<p>Last year Twisted Pixel released the cowboy game <em>The Gunstringer</em> which had a DLC add-on called <em>The Wavy Tubeman Chronicles</em>. <em>Tubeman</em> was a parody of the 1990 arcade game <em>Mad Dog McCree</em>, and many younger gamers were no doubt left out of the joke, while their older counterparts felt a surge of nostalgia for the days of the coin-op arcades.</p>
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<p>Long ago when Video Tapes ruled the Earth, there was a fad in which game designers made video games using footage of real-live human actors recorded on “Laserdisks”, a primitive ancestor of the DVD. This was before digital video was common, and the Laserdisk game trend stuck around for a few years in the mid 90’s when computers had enough power to show digitized video, but weren’t capable of depicting realistic 3D graphics.</p>
<p>This was also the time when light gun games were quite popular and players shoveled fistfuls of quarters into machines to blast away at virtual monsters (The cool players would put in two quarters at a time so that they could use two light guns at once). It was inevitable that the two genres of gaming would intersect, and they did so more than once.</p>
<p>Developer American Laser Games put out a bunch of such games. They varied in terms of setting; some were done in the manner of a film noir detective movie, others were science fiction, but their first was the cowboy shooter <em>Mad Dog McCree</em>.</p>
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<p>Despite the innovative use of live actors on movie sets, all of these games were still essentially on-rails light gun shooters. In <em>Mad Dog</em> players watched scenes of western townsfolk going about their business then, suddenly, outlaws would emerge and draw their sixguns. Players then had a split second to react and shoot the bad guys. It worked very well in the arcades, but usually light gun games didn’t fare very well on home consoles due to the high cost of the gun accessories. With the modern advent of motion-sensitive controllers and touch screens, this genre is getting a resurgence.</p>
<p><em>Mad Dog McCree</em> has been adapted for PC’s and it hit the Nintendo Wii too. It’s now on the 3DS eStore as a fun throwback to the old days.</p>
<p>It makes a good use of the 3DS dual screen, the video plays on the top screen while players aim by touching the lower screen then hitting the shoulder buttons to fire their gun. While this works fine, it doesn’t make use of the accelerometer for aiming – something that’s always welcomed on portable games.</p>
<p>It’s a port, not a recreation, so it uses the original video shot decades ago. This holds up rather well on the small 3DS screen without looking pixilated. Unfortunately the video was intended to be played on a huge screen in a coin-op arcade cabinet, so the small screen makes it very hard to see enemies who appear at a distance. A couple of sequences put the player up against such tiny, nigh-imperceptible dots.</p>
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<p>The sound wasn’t transferred nearly as well. The dialog is fuzzy requires the game to be played in noiseless rooms, or with very high-quality headphones. This is a major problem on a portable system where gamers are likely to be playing on the go with the sound turned off.</p>
<p>There aren’t any subtitles either, which seems like an obvious solution. Some of the dialog is important to doing well in the game, so missing hints about the order of places to visit will be very frustrating.</p>
<p>As with most light gun games, <em>Mad Dog McCree</em> is a very linear game. There’s a slight randomized element to it, but most levels will have enemies appearing in the same places each time, reducing it to trial and error. Players can choose the sequence in which certain levels are played, but that is the extent of player choice.</p>
<p>It’s very short too. The whole thing can be played through in under half an hour. It has several difficulty levels, and there are a few alternative scenes but most of these require the player to die or kill a civilian.</p>
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<p>Once through it a couple of times there is little reason to come back for more of <em>Mad Dog</em> <em>McCree</em>. It is a fun downloadable title, and the cowboy movie footage is still novel in a campy way, so gamers who’ve never tried a laserdisc game will get a lesson in gaming history from it. Older gamers who remember <em>Mad Dog</em> from the arcade will probably have more fun with it, especially if they’ve had a crush on a certain saloon gal for the last twenty years</p>

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“(The cool players would put in two quarters at a time so that they could use two light guns at once).”
Ha, the cool players would put two quarters into different machines. Playing both slots on the same machine is only impressive these days if the game is Ikaruga.
“It worked very well in the arcades, but usually light gun games didn’t fare very well on home consoles due to the high cost of the gun accessories.”
Though not quite as badly as on home computers where the ability to use a mouse kind of made a mockery of the entire concept.
It also didn’t help that the Super Scope and Menacer were both huge clunky blocks of plastic that ate AAs for breakfast and were about as ergonomic as a chair made of pineapples.
Still, the main problem that these games always had was that they were primarily designed for people to play once, empty their wallet and then never look at again. Once you allow the player limitless access to an arcade shooter it tends to become a matter of route memorisation rather than fast reaction, which is why the franchises designed for home gaming introduced rewards or score-chaining systems to provide some replay value. And tended to throw out the ridiculous difficulty spikes such games used to have when they were gently trying to tell you it was time for the guy standing behind you to have a go.