REVIEW: Hogan's Alley

Game: Hogan's Alley
Original Launch: October 1985
Relaunch: December 2010
Rating: 3 Stars


Do you love light guns but are sick of laughing dogs? Do you think target identification is the best part of a shooter? Do you have difficulty shooting the broad side of a barn? Then Hogan’s Alley may be for you! Hogan’s Alley is a light gun shooter that attempts to replicate a police training simulation. I guess law enforcement standards are slipping because the game allows you a ton of mistakes and the enormous stationary targets are nearly impossible to miss.

PROTIP: Pick GAME C.

You get three game modes to choose from. Hogan’s Alley A is a strict target range simulation with three targets presented. When the targets are revealed, the player will have a limited amount of time to identify and shoot the criminals in the batch. The best thing about this mode is that it actually could help hone your skills on target recognition as a practical skill. However, sticking with the convention of rolling out the targets and then flipping them is tedious and unnecessary. You can expect to spend much more time waiting for targets to slowly roll onto the board than you will spend shooting at them. Imagine Duck Hunt if you had to spend 10 seconds watching the ducks paddle around in a pond before you could shoot them. Also, while the time available to shoot tends to decrease as the rounds go on, it is still variable and may one round may give you significantly less time than the next. It would make more sense if it gradually and steadily decreased as the player progressed.

The Professor and his identical meth head brother.

Hogan’s Alley B is similar to A but has a bit more atmosphere. The target range gets an urban setting and the target layout and behavior changes slightly. This mode is a bit more interesting than the first and it does cut down on the waiting between rounds, but it still gets old pretty quickly. After your first time through the different screens, you will have seen all there is to see. You are still picking targets and avoiding civilians, but when the tedium sets in, it is difficult not to blast everything in sight. Of particular note is the Professor who dresses EXACTLY like one of the gang members in an attempt to draw your fire and bait the department into a costly law suit. If you can avoid shooting him out of spite, you are a better man than I.

This is as good as it ever gets.

They saved the best for last with Trick Shot. In this mode, tin cans will fly onto the screen from the right and you must shoot them to keep them in the air and moving all the way to the gaps on the left side for varying amounts of points. There is a bit of strategy in that the more dangerous lower gap give you more points and it will take quick and accurate shooting to keep scoring. This mode is by far the most entertaining and there is a bit of strategy in how you keep the cans aloft and how to maximize your score. There is plenty of shooting here and the smaller, moving targets does ratchet up the challenge. Probably the best part is that Professor jerk face is nowhere to be found.

It's like using a Colt to sort your recycling.

It’s unfortunate that the main modes of Hogan’s Alley just aren’t much fun. It might be worth some time if you are actually trying to cultivate target recognition skills, but it’s going to take a lot of patience. You have to make 10 mistakes before the game ends, and I’m not sure why the game gives you so many chances. Three would have been sufficient, even for the faster paced Trick Shot mode. Ten chances stretches the games out for far too long. Trick Shot is quite an amusing shooting mini-game, and any enjoyment to be found in Hogan’s Alley is here. If the other modes were as fun, then we could have had a bull-eye here. As it stands, most people will have more fun with Duck Hunt.



Review in a Haiku
Shooting and snoozing.
Self inflicted light gun wounds.
Thank god for the cans.

REVIEW: Duck Hunt / Gyromite

Game: Duck Hunt / Gyromite
Original Launch: October 1985
Relaunch: October 2010
Ratings: Duck Hunt, 6 stars / Gyromite, 2 stars


Nintendo knows. They've always known. It's clear to me now that Nintendo understands and recognizes that video game entertainment is not necessarily confined to a button-based handheld input controller, and that it never has been. Consider the Wii: when it was announced, it was generally lambasted as a novelty. Nintendo had been a distant third behind the PlayStation 2 and Microsoft Xbox in the console war, and appeared to be making a major gaff by presenting a system that offered hardware specs that led many to deride it as little more than Gamecube 1.5, and not a true next-gen successor.

