All I Want Is To Relive My Light Gun Glory Days

thegamer.com:

The House of the Dead remake has been a delightful walk down memory lane for someone like me that grew up obsessed with light gun games, but I can’t help but feel like its potential is wasted on the Switch. Despite a variety of control schemes, there’s no way to play House of the Dead the way it was meant to be played - by pointing a cheap plastic gun at tube TV frantically pulling the trigger as fast as you can. The House of the Dead remake is a grim reminder that an entire era of gaming has been completely lost, possibly forever. Letting my GunCon 2 go in a yard sale is one of my biggest regrets in life, and I’d love it if someone brought the light gun games back.

A lot of people might think the light gun genre started on the NES with Duck Hunt and disappeared until the Wii gave a new crop of on-rails shooters like House of the Dead: Overkill, Dead Space: Extraction, and Resident Evil: Umbrella Chronicles. However, there was actually a huge library of light gun games on the PS1, PS2, and PS3 - and I had them all.

By the time I had my own money for games in the early ‘00s, arcades were pretty much extinct in the US. The only way to play arcade shooters like Time Crisis where I lived was at home using GunCon controllers. Games like Time Crisis, Point Blank, and one of my personal favorites, Vampire Night, proved so successful on the PS1 that publishers like Capcom, Namco, and Sega started developing light gun games exclusively for the PlayStation that were never even released in arcades. Without needing to design around Continues and quarter-munching mechanics, developers were able to create longer, more complex light gun games than anything that had been seen in arcades.

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