I have in the past bemoaned the death of lightgun games. They remain, by and large, dead, but let’s see if we can’t cheaply dig the corpse up and make it parade around for us through the wonders of emulation, wiimotes, and dirt cheap IR bars.
Welcome to Esk Computers, I’m Scott and today on the desk of Esk, let’s get nigh-on every lightgun game ever working on our PC and see if we can’t get something approaching an arcade experience without breaking the bank.
If you’re old like me you probably know what a light gun is and how it works, but seeing as they were largely made extinct by the move away from CRT displays, any youngsters who have strayed in might not. Thankfully it’s not that deep, so it won’t take long to tell you that pretty much every early home light gun from the ZX Spectrum’s dismal Magnum through the Super Nintendo’s bizarre Superscope lightbazooka to the Playstation’s G-Cons work in pretty much the same way.
By and large, they made the game very quickly black out the screen and redraw the target hitboxes in white when you pull the trigger, and a light sensor in the gun can then tell if you’re aiming at something or not. Knowing what you’ve hit relies on the scanline nature of the way CRTs incrementally draw the screen, so they can’t work with modern displays.
The solution is the magic of infra red light, as seen on the Playstation 3’s G-Con 3 and the subject of today’s tech ramble the Wii’s Wiimote. These slap a few IR light emitters around the edges of your display, and detectors in the device can be used to triangulate what you’re pointing at. I’d not want to control an operating system this way, but it’s just accurate enough for the purposes of virtual shootybangs.
There’s other solutions, for example old arcade cabinets like Operation Wolf’s permanently mounted gun is more or less a pre-calibrated analogue joystick. The fancy Sinden Lightgun uses cameras and maths, and is probably the way to go for compatibility with the Mister box, but it costs the best part of a ton, and I’m cheap. Let’s see if we can’t get this working on a budget.
Like everyone on the planet, I had a Wii back in the day, and unlike everyone, I didn’t sell it. Indeed, a very short form of this video is just plugging my Wii back into the telly, given the good number of good lightgun games released on it and the homebrew scene’s strides in emulation. But it can’t handle some of the fancier arcade games, so let’s just lift a Wiimote and get it hooked up to my PC. There’s no cost to me for this, but if you did need to buy one it’ll run you about £15 on Bay, and not a huge amount more for a complete system.
However the Wii’s IR bar doesn’t plug into a USB port. For our purposes, there’s no communication over that connection, just power, so we could probably hack up this cable and a USB cable and create some unholy fusion. However, I’ll need this for my Wii one day, and besides, this ready made USB IR bar from eBay cost me about five quid. Or to be exact, the catchily named “USB Remote Motion Sensor Bar IR Infrared Ray Inductor for Dolphin Wii Emulator” cost £4.33 on the 9th of September.
This is the cheapest way get this working. There’s a slight wrinkle in that some PC’s Bluetooth chipsets don’t work all that well with Wiimotes, which might require either buying a more compatible Bluetooth dongle for about ten quid, or perhaps going with the neater but slightly more expensive solution of a Mayflash Dolphinbar, which essentially combines a dedicated Bluetooth connection and an IR Bar, powered over USB. It’s about £20, and seems an elegant solution but, hey, I’m on a budget here.
Let’s get the Wiimote connected to the PC. We’ll need to set the PC looking for it, but not in exactly the usual way. in the Bluetooth & Devices Settings menu, we’ll need to scroll down to the View more devices and More devices and printer settings in order to bring up this Windows 7 era menu, then go to add device. Either hold down buttons 1 & 2 or press the red sync button inside the battery compartment, and it should eventually show up and let you connect without entering a PIN, which the newer style menus don’t.
We’ll need to install a piece of software called Lichtknarre from the geekonarium.de website, extracting the zip file and installing the executable. We want the “Tracker Plugin → Wii 2 LED Tracker” option. Now we need to define what we want the input translated into, so we’ll select the “Mouse” Connector plugin, which someone as smart as you has already figured out makes it show up as a mouse in Windows.
After a quick run through the calibration wizard, aiming at various screen positions we can test that it’s broadly accurate in the desktop, albeit not the most ergonomic pointing device. But who amongst us hasn’t wanted to shoot Excel at one point or another. I did have to stand quite a bit further back from the screen than I expected, at roughly two meters, which in the shoebox of this combined office, studio, gym, spare bedroom, and storage space is practically out of the door.
Now that we’ve confirmed that this is working, I can drop the wiimote back inside this vaguely ridiculous House of the Dead Overkill Hand Cannon shell thing. However first, the rubberised texture on the hand grip has started to return to the oil from whence it came and is disgustingly sticky, so we must clean that off with some alcohol and elbow grease. Gross, but quickly enough done, and the end result is pleasing.
This video isn’t the time or place to get into fully installing and setting up the emulators we’re using today, or how to 100% legally and ethically source the games we’ll be playing, wink, wink. I’m sure someone as smart as you has already figured that out. In terms of getting this lightgun up and running, as far as Windows is concerned its just a mouse, so it’s fairly straightforward.
