light-gun review

Shoot it, shoot it!

Light gun games have been around for years, be it duck hunt on the original NES or the latest version of Time Crisis on the newest next gen console, but throughout these years I’ve never actually owned a light gun on any home system.

Apart from the occasion play on friends PSX light gun the majority of my experience has been in the arcades, much cash has been spent on the op wolfs, point blanks, virtual cops and my personal favourite the Time Crisis series.

So when I got into the whole M.A.M.E scene I found out that many of the old (and some newer) arcade gun games had been emulated. I played a few of these with a mouse but it just wasn’t the same, I really needed to get a proper light-gun.

Now all the latest consoles have plenty of different light-guns available for them, but the PC has only really had one and that is the Act Labs gun. This has had some fairly good reviews and I wouldn’t mind one myself but I wasn’t too keen on paying $35 for the gun (which is reasonable) but then having to pay another $35-40 for shipping from the states to the UK (which I suppose is strange considering how much I’ve spent on my cabinet so far).

Anyway yet another light-gun discussion came up on the BYOAC forums in which it mentioned another PC light-gun called the PC Virtual Gun. Information on this gun has been thin on the ground but I found a retailer in the UK (www.whitedog.co.uk) that was selling it for £25 and there was also some feedback on the site that gave it a positive review. So I thought ‘what the hell’ I’d order one and see for myself how good or bad it was.

The following morning the gun was delivered to me and I took no time getting it unpacked. The actual packaging was basic to say the least, just a cardboard box with a bit of bubble-wrap covering the contents. The only instructions provided were those printed on the back of the box, a simple diagram with some incredibly broken English instructions.

The light-gun itself looks like a real gun, very much like (both look, feel, and weight) those Airsoft replicas you can buy rather than the bright blue/pink guns you find in the local arcades. Some people prefer this real look, I don’t mind it but I actually prefer the look of the Act-labs gun. At first this gun does feel a little light but you will find that if the gun was any heavier it would soon become uncomfortable to use for long periods at a time.

The gun has a trigger for firing and two buttons for reloading, one on the side and a pull switch at the back. In addition to these there is also another switch on the side that sets the gun to auto-fire mode when the trigger is pressed (handy for those ‘end of level’ boss moments).

The gun also comes with a separate pedal that plugs into the handle butt of the gun and can also be used for reloading. I found the reload buttons on the gun easier and would have preferred if the pedal could have been plugged into a separate USB port as the extra cable hanging from the gun got in the way a little.

Getting it hooked up....