The light gun shooter is a bit of an endangered video game genre these days.
When arcades were flourishing you couldn’t move for them, and their popularity inevitably led to home equivalents – whether it was Nintendo’s Zapper, Super Scope and Wii Zapper, Sega’s Light Phaser and Menacer, or the offerings from third-party publishers like the Konami Justifier or Namco GunCon, there was a time when pointing a plastic weapon at your telly was a perfectly common sight.
These days home light gun shooters are far rarer to see. This is down to a number of factors, but the most obvious one for retro players is the change in how televisions work. When old CRT TVs were phased out in favour of modern LCD and LED displays, all those old light guns were no longer compatible because the screens refresh in completely different ways now. Plug a PS1 into your current flatscreen TV and your Namco G-Con 45 simply won’t work with it.
One company attempting to solve this issue is Tassei Denki, a Tokyo-based manufacturer which usually specialises in third-party controllers and other console peripherals. Its latest product, G’AIM’E, is a light gun designed for modern televisions, and it’s an interesting little device that may be pricey for what it offers out of the box, but is hiding at least one surprise that could make it more suitable for a different audience.
G’AIM’E is available in three different bundles – Basic, Premium and Ultimate. Here’s a general run-down of what each set offers:
Basic Pack (£99.99)
- 1 G’AIM’E light gun
- Mini console
- 1 game – Time Crisis
- HDMI cable
- Power cable (no adapter)
Premium Pack (£149.99)
- 1 G’AIM’E light gun
- Mini console
- 1 Foot pedal
- 4 games – Time Crisis, Point Blank, Steel Gunner, Steel Gunner 2
- HDMI cable
- Power cable (no adapter)
- Time Crisis pin badge
Ultimate Pack (£199.99)
- 2 G’AIM’E light guns
- Mini console
- 1 Foot pedal
- 4 games – Time Crisis, Point Blank, Steel Gunner, Steel Gunner 2
- HDMI cable
- Power cable
- Power adapter
- Time Crisis pin badge
- Time Crisis acrylic diorama stand
Having three SKUs is perhaps a bit overkill, especially considering that the Basic Pack is a fairly bare-bones experience that only comes with one game and doesn’t include the foot pedal that it was originally played with in arcades. There’s an argument to be made that the Premium and Ultimate Packs would have been enough.
Plug in the mini console and turn it on for the first time – the HDMI and power cables are comically short, but at least the gun and pedal cables are comically long, so you can still get very far from your TV if needed – and you’ll be given an introductory video showing you how to set everything up (including how to plug it in and turn it on, which seems redundant by that point).
You’re then presented with a calibration screen where you have to point the gun at eight different targets and shoot each one three times. The gun’s barrel contains a camera inside it, and by calibrating it you’re essentially setting the dimensions of your TV so the camera can adapt accordingly. Tassei Denki claims this is accomplished using “advanced AI technology” but that has the whiff of buzzwordery about it so let’s not dwell on that too much.
In terms of performance, G’AIM’E is generally fairly accurate but not to the level that the arcade originals were. These games were originally built around an entirely different control system – the controllers may still have been guns but the way they operated was nothing like this – and so what G’AIM’E is trying to do is emulate that to the best of its ability.
“G’AIM’E is generally fairly accurate but not to the level that the arcade originals were. These games were originally built around an entirely different control system – the controllers may still have been guns but the way they operated was nothing like this – and so what G’AIM’E is trying to do is emulate that to the best of its ability.”
The reality, however, is that an old-school light gun aimed at a CRT display is always going to be more accurate and faster than a gun with a camera built into it, tracking an invisible cursor on a modern TV (which will also inherently have more input lag than older televisions).
In fact, G’AIM’E actually includes an option to make this even clearer. Players can turn on a tiny blue cursor while playing Time Crisis, and while it’s very difficult to see you can at least note that it jumps around a little at times. Given the calibration process your mileage will obviously vary, but I tried my best under optimal lighting conditions and with nothing else around that could interfere with the camera, and still found that the accuracy was good, but not perfect.
