The light gun game, a genre so cruelly lost to time, yet so fantastically satisfying on a deep and primal gaming level. It’s unfair that the advent of High Definition displays all but killed this qtype of game for the masses, just like a precision “Justice Shot” instantly debilitating it.
Sure, modern solutions like Sinden are available, but they’re not mainstream, and with arcades also reduced massively from the era when the light gun was en-vogue, there’s little chance of the genre making a comeback.
But there was a time when it was king. Well, perhaps not king, but it was very prominent. Every games system seemed to have a gun, from the Master System Light Phaser and NES Zapper, to gargantuan Menacer and Super Scope of the Mega Drive and SNES respectively. Even the C64 and Spectrum had light guns and a handful of titles that took advantage of them.
But it was the 32-bit era where I feel we seemingly hit the genres high point. Sure we’d had the likes of Lethal Enforcers, Operation Wolf and Duck Hunt in the past, but once the arcade saw the release of the seminal Virtua Cop, the genre exploded seemingly everywhere. From Time Crisis to Point Blank to The House of the Dead, they all owed a debt of gratitude to Virtua Cop.
So it’s only right that when Sega’s light gun arcade hits came home, they came back to the best gun peripheral ever made: The Virtua Gun, or Sega Stunner as it was known in the US.
The concept was simple, take the Virtua Gun from the arcade, and adapt it to console form. That was it, but my goodness did that simplicity give us superb refinement.
The Saturn was built for the light gun. It may have taken just short of a year after the Japanese launch, but a port of Virtua Cop, the arcade version of which was just a few months older than the Saturn, was always planned. As such, the key to the gun’s success is in the consoles chunky joypad ports.
The controller ports were designed to have light gun support from the off, the hardware built so to pass that important gun data directly to the video signal. No additional solution was required like the Gun-Con’s extra RCA cable, the Saturn solution was simple, elegant and accurate.
Virtua Cop 1 and 2 can claim to be superb ports on the system, and their appeal is amplified many times by the quality of the Stunner. They remain must haves to this day if you have a Saturn and CRT display.
But it’s the lesser games that become superior when paired with the exquisiteness of the Virtua Gun that really highlight the peripherals strengths.
The disappointing House of the Dead port becomes hugely more enjoyable with Sega’s firearm. The muddy textures and a low frame rate could spoil the experience outright, but so good is the Saturn’s light gun that plugging it in makes it feel as if the arcade was in your home, and is probably the sole reason why that port is one of my favourite light gun games of the generation. All the blemishes of the port fade away when you have a bona-fide Zombie shooting gallery at your disposal.
Die Hard Trilogy was one of the biggest litmus tests for me in the 90s. The Saturn version of Die Harder in the compilation has the propensity to turn into a slide show frame rate wise, but the Stunner works so beautifully with it that it surpasses the comparably smooth PS1 original with ease in terms of fun factor. By comparison, the PS1 light guns (I’m looking at you, Predator) at the time were dreadful, and made trying to be a crack shot a crap shoot.
When I endeavoured to get a CRT TV a few years ago, it was the Saturn gun that was the driving factor. How I yearned to play the titles I mentioned on this list, from Virtua Cop to House of the Dead, and still today I’m in the hunt for Maximum Force, Area 51, Mighty Hits and more that take advantage of the sublime shooter.
To me, it is the greatest light gun of all time. Even the G-Cons and Dreamcast guns that came later pale against its beauty and execution.
If ever Light Guns make a return, I only hope Sega can furnish us with a replica that nears the Stunners perfection.
