Time Crisis 2 – 2001

In my opinion, and backed up by almost every list I could find, Time Crisis 2 is hands down the greatest light gun game of all time. So let’s grab our Time Crisis 2 Arcade Gun, converted to Blamcon, and see why.

I haven’t played this game since 2002 in the arcades in Korea so I’m pretty excited to play it again.

If there’s one word to describe Time Crisis 2, it’s ‘smooth’, the gameplay, action, and shooting have a flow about it. My favorite part is the duck and cover mechanic, it lets you catch a breath at your own speed and line up your shots before you pop out. The duck also acts as your reload, serving double duty. The duck button and trigger are the only two keys used, so if your light gun has an A button, you’re set. But, for the real experience, it’s best played with a foot pedal. Keep in mind there’s always a timer going, if you duck too long your timer runs out and it’s game over, so it creates a bit of a risk/reward system with the mechanics.

Your current ammo, life, and remaining time are on the bottom of the screen, nice and big. I really appreciate the icons they use for your bullets as well as giving you a number remaining. Having both seemed a bit redundant but after a while you start to get the brilliance, you can see the bullets disappear in your peripheral giving you a good idea of when to reload, and giving you the total as number means you don’t have to count to see how many you have left, so you can kind of give it as much attention as needed. Your health is nice big white and red medkit icons, there’s no ambiguity there.

There are no crosshairs in this game, which I love, so you’ll need an accurate gun. Enemies react differently depending on where you hit them but there’s no margin of error, enemies shoot from behind cover, far away, and pop up and down between shots. Check this guy backflipping just before I shoot. You have to be right on with your aim and there’s very little time for target shooting, you have to be snappy and accurate. Except for a few special scenes where you get a machine gun, this 9 round semi-auto is all you get. You also have to keep your spatial awareness up, enemies often have rocket launchers that will hit you unless you duck, love the detail with the pan.

I do appreciate the screen stays still while you are shooting, except for ducking, which you control. One of the most frustrating parts of light gun games is when they simulate movement causing you to miss, no here. Well, except for the speedboat part, which I find to be fun but it gets my goat when I line up a shot only to have the camera veer wildly around causing me to miss. I did cheat for just a minute and used Blamcon’s burst fire mode. I will have to give it to this scene that the Miami Vice esque music is awesome.

There’s a lot of fun and interesting challenges sprinkled in too, like enemies throwing down barrels you have to shoot or taking down vehicles, the game keeps you on your toes.

While this game is perfect in single player it does have a lot of unique features in co-op. In some scenes the second player often gets a different angle or vantage point making co-op a lot of fun as one player can hit enemies obscured for the other player. Or in boss fights where the boss alternates between the players. If you’re playing single player, there’s a CPU that stands in during these co-op segments, they don’t take out the bosses for you but you do lose that unique level of co-op gameplay. But honestly the single player experience doesn’t suffer for it, it just gives you that extra push to find a friend.

The voiceover is full cheese, for some reason light gun games seem to have the most over the top voice acting of any game genre, and I love it. Just listen to this…

Overall you’ll be fighting your way though 9 levels, broken up into 3 stages, each around 2 to 3 minutes. You start fighting your way though a city finishing with a high speed boat chase. Then through a forest and onto a high speed train, the boss in this level is its own stage, he has so many forms and attacks, including at one point just picking up a whole missile and trying to hit you with it. The last stage is on some kind of floating base where you’ll be trying to stop the bad guys from launching a ‘nuclear satellite’ You end up stopping it only to find there’s another one mounted on a gantry and you have to fight the final boss while he’s basting you with its lasers and canons while he hangs off the side shooting at you. It’s lasers, explosions and high octane action right to the very end.

If I had to sum this game up it would be: Awesome. It’s just so well done, well paced, and just superb from end to end. There’s a good reason this is considered the best light gun game of all time and it’s a wild ride. Overall it took me 10 quarters to beat it, which I think is pretty respectable.

So this light gun is a Blamcon conversion of the original Time Crisis 4 Arcade Light Gun. It’s using Props3D’s Blamcon system to work with modern TVs and computers. There’s a 3D printable bracket to hold the camera in the front, I added an A and a B button to the gun along with using the original recoil system for slide blowback and a rumble motor for interactivity. There’s also an RGB LED in the back for feedback connected with a small piece of fiber optic. We do sell kits over on Blamcon.com but the knowledge, code, and models to convert this yourself are entirely free, so if you want to learn how there’s a guide over on Blamcon.com, direct link in the description. I’d like to give a shoutout to the Patreons who help keep Blamcon and Props3D content free for everyone, at the VIP level… and of course, all the patrons in the crawl that follows.