Time Crisis: Project Titan

Time Crisis: Project Titan is a side entry in the famous Time Crisis light-gun shooter series, set between the first and second games in the story, explaining what happened to the main characters in the meantime. The player once again takes control of agent Richard Miller and, Guncon pistol in hand, moves through a sequence of short, quickly cut scenes full of enemies hiding behind cover – the series' signature system, where the character only fires while peeking out of cover and the player has to re-aim in time, remains unchanged here. The Time Crisis series became famous from its arcade debut precisely for this rhythm of hiding and popping out, which brought light guns into a tense race against the clock, and Project Titan takes over this principle wholesale, even without the arcade cabinet's foot pedal.

Unlike other entries in the series, Project Titan was never made as an arcade machine – Namco created it directly as a PlayStation game to fill a gap in the story and offer owners of the console and the Guncon peripheral a full-fledged experience without having to visit an arcade. Because of this, the game is shorter and more linear than the mainline arcade entries, but the cutscenes tell a more cohesive story and tie the series' key characters together more tightly than the arcade format of individual missions allows. The game also offers its own score leaderboards and unlockable bonus difficulties that encourage replaying individual chapters, and because it didn't have to copy any arcade original, it could afford a calmer pace and longer dialogue passages between the firefights.

Why play it: Project Titan will be appreciated mainly by Time Crisis fans who want to see the missing piece of the story between the first two games and have a Guncon at home – it's the only episode in the series made directly for a console without an arcade original, which is why it plays a bit differently from the rest of the series: calmer and with a greater emphasis on storytelling.