"A groundbreaking First Person Shooter in the arcade with unique controls"

Here’s a rare find. As far as I can tell, Operation Gun Buster was the first arcade First Person Shooter, beating War by the better part of a decade. Unlike War, or any other FPS you’ve played for that matter, Gun Buster’s control scheme is unique. You get both a joystick and an Operation Wolf style submachine that’s mounted to the cabinet. The joystick moves your character forward and back, strafe left and strafe right, like the “wasd” control setup that’s popular with most computer FPS players. The gun acts both as a mouse look and as a, well, uh, a gun. Pan the gun to the left or right of the screen and your character turns in that direction. Aim at a dude and shoot. Basically, the gun takes the place of the mouse. The controls are about as intuitive as you can get. I’ve heard people talk about wanting to use a pistol-type arcade gun (the kind used today) for an arcade FPS, but I don’t think it would work. Movement (strafing and moving forward and back) takes one hand any way you do it, and looking and turning takes another. You’d need a third hand to hold the gun.

Ideally you’ll be able to find the cabinet with spots for all four players. If you’re not playing the single player, which is essentially a series of boss fights, you’ll be able to pull down a sweet multiplayer deathmatch. Yes, ladies and gents, there was arcade FPS deathmatch as far back as 1992. There is one, uh, slight problem. Only the first and third players have the joysticks that move their characters around. The second and fourth players just have the guns and actually ride around on the backs of their partners. It’s somewhat similar to being in the passenger seat of a Warthog in Halo. The best time my friends had playing Gun Buster was just one on one, winner stays.

I really enjoyed the character design in this game. Granted, everything is done in sprites, and anything done with sprites is going to look pretty archaic by today’s standards. But the sprites, for what they are, are so well done. The characters you can choose from have this weird, hunched over look, like the anime inspired picture of Tom Cruise running from the movie poster to Mission Impossible 2. I presume this was mostly done to hide the fact the characters don’t really have a running animation. All of the characters have serious cybernetic enhancements, which gives the game most of its flavor. It’s certainly interesting to blow the human parts off a boss, exposing his robotic interior. Makes it almost believable that these guys could take hundreds of rounds from high-caliber automatic assault rifles and still fight back. The only strange part is how the two player teams look. Is an ultra-tech cyborg assassin from the distopian future really going to let his buddy ride piggyback?

Level design is simple but effective. Mostly they seem like grid mazes. Technology precludes total freedom of movement in Gun Busters, but the designers were thoughtful enough to make most of the walls in the various level semi-transparent, like glass windows or strategically piled junk. This makes it possible to see (and sometimes shoot) your opponent. The best level is probably the first: a nighttime assault on a office building. Shattering all that glass is just too killer. It reminds me of that scene in Terminator 2 when the protagonists are shooting at the cops from the office building. Or maybe the first Die Hard.

If this game had true four-player deathmatch instead of the piggy-back system it could have been the start of something amazing. Sure, it’s dated, but look at the first Street Fighter and see how far the fighting game genre has come. In some parallel dimension, Operation Gun Buster ushered in a golden age of arcade First Person Shooters. Man, that would be neato mosquito.

Reviewer's Score: 9/10, Originally Posted: 10/10/02, Updated 10/10/02