Nintendo Okie

Shooters come in a variety of shapes and sizes. Mostly they take the form of some aerial vehicle shooting lots of other aerial vehicles through a hail of bullets. Capcom created a shooter that looked completely different from that. Gun.smoke was a vertically scrolling shooter themed around a western. you took the role of Billy Bob, a bounty hunter who is out looking for criminals in the wild west. The name of the game could be confusing to some. It shared a similar name with a hugely popular television show and Capcom added the dot to get around copyright issues.

Each level of the game begins with you, as Billy Bob seeing the wanted poster of a criminal in the area. You’ll then be dropped into each of the games levels and you’ll face waves of enemies shooting lead in your direction. These enemies come in a few different forms; gunslingers, snipers, riflemen, Indians and demolitionists. Most of them die with just a couple shots, but some of them don’t go quietly. They’ll drop a stick of dynamite when they fall and you have to avoid it or die. Along the way you’ll see citizens of the town of Hicksville standing on the street while the firefight is going on. Talking to these townsfolk will give you the opportunity to upgrade weapons and even purchase the wanted poster of the level’s boss.

The levels themselves look pretty good for an NES game. The different shades of brown with smaller patches of green really give the feeling that you are in the desert of the Old West. The city is littered with wood buildings, barrels and fences that can all be used for cover or destroyed to find power ups, bullets for your guns, and cash to buy upgrades. The outdoor areas of the game are made to look like a canyon area that has plenty of ambush points for your enemies and choke points where they try to put more bullets than you can dodge.

The one thing you can’t really dodge is the somewhat clunky controls. The game was originally designed for the arcades and a three button set up. One button to fire left, one to fire right and another to fire straight ahead. You might not have known this, but the NES controller only had two buttons. To get around this the developers set up the A and B buttons to fire right and left respectively. In order to shoot straight you had to push both buttons simultaneously. It’s not really hard, but I found that it was a bit distracting as the controller was constantly shaking because you had to pound on the buttons so much.

Gun.smoke is one of the more interesting shooters I’ve played in a while. The theme is something unique. Companies have tried to theme shooters around things other than space ships and airplanes. Square tried it with their release of King’s Knight for the NES. The genre works best with traditional games like Gradius or Ikaruga, but Capcom did a good job bringing something unique to the table with Gun.smoke.