Wild Guns

The Wild West meets a steam-powered future, and from the resulting collision emerges one of the most stylish action games on the entire Super Nintendo. Wild Guns combines cowboy romance with steampunk robots and creates a world where you face not only bandits but also giant mechanical guardians and steam engines spewing lead. Even the idea alone is bold enough for the game to stick in one's memory.

The gameplay is brilliantly simple yet masterfully tuned. Your character stands at the front of the scene and moves side to side, while with a cursor you aim anywhere on the screen and eliminate enemies. The key to survival is the dodge and roll with which you evade bullets, and the well-timed use of dynamite. This combination of shooting from a rear view and manual aiming makes Wild Guns something between a classic shooting-gallery game and hectic run-and-gun action.

Behind the game stands the Japanese studio Natsume, known for its feel for pixel craftsmanship. Wild Guns came out in 1994, at the very end of the SNES golden era, and belongs among titles that did not break through on a mass scale in their original release; all the more, however, did its reputation grow among collectors and connoisseurs. Original cartridges eventually became a sought-after and expensively traded item.

The game's cultural significance was confirmed by the fact that, years later, it received an improved return. The Wild Guns Reloaded version brought the title to modern players on contemporary platforms, added new characters, weapons, and levels, and proved that an idea from the mid-nineties had lost none of its charm even after more than two decades.

Wild Guns is today rightly ranked among the hidden gems of the sixteen-bit era. It is a game that makes sense both in solo and in co-op for two players, where the chaos and the joy of blasting the entire screen multiply. The combination of an original theme, perfect controls, and high but fair difficulty makes it a must for every fan of arcade action.

Why play: For a phenomenal mix of Western and steampunk and for one of the most addictive shooting-action games the SNES offers, ideal in co-op too.