a problem, but after playing for about 45 minutes with your arms held in front of you, even a couple more ounces seems like pounds in the end. The light effects were nice, and the fact that there were slide switches for the settings rather than a weird "Hold the start button and pull the trigger twice while you are holding it to set up the autofire and everything" directions from the Lunar Gun.
The Lunar gun was fun to play with, but it was scary looking at the cursor jitter around on the calibration screen for Project Horned Owl. In the actual game, the gun was a lot better, even though it did seem to drift. After a while, I gave up trying to shoot by aiming with the pretty wide gunsight and I just started blasting at everything by feel. Then it was really cool.
Although the game seemed easy, it was actually difficult. With blocky building graphics reminiscent of Ridge Racer in the first level, I sort of expected fast and furious shooting action. It was a big surprise when I discovered that the game is set at a pretty laid-back pace. You have to reload by either shooting outside the screen (or if you have a controller, moving the cursor to the edge of the screen). This makes it kind of a timing puzzle when you use the controller, since you have to get out of the middle of the screen and back again in between each volley. Fortunately the clips held a lot of ammo, so you only have to reload often near the end of the game, where it really heats up.
The biggest surprise in the game was discovering the length that the levels go on. After shooting at robots for ten minutes, I was sure that I had missed something and gotten in a glitched endless loop or something. But the game ACTUALLY HAS LEVELS that seem to go on FOREVER. So unlike Time Crisis 3, for example, you will have to play the same scenerio for maybe five or ten minutes before you get the boss fight. This makes the game seem very long. This is a good thing in the Lightgun world, since the games tend to be really short.
A lot of people say this game was too easy, but I thought it was kind of nice to sit back and relax with a bit of wild gunplay. And there were a lot of complaints that the graphics were kind of low quality. These were well founded; the game programmers liked to use really low resolution textures for much of the game. The look, however, was consistent, with basically everything in the game having bright colors and interesting reactions when shot. The breaking glass wasn't quite ONE style, but it was certainly cool by me. It was fun to shoot the parked cars and signs in the airport and watch them break in between shooting robots.
The big difference in this game as compared to the other gun games that I have played is that the bullets take a long time to go into the TV. Instead of instantly hitting whatever you are aiming at, you actually have to lead distant targets that are moving tangentially by quite a lot. This makes it hard to hit all of the robots in each stage. It's not a big big problem for the dangerous ones, though, because most of them are pretty close to the front of the TV before they start shooting.
The biggest problem with this game is that it is super hard to understand the storyline. I didn't read the manual and bet that I could follow enough just by watching the cutscenes, but I only ended up getting confused. Maybe it will make sense after I read the booklet.
Apparently the new Time Crisis game's Guncon2 doesn't work with the old games, so you have to buy old Guncons to play them. This is a little annoying, but is okay I guess. Although the accuracy of the gun was a little weird, it was actually a lot more stable seeming than the old PSOne gun's stability. I think that you could get the same results by filtering the coordinate results, or averaging three or something. You wouldn't actually need massively cooler new technology. The screen doesn't flash as much when you shoot, but it still flashes.
The gun is molded out of orange plastic and doesn't have an easy place to duct tape a laser pointer onto it. I'm going to buy some cheap ones from eBay and tape them onto the gun anyway, though.
The graphics are very bright, and the colors and textures look a lot cleaner than the old PSOne games. Of course, since it's PS2, it should look better. There weren't any framebuffer effects that I could see in the game. Even in Project Horned Owl there was a little framebuffering right at the end during the final bossfight to add cool looking motion blur type effects.