Obscured View

Okay, whoops.

SEGA was at the event. Although it was only with a few titles, and the one that would have been cool was very broken. It was a dinosaur hunter game, which you used a touch screen at the center console to navigate your character around and then used a decently hefty shotgun light-gun to aim and shoot weak points on every kind of dinosaur you could imagine on a huge screen in front of both players.

You could change weapons, and even pull out an RPG on a poor dino and blast away. At the end of each board, they’d tally up the dinos you just blew back into the stone age. It was kinda sad.

One kid would blast away the dinos with total glee, shouting and constantly firing and cocking the shotgun over and over, in that kind of kid sugar-high aren’t-the-lights-so-pretty-wow-I’m-amazing state that kids can get into.  Between rounds he’d kiss the gun and then get that embarrassed smile like a girl had just kissed him and he didn’t know how to react. It was… weird. I think that 12 year old kid has likely seen Full Metal Jacket already.

The guns on the machines were so out of calibration that I’d aim at the center of the screen and hit the top instead. Our games were quickly over because we simply couldn’t get a shot to go where we wanted it to. We just put the controllers down and walked away, saddened.

And you know who had the most accurate guns? The America’s Army game and the Paradise Lost one they did, which reminds me of Operation Wolf back in the day. Unreal powered both of them. Interesting again to see console and PC game tech being used in arcades in yet another way.