Several years ago I had way more fun that a person really ought to have shooting cowboys with a fake gun. But several years before that, while visiting the arcade at Holiday World (rides? what rides?), I played a game made by the same people filmed in what looks like the same place and with the same cheesy actors.
As far as the game goes, Mad Dog McCree is some kind of gang leader whose thugs have overrun some random town in the Old West and you, some guy with a gun, have to gun down them all before you can get at the Mad One himself. So what all that means, essentially, is that you are presented with a scene in the town and guys pop out of random spots. You have to shoot them before they shoot you. You shoot all of them, you go on to the next area. They shoot you, you go see the undertaker… Literally. He tells you how many lives you have left and then sends you back to the scene where you bought the farm.
I would only play this game one time, mostly because the only arcade I ever found it in was over 50 miles from my house and I didn’t feel like riding my bike that far. But that one time that I did play it, I had a little bit of fun. I was actually kind of impressed with the amount of variety in the game. You’d think that in a game that uses pre-recorded movie clips that stuff would unfold the same way every time, kind of like they do in Dragon’s Lair, but they don’t. In particular I was playing in some kind of barn area where some guy popped out from behind a hay bale and killed me (right in the face). But it was cool, I had one life left so I paid special attention to where the guy popped out from and was ready for him. Then some guy popped out of a different area on the other side of the screen and I didn’t have time to react and, well, I filled up another pine box.
I would have liked to have given this game another chance at some point, but have never seen it an any other arcade before or since. I’d even consider giving one of the home console ports a try, but I never owned any of the systems that it came out on, so that didn’t really work either.