What does this mean in practice? Basically, if you’re the type of crackshot who could take out enemy scum with one or two shots in the arcades, it could now take you two or three shots to hit them instead. For the most part this isn’t the end of the world, but nor is it flawless. There are certain rare situations – such as the infamous Point Blank stage where you have to shoot a falling leaf with a single shot – where you’re basically at the mercy of luck as to whether you’re going to hit the target first time, but for the most part it’s serviceable without necessarily being 100% authentic. It’s certainly a lot better than using a controller or a mouse instead.
In terms of the games on offer, the four titles available in the Premium and Ultimate Packs are all solid light gun shooters. Time Crisis is an iconic title which graced many an arcade and Point Blank’s comedy mini-games lend a carnival feeling to proceedings. Steel Gunner and Steel Gunner 2, meanwhile, are less well-known but are also entertaining shooters, and the fact that both games have you moving a crosshair around – as was the case in their arcade form – means your shots are a lot more accurate when you can see where you’re aiming.
It’s hard to avoid the fact that four games still isn’t a hell of a lot, even if buying all four as arcade cabinets would set you back significantly more than a couple of hundred quid. Even though there’s clearly been a licensing deal with Bandai Namco here, there are plenty more Namco shooters that could have featured in this compilation, such as Time Crisis 2, Point Blank 2, Golly Ghost, Crisis Zone or Ninja Assault.
The fact that the G’AIM’E console is not designed to be updated with more games is very disappointing, and it means that should G’AIM’E become successful enough to warrant follow-ups, you’re looking at buying another set – or at the very least another of the mini consoles – if you want to play more games.
Here’s where I come to the hidden surprise G’AIM’E has to offer, though – and to be clear, the product doesn’t advertise this as a feature in any way, nor does the official website say it’s even possible – you can plug the gun into a PC and it works there too. What basically happens is that when you plug the G’AIM’E gun into a PC, it acts like a mouse, with the camera moving the cursor around and the trigger acting as the left mouse button.
What this means is that any PC light gun shooter which allows mouse controls can also be played with the G’AIM’E gun, because as you move the gun around it moves the aiming cursor around. This also means it can extend to emulation, so if you have an emulator that also lets you use a mouse to replicate a GunCon, Zapper, Menacer or what have you, you’ll be able to use the G’AIM’E for that too (after reassigning its buttons to suit that particular system).
There are some caveats here, because it’s not quite a flawless plug and play situation. The main issue is that whatever you previously set the gun’s calibration to will remain in place when you plug it into the PC, so when I first tried it the cursor was all over the place as it suddenly went from my 65” TV to my 21” monitor.
What this means is that in order to get the gun working properly on a PC, you’ll have to calibrate it to work with your monitor – either by plugging the G’AIM’E mini console directly into the monitor’s HDMI port (if it has one), or by plugging it into your PC’s capture device (if it has one). Do either of these and you’ll get the calibration screen on your monitor, allowing you to recalibrate the gun for your smaller screen.
Alternatively, if you’re lucky enough to have your PC near your TV you can do what I did – run an HDMI cable between them, feed the PC picture into your TV and play your PC games on that without having to recalibrate it at all.
This surprise feature is the potential saving grace for the G’AIM’E, because suddenly you’re going from buying either the £149.99 or £199.99 set to only play four games, to only needing to buy the basic £99.99 set to have a recoiling gun that works on any PC game with mouse controls. This also puts it in competition with some other PC light guns, such as the Sinden, which is £139.99 with recoil and puts a white box around the screen for calibration (but is a little more accurate).
The result of all this is a delightfully awkward conclusion where our recommendation for the G’AIM’E set depends on what you plan to do with it. As a standalone product that only plays one or four games (depending on the set you buy) with no option of increasing its library, it’s a very expensive proposition, but as a PC light gun that theoretically works with a bunch of emulators as long as you’re willing to tinker with the settings, suddenly it feels like better value for money.
It’s never going to be better than the original – light gun games are just one of those few things that will always remain better played on original hardware and an instantly responsive CRT screen – but in terms of modern alternatives, it could be a lot worse.
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