Anyone have ideas on why there aren’t more of these point and shoot at home games? I loved the ones I played as a kid. It always felt like something relegated to arcades
It was a major genre on the Wii. The Wii Zapper was an optional attachment that gave the WiiMote a pistol grip. Titles off the top of my head include CoD III, Metroid Prime 3: Corruption, Resident Evil: The Umbrella Cronicles, Resident Evil: The Darkside Chronicles, and House of Dead II & III Return.
I think the main reason that it never took off much was that it kinda sucked. It worked great when it worked, but the tracking was often glitchy and it was super frustrating when you're counting bullets to have the occasionally shot go offscreen. I have a feeling we had a higher tolerance for this with Duck Hunt due to the novelty and arcade games due to the format. (I feel like arcade games tend to avoid showing you a reticle for this very reason, but I don't have data to back this up.)
That being said, I still ended up beating Metroid and both Resident Evils, so they were still super fun!
Also, I was in Dave and Busters recently and they had Time Crisis 5. Beat that too!
FWIW, I had until now completely forgotten that I was playing these games at home, on a PC with a "shooter" experience.
They were mouse controlled, but I had a gyration air mouse -- (with the clever thing of instead of requiring infrared, it just had a 3rd button that had to be depressed for actual movement)
I'm surprised you call it glitchy. I heard elsewhere that Resident Evil 4 on Wii was easier than the GameCube original because the aiming was more precise than with a stick.
They can both be true! It worked great probably 97% of the time, but the 3% where it flicked 20px to the left for a frame or lost tracking entirely add up over the course of a boss fight. Missing when using a joysticks feels like a skill issue. Missing when using the WiiMote could be frustrating.
LCD televisions became popular which don't work with old light guns. We might have the sinden gun now but it kind of came too late, i don't think you can play much on it except for old/emulated games. although there was the Wii so i think people getting bored of light gun games could be a factor, they are all quite similar after all.
There might not be many new games, but for the old games getting a used crt is free and the consoles are cheap too! I’ve been playing through the ps2 light gun games and it really does feel like you’ve got an arcade at home.
The CRT requirement has pleasantly eroded recently.
A kickstarter a few years back for the Sinden light gun [1] realized that by using webcams, some quick image processing and perspective transforms, you could make a light gun work anywhere and could get real-time performance on non-CRTs by essentially adding a small border region of the screen, making it work on essentially any monitor. He filmed and wrote extensive technical breakdowns about the build process and mechanics at play, which were great.
The maker also seems to have had a solid understanding of what made those old light gun games cool, because he made sure to build versions with solenoid-based recoil as well as the big chunky metal foot pedal you’d use for games like time crisis.
Sinden is no longer the way to go. Most lightgun enthusiasts have now gone the Gun4IR route [0]. It uses the IR sensor from a WiiMote plus a microcontroller in the gun (either a gutted commercial controller like the PS Guncon, a modified Nerf or similar, or something straight up 3d printed) and four IR LEDs placed around a monitor / TV at the midpoints of each each. This system is extremely accurate and there is no flashing border around the screen like with Sinden. Unfortunately, the whole shooting match (see what I did there?) is closed source code and (as of now) Window's only for the calibration-based PC software.
The current open source competitor to Gun4IR is the Samco light gun [1]. It uses four LEDs as well, but with two on the top edge and two on the bottom edge of the screen. A couple Wii LED bars will do the job here as well. I don't think it is quite as accurate as the Gun4IR as I don't think it accounts for perspective correction if you move from the position it was originally calibrated at. But...
Sam & a few others are readying a new design called OpenFire [2] that will be at least on par accuracy-wise as Gun4IR and will be fully open source and cross platform. It should be available relatively soon. Pair this with the PiCon [3] and you have a lightgun with a pretty crazy feature set. All the guns mentioned support some kind of solenoid & rumble support, but the PiCon kicks it up a notch with exclusive OpenFire features like an OLED display, NeoPixel LED, accelerometer, and analog joystick.
That's true, but crts are basically free and plug and play while looking extra crispy. I think if you're okay spending a lot more to get an equivalent setup those are good options, but harder to recommend.
"relegated" seems like the wrong word - the best ones IMO were the later arcade versions like Gunblade NY (pivot mounted machine gun style) or the Time Crisis series (big foot pedal to take cover) with special hardware that would be too expensive for home sales.
There were home console versions of most of the Time Crisis games on PlayStation consoles. I think the 3rd and 4th games were on PS3 along with light guns. There were probably about 10-15 games on each console (PS1/PS2/PS3) which supported light guns. Although I don't think the home console versions had foot pedals, instead using a button or gun movement to achieve the same thing.
Some dedicated players with soldering irons may have hooked up a simple pedal switch across the gun's "cover" switch. Omg how I loved Time Crisis and arcades in general. Sigh.
You could buy third party guns that had pedals though. I had one that also came with a cool realistic moving thing at the top that made cool shooting sounds when you pulled the trigger....and gave you a massive headache after a while.
I think the main reason that it never took off much was that it kinda sucked. It worked great when it worked, but the tracking was often glitchy and it was super frustrating when you're counting bullets to have the occasionally shot go offscreen. I have a feeling we had a higher tolerance for this with Duck Hunt due to the novelty and arcade games due to the format. (I feel like arcade games tend to avoid showing you a reticle for this very reason, but I don't have data to back this up.)
That being said, I still ended up beating Metroid and both Resident Evils, so they were still super fun!
Also, I was in Dave and Busters recently and they had Time Crisis 5. Beat that too!