Well, in truth, you won’t need a GunCon this time around, and that’s the retro beauty.
Chinese technology company Dashine Electronics is pairing up with Bandai Namco to officially resurrect 1995’s classic light-gun shooter Time Crisis for modern televisions. The game will come pre-installed on a mini plug-and-play console, dubbed the G’AIM’E. For the base price of $89.99, it will arrive packaged with a new AI-powered light gun. Ah, finally a good use for AI. I’m only kidding. Or am I?
For $119.99, you’ll get a physical foot pedal alongside the console and gun, so you can truly replicate some amazing Time Crisis arcade action, though there’s no word regarding a North American release. Fingers crossed!
On that note, Time Extension surmises that this will be a port of the arcade version proper, not the 1997 PS1 variant that I’m sure many of you owned. I know I did. Thus, my jewel case thumbnail is a bit misleading, admittedly, but I love that port to pieces, so I figured, hey, why not. It’s downright beautiful.
I can still remember the comically oversized retail Time Crisis PlayStation box, beckoning me from the glass display case at our local Target, and once I got a copy that following holiday, I relished plugging the yellow GunCon video cable into the back of my launch PS1 for scary shooting accuracy. There was nothing else like it at the time, I assure you.
If you’re into light-gun games at all, you’ll realize how huge this G’AIM’E news is, as it’s impossible to hook up an original Namco GunCon to anything other than an old CRT display. I recycled my dusty Sony Trinitron years ago, because it was heavy and ridiculous and I had nowhere else to put it. There went all my light-gun compatibility, unfortunately.
Sinden’s light gun has been a recent—if seriously expensive—alternative, but that’s a more boutique route that’s geared toward PC users, requiring fiddling with settings and ROMs and whatnot. You can technically use it on consoles with extensive physical modifications, but come on, nobody has time for all that. There’s also Arcade 1Up’s (mostly) dedicated Time Crisis cabinet, which is awesome and comes bundled with Point Blank and a few extra light-gun titles, but that’s over $600 and takes up a ton of space.
I think if this supposed AI light-gun technology ends up having ‘low input lag’ and ‘works on any modern TV’ as Dashine claims in the announcement, and if the console is exactly as ‘100% plug-and-play’ and works with ‘no external sensors’ as advertised, then this might be a real winner. That said, it seems like a waste to dedicate an entire product to just one light-gun game, as even the bespoke Arcade 1Up cabinet has other pre-installed software on-board. Will we be able to update the G’AIM’E hardware with additional titles? Will there be more G’AIM’E consoles released featuring different arcade ports?
With Bandai Namco’s robust back catalog of light-gun software, it seems silly to release one-off hardware units like this, but I’m still excited. This honestly gives me hope that we’ll eventually see an actual Namco Light-Gun Collection at some point, complete with all the Time Crisis and Point Blank titles (maybe even Deadstorm Pirates too, though we got that on the PS3). Getting something like that on modern consoles with a rebooted GunCon, using this sort of AI technology, would be wondrous.
As of this writing, there is no release date for the new G’AIM’E bundles, though they are apparently being demo’d at Tokyo Game Show 2024, which runs today through September 29. We’ll see if we get any more info from the show floor as it progresses.
