I remember my first favorite nintendo accessory was the nintendo duck hunt gun...haven't seen a lot of guns for the PC or for later home console systems, and I'm not sure why. A gun is a great controller for video games, especially if you have a large screen, or even possibly with the 3-D upgrade that is coming out soon. It seems technologically simple enough to build/design a lightgun based video game, which is basically a first person shooter, except possibly without the controls for movement, placing the character's foot movements in the hands of AI, possibly allowing some directional control at fork-intersections via gun-pointing in the direction you want to go. The reason that it's an advantage to put the game "on rails" and use a gun for a controller is for the immersion. Modern Warfare will only seem so awesome if you're using a keyboard and mouse, and while I wouldn't want to get rid of the keyboard/mouse version, which is a very nice multiplayer version, I would also enjoy having a light-gun based implementation of the above game, possibly even doing multiplayer with some sort of gun-hammer located controls, or even multiplayer where all the player's have an equal AI controlling their movements while they all control the direction of the gun by moving their gun around and firing. I should also note that most lightguns are pretty similar, and if there were more lightgun oriented games then people could own a personal lightgun of varying capabilities, sort of like how we all have different 3D video cards now but they all run the same games. A cheap lightgun would just be an inanimate plastic shell with the working guts, however an expensive light gun could replicate a real gun in weight and materials, as well as having proper recoil when the trigger is pulled via a gas blowback mechanism. I remember Time Crisis in the arcades had a good gas blowback recoil mechanism, the arcade operator could set it to different recoil amounts, I got .223 and it was pretty awesome for a little handgun to have M-16 amounts of recoil and for that to be modeled in the game properly. That may possibly have helped inspire the .50 handgun caliber, since after that I thought .45 was a little small. I should also note that the gas blowback arcade guns had a slight flaw, a second recoil in the forward direction after the proper recoil in the backwards direction, however it wasn't that bad, especially during rapid fire, and some guns wiggle around with their loaders anyways.

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Original post by aersixb9 Does anyone do lightgun based game designs these days?

Why do you ask? If you want to design a lightgun game, go ahead and design it. Why should what other people do prevent you from pursuing something you are interested in?

As Tom says, if you want to build a lightgun game, build a lightgun game.

As to why people don't often build them, the peripherals aren't common for PC gamers. Heck, until Microsoft's Xbox 360 Controller for Windows (and even still), gamepads were comparatively rare among PC gamers and a total mish-mash of options, features, capabilities bits and programming models. DirectInput didn't do much to change that in the early part of the last decade; I've run through hundreds of dollars in game pads and found publisher support to be poor. Eventually I just stuck to buying consoles.

Make your lightgun game, but don't expect widespread adoption. Maybe look at creating a custom arcade cabinet of your own, which friends and visitors can play with, as the best way to share your work, followed by online enthusiast communities.

Happy hacking!

There are a number of "light-gun"-ish games on both the Nintendo Wii and the DS. Includeing a Capcom produced variant in the Resident Evil series. But, like beat-em-ups and SHMUPS, it seems to have become a niche genre (nothing wrong with that...just something to keep in mind).

There is a good reason why they don't make "Light Gun" games that use the old Nintendo style gun.


That reason: They don't work on anything but a CRT screen that is updating at whatever fixed rates were used for TVs.

It is however possible to build a slightly different style pointer, but they work differently. Just something to think about before you try to gut an old Nintendo gun for it.

Dude if you want to make a game like dat that sounds sooo cool. Wat consloe would it go on. I think u should put it on the wii. But its your choice.