Episode 37 – Something Old

I was on the street and overheard some businessman say to a girl “Remember the Sega Menacer? The light gun? No?” I instantly smiled. Yeah, I remember the Menacer. But I remember the Super Scope more. I never used the Menacer because well… I didn’t have a Genesis. I had a SNES. But I didn’t have a Super Scope either… because it looked idiotic and I can’t think of a single game that made use of it… none that I wanted anyway. Wikipedia tells me that there were only 11. And all of them look horrible.

Those two light guns were created at the end of a kind of era where peripherals for the NES were so well received. Everyone had the light gun because it came with the system. A lot of people had the arcade pad (or NES Advantage) as well… although I always found it harder to use then the actual controller.

I can think of only one person I knew who had the Super Scope and I remember it took an insane amount of batteries to operate, and they didn’t last very long. It seems after the NES the light gun didn’t really make the transition to the next-gen (haha, because the snes was next… get it?).

I don’t even know of a light gun made for any other system after that. I’m pretty sure there were none. Although I think it would be fun if there were one on the Xbox. I wonder what it would look like. If the Zapper was a pistol, and the Menacer is some kind of automatic thing, and the Super Scope was easily rocket launcher (the thing rested on your shoulder) would the Xbox version be like a sniper? That would be pretty cool. Or a shotgun… or the chainsaw gun from Gears of War.

My guess is we will never see another light gun again. There is too much of a need for walking around and shooting these days and nothing really works better than a controller. That’s right, I said controller not keyboard + mouse. Why? Because the controller has two joysticks and was designed to play videogames. The keyboard was not designed for that purpose. Everyone knows it was designed so people could blog.

So, take this time to think about what the businessman said, “Remember the sega Menacer? The light gun? No?” because that is the future. Our kids will have never played duck hunt, or picked up a gun shaped controller, and for that I weep.