Mad Dog McCree

Mad Dog McCree brought a Western shooting gallery to the Philips CD-i that had crowds flocking to arcades in the early nineties. The game is shot entirely with live actors, and the player takes on the role of a gunslinger who must free the mayor and his daughter from the clutches of a gang of bandits led by the titular villain. A live-action scene plays out on screen, and the instant an opponent appears, the player must aim and fire immediately. Hesitate, and you take a bullet and lose a life. Besides shootouts in the street, in the saloon, or in the canyon, the game also offers practice duels and several branching paths, so progress is not entirely linear.

The original arcade machine used LaserDisc and a light gun, so porting it to CD-i came down to how aiming would be handled. The game can be controlled with a cursor via the controller, which is slower, but with the special light gun made for the platform the experience comes close to the original. Technically it's an impressive showcase of what the CD medium could do: the video runs smoothly, transitions between scenes are snappy, and costumed actors create a backdrop unheard of in home entertainment at the time. Music and sound effects lifted straight from classic film Westerns help build the atmosphere.

At the time, Mad Dog McCree was one of the best-known examples of the interactive shooting-gallery genre and set off an entire wave of titles built on the same recipe. Critics faulted its short playtime and the fact that once you learn the right sequence, playing becomes a matter of memorization, but praised the technical execution and its infectiously tongue-in-cheek tone. Today it's worth trying mainly with two people at one screen, where it becomes a fun social occasion. It's also a good record of the direction the game industry briefly took once it discovered video. The live-action Western styling — the hat, the dusty street, an actor staring straight into the camera at the player — carries a naive charm that today's realistic shooters simply cannot replicate.