Aww yeah.

Consider the light zapper. No, seriously, think about it. For many children, the most amazing part of the original Nintendo Entertainment System was the NES Zapper, a silver-gray (quickly replaced with hunting orange) handheld pistol that allowed us to hunt ducks in our living room. It made an entire generation of boys and girls want to murder a snickering dog. It even made a gigantic, satisfying CLANG noise when you pulled the trigger. It had springs. Springs meant quality.

We’re spoiled today by our Wii remotes and our Natal technology (or we will be soon). It was a gun that shot light! Or at least that was what we were lead to believe. So there weren’t many game developers that opted to design games for it, or for the Light Phaser for the Sega Master System (my personal gun of choice because they modeled it off an obscure Japanese anime). These were novelties at best–a clever use of cathode-ray technology that to this day I still can’t quite understand (magic, I assume).

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