Gaming is always changing. Imagine explaining to someone fresh off of Halo 2 that a French turn-based RPG where you beat up mimes would end up winning Game of the Year in twenty years. They’d probably spit out their Mountain Dew™ and/or Doritos™. What’s also changed quite a lot is how lightgun games have really faded into memories, or clinging for life right at the back of that one arcade with a giant-sized Flappy Bird cabinet (for some reason). Due to the CRT tech of the 90s and 00s versus what we have today, a lot of old lightgun peripherals simply don’t work with modern setups.
Enter G’AIM’E, Tassei Denki’s attempt to bring lightgun gaming back into the home without needing to bust out the old tank television. Make no mistake: this is some super impressive tech that absolutely anyone can appreciate and leap into, but it must be said that the tech hasn’t quite been perfected just yet.
Everyone over the age of 30 remembers the first time they encountered TIME CRISIS at the arcades. While there are other big hitters in the genre like House of the Dead and Virtua Cop, for me, TIME CRISIS is lightgun gaming. I have a lot of fond memories of playing the TIME CRISIS 2 PS2 demo until I could basically choreograph every screen, and have lost more than a few weekends of pocket money to the arcade equivalent. The perfect series, then, to be the face of a Kickstarter campaign to get this thing moving, especially now that TIME CRISIS is now very upsettingly three decades old.
G’AIM’E is split into three distinct bundles: G’AIM’E TIME CRISIS BASIC, G’AIM’E TIME CRISIS + PREMIUM, and G’AIM’E TIME CRISIS + ULTIMATE. I received the G’AIM’E TIME CRISIS + ULTIMATE version for review purposes, which retails at a not insignificant $199.99/£199.99. That wedge of change gets you the mini console, 2x G’AIM’E lightguns, a pedal to help you smoothly duck in and out of cover, and a couple of neat little collectibles. This top tier does also include POINT BLANK, STEEL GUNNER, and STEEL GUNNER 2, but you can’t add any other games to it, which is a shame. It is also the only version to include an AC adapter, which sounds like a bit of a cheap move until you realise Tassei Denki actually included an adapter for basically every region on Earth.
And you cannot accuse them of being cheap with the overall quality of G’AIM’E, either. The first time you unbox the G’AIM’E TIME CRISIS + ULTIMATE, it does just feel like the real deal — something that can’t always be said for Kickstarter end products. There’s a lovely sheen to the packaging with distinct branding that catches the eye, and all the different parts inside are so clearly for a specific purpose and smartly segmented that even people who don’t know what Duck Hunt is could figure out what’s what.
(Conversely, I think I need some kind of nuclear engineering degree to get everything back in the box again. It’s like putting Brock Lesnar inside a Smart car. How did they do it?)
The gun itself also has a premium, transportive feel to it. The form factor is exactly the same as the one that you remember smelling like old cigarettes and sweat so many decades ago, with the exact same haptic “click” of pulling the trigger. The A button means you don’t need the pedal to duck, and there’s even a facsimile of the recoil you’d get in the arcade for extra immersion. It’s probably the best lightgun I’ve ever used in terms of feel and features.
Set-up is remarkably simple. There’s a nice little video that tells you which cables to put where, and everything is very easy to discern on the streamlined mini console. The only real stumbling block some might run into lies on the calibration side of things.
What makes G’AIM’E such a fascinating modern solution for an old problem is that it uses AI. Don’t worry: you don’t need to connect the G’AIM’E to your local data collection center and also reservoir. Instead, G’AIM’E works by placing a HD camera into the barrel of the gun, with that camera then capturing an image of your screen. With its Neural Processing Unit (NPU), the G’AIM’E is then able to refer to its knowledge base that’s been trained on thousands of screens to then replicate where you are pointing on your TV.
It’s a very clever idea that works shockingly well, for the most part. Ensuring that you’re far enough away from your TV and with low lighting, G’AIM’E asks you to shoot some targets by aiming square down both sights of the gun. And then, as if by magic, you’re able to shoot at bad dudes in a tower while you save the president’s daughter. It cannot be understated how miraculous this all feels: no sensor bar, no weird visual concessions on your TV, and no need to lug around a 200lb arcade cabinet. It’s TIME CRISIS (and POINT BLANK, STEEL GUNNER, and STEEL GUNNER 2, if your budget allows) right in the comfort of your own home.
There’s a pretty big “but” here, though.
You see, G’AIM’E is a very neat party piece, something for you to bring out when you have a few mates over and roll back the years. POINT BLANK is maybe even more fun here than in arcades, as it being so accessible means it becomes the Wario Ware FPS you didn’t know you wanted. And while TIME CRISIS is strictly one-player, it’s still fun to swap between players, some of whom can definitely be a tad dramatic on the pedal. But G’AIM’E is probably not what you want if you’re chasing the highest of scores.
While largely accurate, I found that my crosshair was almost always doing some kind of jittery juddering on the screen. Sometimes, it was just a small bit of movement. Other times, it felt like I was acres away from my target. No matter how many times I recalibrated, it always felt like a headache to shoot at guys behind cover in the distance, as the G’AIM’E does seem to lack pinpoint accuracy absolutely all the time. It’s also annoying having to recalibrate every time you move position, or even just set down the gun.
I did have a couple of other minor quibbles with the G’AIM’E. My audio would sometimes cut out for a while after pausing, which I can only put down to being a quirk of pausing a game that was never really designed to be paused. The other comes down to room space required. If you have a TV over 50″, you may have to basically be standing in your doorway — something for those who live in smaller houses to consider. You can’t just wing it either, as G’AIM’E requires almost perfect calibration to get the most out of it.
In a lot of ways, G’AIM’E reminds me of PlayStation Now. To get around the backwards compatibility headaches, Sony’s streaming service essentially let you play PS3 games by remotely playing them from a physical PS3 in a datacenter. G’AIM’E is a similar compromise, an ingenious solution to a technical nightmare that you just have to accept has some downsides if you want to travel back in time for a few hours.
A G’AIM’E TIME CRISIS + ULTIMATE bundle was provided by PR for the purposes of this review.
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