I loved lightgun games on the old systems, and I think the Sega Saturn’s Stunner was the best hardware of the lot. The obsolescence of CRTs pretty much killed the tech, but the gameplay style has made a bit of a resurgence a couple times with the advent of the Wii and VR.
Local multiplayer.
That is, I want my “peripheral” to be the capacity for the game to support a second controller and another human in the same room, not just over the rent-seeking network service.
I used to have to mess with these things:
Now it’s easy, you can just have 4 controllers wirelessly connected to the console, no problem, but most new games don’t have a splitscreen mode. Personally I’ve gotten to the point where I often won’t buy a game if it only has online multiplayer.
Also, I want LAN parties back.
Online services have taken so much away from us.
And those that do, they are all competitive vs games. Everything has to be a survival of the fittest battle
Why I loved borderlands so much. Co-op was just better. My brother and I spent countless hours on those types of games
Also, I want LAN parties back.
Be the change you want to see. My office has a LAN party once a year. There’s also consoles and board games for the non-gamers. The boss orders spare ribs for dinner and we do sone kind of fun pub quiz thing. It’s a lot of fun.
i just realized that ‘spare rib’ could refer to women.
Oh I’m absolutely into board games. I’m playing through Jaws of the Lion with a friend right now.
There’s a fair bit of nostalgia in this lament. I don’t just want to have a LAN party… I want LAN party culture back. The ubiquity of the online services has killed it.
On the flip side, I’m older and have kids now. I love that I can game online a few times a week with friends, because I don’t have time for old school weekend-long LAN parties.
Is it LAN parties you miss? Or being young and having more free time than responsibilities and common sense?
Eh, column A… column B…
It’s not just pining for my misspent youth, it’s the sense of community… the shared common experience of playing games together and shouting insults at each other across the room, getting together and comparing PC builds, helping each other with troubleshooting, plugging two 360s into each other for a 4v4 on Snowbound…
In some ways the activity doesn’t matter that much, it’s the spending time with other people… but that time and place where a really good game matched with a good group of players was where the most fun happened.
No game can ever be really great without a community, and there are aspects of community-building that don’t translate into online spaces, especially not ones that charge rent.
I was playing a lot of Final Fantasy VII when it first came out around 1996, and used a paper strategy guide.
I got a one-handed controller (an ASCII Grip that was amazing for old JRPGs. I still miss having it for those kinds of chill games where I don’t feel like I need to be hunching over a controller.
Steel Batallion’s humongous controller. That beast is the most fun I ever had with a simulator.
How many times did you lose your save file from not ejecting in time before you removed the little cover over the eject button?
I was hoping someone would bring this up!
I got to play with one at PAX. It was so much fun!
I was always super jealous of this controller but I couldn’t afford it when it first came out!
I love ridiculous controllers.
The full guitars, drumkit and mic setup for Guitar Hero made for a pretty fun party game
Not sure I’d want it to come back, but this post brought back the memory of Boktai. It was a gameboy game where the cartridge had a built in light sensor that let you charge your weapon within the game.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boktai:_The_Sun_Is_in_Your_Hand
There’s a gun available called The sinden lightgun it doesn’t use infra red, it had a high speed camera in the barrel and monitors it’s position relative to the border of the TV. Works brilliantly on modern tvs and even projectors.
There’s also the GUN4IR project that can be put together for a fraction of the cost of the Sinden. The Sinden requires a visible border around your game.
I second the Sinden. I use it in MAME and it requires some config changes to set it up, but their support documentation on how to get it up and running is spot on. The only real problem game I’ve run across is Terminator 2.
It’s so bad.
But it’s what I want.
Yeah well uh… just keep your power gloves off her pal’.
I have never even seen a foot pad controller, like for Track and Field or the more popular Dance Dance Revolution, for a PC. Actual car/plane pedals and shit, but not just a big flat controller you play with using your feet.
Cranks and dials like the Tempest arcade cabinet and the more recent Playdate.
The Playdate almost nailed it.
I want a lightgun that works like those big chunky ones you’d see on arcade machines back in the day that weighed like 4 lbs and had servos to give it real clacky recoil. I know people make these and you can buy them (or even just pull ones off an old arcade cabinet and interface them with the hardware) but they’re way to expensive for me to actually buy though.
If it was like a $50-100 project maybe but I’m pretty sure it’s like $600+ and that’s just an obscene amount of money for this. But it would be fun
I miss the Time Crisis gun for playstation
Look into the GUN4IR project. They have drop-in replacement parts to make the Guncon work on LCD monitors.
The Roll & Rocker. Games today just don’t require you to balance on a weird peripheral like they used to.
Super Scope, we hardly knew ye.
Battleclash & Metal Combat were both awesome. Another forgotten IP…
BNC Feed-Through Adapters (with Terminators if needed)
I’m kidding, I’m kidding!
For anyone too young, this was how you made gaming LAN parties in the early 90s when there was Doom, Doom 2, Duke3D and Quake 1 to play. It’s a switch- and hub-less network connection where every PC is literally connected to all others in one line which is fed through each PC. Making your connection extremely sh!tty if you were on one end or someone between you and the other guy had a terrible PC or had to reboot. Well, actually it was generally sh!tty. This problem went away completely when switches (even just hubs) became commonly available / cheap for consumers.
I do miss LAN parties though. Online gaming is also great but it’s just not the same.
You can get modern light guns that work with newer displays. They track using infrared, so it’s not quite the same, but it’s good enough to play all the arcade mame classics without a problem.
Check out GUN4IR, I put together a two player setup last year and it’s a ton of fun. The accuracy and response time are basically perfect. They also support solenoids for arcade games, but I haven’t had the time to put that together yet.