What was truly happening was this: Nintendo was going back to its roots. In October of 1985, Nintendo released the Nintendo Entertainment System, A.K.A. the NES. Knowing that they were entering a market that had just experienced a video game crash, they realized that they had to offer something different. That difference came in the form of a light-gun and a robot, both of which offered new ways for the player to interact with their games. Little did we know at the time, but these were the seeds that would grow into the various interactivity options put forth by Nintendo, eventually leading them back to being the industry leader.

The fuck you laughing at?

The light gun was used by the launch title Duck Hunt. Duck Hunt features three game modes: 1 Duck, 2 Duck, and Clay Shooting. The accuracy of the gun depended upon your distance from your (tube-based) TV. I found that the accuracy overall was pretty good, making for a fun shooting-gallery style game. To enable cheat mode, you held the muzzle of the gun an inch from to the screen. Although simple and repetitive, I always had a good time playing Duck Hunt. I felt like quite the marksman, blasting those small clay pigeons out of the sky, followed by reducing the high-speed ducks found in the later levels to dead projectiles.

What Duck Hunt is iconic for, though, is the dog. American gamers weren't generally accustomed to straight-out mockery by a game because on poor performance, but that's exactly what Duck Hunt did. Miss a duck, and that fucking dog would poke his head up over the brush... and snicker at you. Infuriating! Numerous light-bursts were regularly expelled from the gun in an attempt to blast that laughing mutt.

Yea, I'm sure I won't lose any of the pieces.

If the Light Gun lightly foreshadowed the genius of the Wiimote, it can be said that R.O.B., the Robotic Operating Buddy, was the harbinger of the Virtual Boy. While intriguing in concept, R.O.B. never took off in popularity, hence the fact that only two titles were ever produced to work with it. What R.O.B. did, essentially, was push buttons on controller 2, making him a Buddy that Operated, who happened to be a Robot. Yeah. With the multitude of small plastic components, the unit rarely stayed Operational, as the average 12-year-old wasn't much for taking care of relatively complex apertures, unless they were Lego-based.

Gyromite was one of the two R.O.B.-compatible titles. You are a scientist, trapped within a complex, and you must collect the dynamite and vegetables before being eviscerated by the roaming bad things. I've never had the opportunity to use R.O.B. to play this game, but I did play with a friend. Gyromite transforms from "help from a robotic teammate" to "go ahead, trust me, fall backwards. I'll catch you." Two player Gyromite will show you the true nature of the person you once considered a friend. If they're feeling ambiguous, they'll play the role of R.O.B. and move pylons out of your way so that you can successfully reach the your goals. If they are feeling treacherous (which my friends apparently strive to be), the game becomes a scientist-crushing simulator. It'd be one thing if you could hop out of the way; the game would be mildly versus-like, with player one managing the wily doctor and player two running the death machinations. Unfortunately, it's a carrot of a different color. The moment you cross the threshold of a pylon, you can be instantly destroyed by a bloodthirsty Lucy van Pelt. Once player two reaches ambivalence, the game become a monotonous foray into walking along pathways, collecting stuff and avoiding brain-dead bad guys.

I trusted you, goddamnit ;_ ;

Neither game stands the test of time, not from a game-play point of view nor a technological one. Good luck finding a complete, working R.O.B. to play Gyromite as it was intended, let alone a CRT television to bounce light signals off of. But that’s not what these games are about. What these games represent is an early example of the level of creativity that Nintendo was capable of, and what consumers could come to expect in the following 25 years. Not content with a button-based controller input, Nintendo was willing to take the home video gaming experience into new, uncharted directions. I think the world lost sight of that prior to the Wii launch, but I'm glad that Nintendo hadn't. Redefining the video game experience is something at which Nintendo has become an artisan. It’s my hope that Nintendo Relaunch is able to put that significance into perspective.

Duck Hunt


Gyromite


Review in a Haiku
I want to believe
That light-guns have a future
And robots do not.