Gotcha! The Sport!

"Wrote this bad boy RIGHT in this box in 15 minutes BAM (quality review, I assure you)."

Back in the glory days of Nintendo monopolization, which involved your uncle, best friend, your sister's boyfriend (or any other random family member with a significant other) getting Nintendo Power, fully packed with pictures of our favorite damsel in distress, Peach, and the nefarious Bowser absconding from yet another castle while Mario dreadfully looks on, there was an extremal gadget of sorts, called the Light Gun, released which only worked with a handful of great shooting games.

While Nintendo surely didn't promote the use of 79 word sentences, it did enjoy the not-so-tepid response from the public to its new gadget. As it name portends, it was a gun, thus shooting some kind of recognizable medium for which the archaic Nintendo was able to decipher. Some games, such as Gotcha! were released to work with this Light Gun.

Gotcha! pits you from a first-person point of view against camouflage baddies sneaking around foliage, snow hills, and other such not-so-menacing natural barriers to hide themselves. As each bad guy slowly appears from behind his or her hiding area, slow, dreadful music begins to play and you better shoot him or... you get shot! Yes, exciting and provocative: enemies with guns fire back at you! Not being able to aim your handy little gun and fire back as fast as possible in successions means you lose the and, thus starting over.

I have many memories with this game, but, as such, returning to games proves to also be returning to the sense that game wasn't as good as all the grandeur and greatness time has built. Time seems to be a reviewers worst enemy. Upon revisitation, as not to be jaded by beautiful Xbox graphics, Gotcha!'s replay value sits at this: it's the same thing over and over, and once you get to know where most everyone is going make a dramatic appearance to blow your head of from, the game tends to get boring. Also, you can cheat so easily with any light gun game: move up to the screen and fire at pointblank range. Always annoying.

While things like graphics are negotiable since this is a Nintendo game, as such, most 8-bit graphics had the same technological limitations applied, in the sense that there wasn't much room for improvement, since that seems like an umbrella argument against bad graphics on any game. So, what is Gotcha! good at? It's fine a few times through until you find out where everyone is, can shoot the enemies relatively quickly even given the problem with the light gun not always shooting where you aim. Is it worth whatever negligible amount of money you'll spend on it? Sure. Will it keep you coming back and back? No. I sort of like the other shooter game which involved you shooting Native Americans and beer cans more, anyway.

Reviewer's Score: 6/10, Originally Posted: 07/08/08

Game Release: Gotcha! The Sport! (US, November 1987)