A brilliant idea...about 25 years too late.

[xaq_the_aereon]

You all remember the infuriation suffered at the hands of games like Duck Hunt when, despite how you just knew that shot was spot-on, the stupid light gun somehow missed?

My dreams last night decided to focus on that, it seems, and came to a conclusion...


Nintendo should have made a rifle version of the Zapper.

Note to self: Either invent time travel or get in touch with someone who has, and have them deliver that idea to Nintendo, circa 1986.


(Seriously, who the hell hunts ducks or goes skeet-shooting with a pistol, anyway?)

Comments

[lupineangel.livejournal.com]

Honestly, I'd settle for a version that lets you shoot the dog when it laughs at you. :P

D.F.

[kjorteo]

You can in the arcade "VS. Duck Hunt" version!

[anher.livejournal.com]

Forget the rifle, give me a punt gun instead. That'll get the duck and the stupid og.

[xaq.livejournal.com]

Anything else, that'd be swatting a mosquito with a bazooka...but in the cast of that bleepity-bleeping dog, I'd say that's justified.

I was just talking in terms of the design of the light gun, though. Being able to use both hands to stabilize my shots would have been nice, is all I'm really getting at.

[lupineangel.livejournal.com]

Stabilise your shots? You mean, you were playing it *properly*, rather than point-blank pressing the thing to the tv, or pointing it at a nearby lamp to trick it into thinking it was always scoring hits?

D.F.

[xaq.livejournal.com]

Yeah, pretty mu--wait, what's this about a lamp?

[lupineangel.livejournal.com]

The way the gun worked was, when you pulled the trigger, the screen flickered momentarily. All other details disappeared and were black, and the hitboxes of the ducks were represented in white. The gun had a light sensor in it to detect whether what it was pointed at was light or dark; if the result was 'light', then the game figured you were pointing it at something white (i.e. the hitbox) and registered a hit. This meant you could trick earlier versions of the game into always registering hits by pointing the gun at a lamp when you pulled the trigger, so it always registered 'light' (albeit at the cost of eventually burning out the sensor in the gun to the point where it wouldn't recognise the meagre light put out by an '80s tv screen).

Nintendo fixed the problem in later designs of the Light Zapper by incorporating a slight delay in the display of hitboxes and having the gun detect the dark-to-light shift rather than just 'light' in general; they assumed people wouldn't be hardcore enough to turn their lamps on at the exact same time as they pulled the trigger. No point in cheating if it's harder to pull the cheat off than it is just to play the game normally, after all.

D.F.

[xaq.livejournal.com]

Huh. That'd have been a useful bit of info about 2 decades ago...