The Closeout Warrior

Since it was one half of the pack-in cartridge for a ton of Nintendo Entertainment Systems, Duck Hunt is probably the game you think of whenever you see a picture of a Zapper.

Duck Hunt, like a lot of light-gun games of the time, is exceedingly simple. There are two things you can do in this game: shoot ducks and shoot clay pigeons. When shooting ducks, your dog will rush into the marsh and flush out the ducks, either one or two at a time depending on the mode. You have three shots to shoot them all in each wave, and must hit a certain number of ducks to continue. Hit them and the dog will pop up with your duck(s) in hand. Miss or take too long and the dog will laugh at your pathetic marksmanship. This frustrated just about everyone I knew that played the game, and they desperately wanted to shoot the dog for laughing at them. While it wasn’t possible in the NES version, Wikipedia claims that it is possible to shoot him in the arcade version, though I was not able to figure out how to do that.

The second mode you could try was shooting clay pigeons. They would fly out from the bottom of the screen two at a time into the distance. You had to shoot them before they hit the ground and, like the ducks, have to shoot a certain number of them to make it to the next round.

I spent hours with this game, simple as it was, mostly because I didn’t have any money for anything new for a few months. This isn’t to say that it’s a bad game, it’s not, really. It’s just at this point, I’m pretty much done with it.

I do not know who Hogan is, but his alley is infested with cardboard cutouts of gangs and good guys. Good thing I have a Zapper.

Hogan’s Alley is the first light gun game that I played in the arcades. Though to clarify, I didn’t play it, my mom did. But I saw it in action, and that’s what counts!

The home version is slightly more limited, but the basics are the same, the main mode, the bread and butter of the game, is to travel down an alley. Popping out from behind walls, in windows, around fences, and the like are cardboard cutouts of a woman, a professor, a police officer, or one of three gang members (creatively named Gang A, Gang B, and Gang C). Of course, your goal is to shoot the bad guys while not shooting the good guys. Shoot a good guy or take too long to shoot a bad guy and you get a miss. Get too many misses and it’s game over.

Alternatively, you could play the shooting range mode where you are presented with 3 cutouts and must shoot the bad guys instead of the good guys. It’s pretty much the same as the other mode except that the background doesn’t change.

The third mode is a little bit different. You have a series of platforms on your left. From the right paint cans flip onto the screen. You can shoot the cans to bounce them a bit. Your goal is to bounce them over to the platforms and make them land on them for points. If any cans fall off the bottom of the screen, you miss. Miss enough and it’s game over.

I did quite enjoy this game, and am slightly puzzled why there hasn’t been a proper sequel made.

In a back story that didn’t make a lot of sense (and isn’t especially relevant) two brothers were turned into snowmen by a generic evil-type person. They are determined to get back to normal, and to do so, must defeat throngs of enemies with the power of snow.

Each level is one screen with a series of platforms. You have unlimited, though tiny, shots of snow that you can lob at whatever rabble appears on the screen. Your goal is to cover the baddies with snow and then kick them to dispatch them. If your snowball hits other monsters on the screen, they’ll be KO’d as well, garnering you bonus points. It’s in your interest to set up chain reactions for the points (every so many nets you an extra life) but also for the hot sauce. Why snowmen use hot sauce for powerups is a mystery, but they give your little guy the ability to hurl more snow, hurl snow further, run around faster, or float around and flatten things. The first three can be combined and stay with you until you lose a life, which you will do. A lot. You’re pretty fragile in this game, the first hit kills you every time, unless you’ve eaten the hot sauce that lets you float around and bump into things, then you’re invulnerable.

The game’s numerous stages are punctuated by the occasional boss fight, huge things that take up most of the screen and are invulnerable to your pathetic little snow volleys, so you get to hit the smaller enemies that appear and crash the big snowballs into the creature to kill it.

I was able to actually finish the NES port of the game, and restored the brothers to their human forms, but inexplicably there seems to exist a 2 and a 3 in Japan. Story inconsistencies aside, I imagine it’s a lot more of the same, which in this case might not be too bad.