Over on Wii, however, the genre was thriving.
#TIME CRISIS PC GAME PS4#
In many ways TC4’s PS4 release seemed to herald the end, showcased perfectly in the hideous design of Namco’s GunCon 3 accessory, breaking a streak of iconic PlayStation light guns with a hideous design that welded a Wii Nunchuk onto the front of the gun, a concession for those previously-mentioned add-on modes designed to pad out the package. I barely played Time Crisis 4, a game I’d clocked in arcades many times, because I was too lazy to mess around with sensors. People couldn’t be bothered with that stuff. Sales of light gun games in that generation proved the dark truth. That’s why in actual arcades, modern shooting machines such as the newest House of the Dead have enormous bezels around the screen - it hides the sensors. That’s why the genre was so prevalent on Wii, where a sensor bar was an integral part of the console setup.
#TIME CRISIS PC GAME PS3#
That’s why, if you bought one of the rare PS3 light-gun games, you had to dangle a bunch of crap around your TV to play. As the world switched to flat-screen LCD and LED displays, light guns had a problem: the traditional mechanism by which the gun registers where you’re pointing on-screen flat-out doesn’t work on modern displays.
It wasn’t all the fault of the games, however. The release of a bunch of all-timer FPS games can’t have helped, either - things like Halo 3 and Call of Duty 4 were providing the cinematic thrills that were previously the purview of arcade shooters. Some games stuffed in extra modes to try to make up for it - slightly rubbish first-person-shooter style extras that arguably dragged the rest of the package down. In the mid-2000s titles like Time Crisis 4 and a slew of Wii light gun shooters were released - but at a time when games were bloating in size, length, and complexity, the hour-long rollercoaster of an arcade light gun game with some extra bonuses seemed a less than generous value proposition. It is fair to say that the games were partially to blame. To see this content please enable targeting cookies. The most suffering of all genres is the light gun shooter - and it isn’t even completely the fault of the games.
Arcade sports games feel to have fallen out of the mainstream - indie efforts appear from time to time, but I wonder if we’ll ever get a game like NBA Jam, Red Card Football, or NFL Blitz ever again.īut, no. What types of games have suffered a painful decline to the point where the genre barely exists any more? Brawlers, perhaps - Final Fight’s characters now live inside Street Fighter, and attempts to revive Golden Axe have stalled - though one could argue a certain breed of 3D character action game is descended from them, and last year we had a solid revival in Streets of Rage 4.