For example, this is TeknoParrot, which installs like any other app. We just have to point it in the direction of the game we’re interested in, this is Jurassic Park Arcade. In the controller settings, we map gun x and y to mouse x and y, the trigger to the Wiimote’s B button, grenade to Wiimote A, with insert coin and start on the 1 and 2 buttons, and off we go.
Depressingly this 2015 release is one of the more recent lightgun games released, at over a decade old. I miss arcades. Anyway, while there’s been a few spectacular Jurassic Park licenced shooters over the years, the pedestrianly named Jurassic Park Arcade is both the most recent and most spectacular. It is quite the treat, and I enjoyed this dinoblaster a lot. Purely in terms of my setup, I’m a bit too far back with a bit too small of a screen for it to be ideal, but it’s still fun. It would be better on the big living room telly, though.
This effectively concludes the education portion of this video, the rest of it will just be me shooting stuff in a whistlestop history of lightgun games. Of late, this seems to be the only way I can carve out time to actually play games, and there’s also not much to say about any them other than “I enjoyed shooting baddies in this game while avoiding shooting the goodies”, so forgive the indulgence. Oh, and for complete radical transparency, I’m using a mouse as a controller in a few of these captures mainly so I didn’t have to keep standing up and sitting down. I’m old, knees are a wear and tear item, and mine are already both worn and torn.
Starting back in the mists of time, this is Bronx Street Cop, a budget shooting gallery game for the ZX Spectrum. This was originally a bundled game with the Cheetah Defender lightgun, but I’m pretty sure I got the 1990 Virgin Mastertronic re-release for two or three quid. It’s basic shooting gallery stuff, but well done and presented as well as you can expect given the Speccy’s limitations. Still solid thirty six years on.
Duck Hunt for the Nintendo Entertainment Famicom won’t need much of an introduction. It was released in Japan in 1984, but didn’t appear in Europe, officially at least, until 1987. It looks better than the Speccy game, arguably, although it’s actually got less in the way of variety. I never owned this or a NES for that matter back in the day, but a quick blast of this on in-shop demonstration systems was always a highlight, so it’s in for nostalgia reasons alone.
This is Rescue Mission on the Sega Master System, which to be honest I’d not heard of until researching this video. Probably because I didn’t own a Master System, funny that. It’s a fun game, even if it is essentially an escort mission.
Heading off to the proper arcades now, and surely the coin guzzling Operation Wolf needs little introduction as you relitigate the Vietnam war single handed. It’s not quite the same experience without the cabinet mounted Uzi, but it’s still fun and a foundational game in the genre.
With Virtua Cop we’re getting into the cusp of the era of games that are just plain good and don’t need nostalgia goggles to enjoy, although I expect some younger pups are wondering where the textures have gone. I believe this is one of the earliest light gun games that rewards accuracy, for shooting guns out of these criminal scum’s hands. Eclipsed by it’s sequels, but this Model Two game was a sensation in the arcades alongside the earlier Model One’s Virtua Racing and Virtua Fighter and is still worth playing.
Namco’s Time Crisis was their response to Virtua Cop, and also a real pillar of the genre. This is the second outing, and for this the crucial ducking function is mapped to a button, functional but not quite the same experience as having the foot pedal. If you’re serious about this game, there are solutions for that but they’re pricey, or there’s always the cheap solution of buying a cheap sacrificial keyboard, mapping the space bar to duck and then stomping on it until it breaks. However you work it out, this is good darts.
House of the Dead 2 couldn’t not be in the list, a really tremendous Dreamcast and Arcade zombie themed shooter with the famously wooden voice acting. I’m sure you’re familiar with it so I won’t labour the issue. For me it’s a toss-up between this and Overkill for best non-typing game in the franchise.
Staying with the Dreamcast and Naomi systems, Confidential Mission is something of a James Bond-esque, Spy-themed spiritual successor to Virtua Cop, and while it’s by no means obscure I feel it maybe doesn’t get quite the respect that it deserves. It’s really good, give it a look if you haven’t already.
Returning to bizarrely monikered emulator TeknoParrot for another recent arcade game that didn’t get any home ports. I say recent, Alien: Extermination appeared in 2006. But, y’know, it’s all relative. It’s quite a visual leap, and the Alien franchise lends itself well to this sort of shooty behaviour. We’ve already covered Jurassic Park Arcade, but this emulator can play more unported games like Rambo and Let’s Go Jungle.
Right, that’s enough of that. There’s plenty of other great games in the genre I’ve not touched on, and that wasn’t my top ten or anything. If you’re just getting into this you’ll also want to look at the Point Blank series, LA Machineguns, Terminator 2 Arcade, and the rest of the games in the franchises we’ve already mentioned.
My other avenue for exploration is to move this into the futuristic cyberspace of Virtual Reality, and maybe see if we can’t do this better with a magic science helmet strapped to our bonce.
In the meanwhile, if you have any questions or want further details please leave a comment down below, and if you enjoyed this videotronic missive then consider subscribing. Until next time, take care of yourself, and each other.