Gotcha! The Sport!

"Gotcha!: The Sport!: The Game!: The Review!"

Ah, Gotcha!: The Sport. Simulation of paintball, which in turn is a simulation of bloody combat. Paintball is, as most of you ought to know, where you run around in camouflage with a gun that shoots paint pellets and you shoot and eliminate people until someone with a better gun finds you, then... POP!

In this game, the sport is handled in a Capture-The-Flag scenario. Your goal is to race towards the enemy camp, retrieve their flag, and then bring it back to home base before they do the same. Now, how can we bring this excitement to a home console? What sort of control could allow the madness of firing frantically at foes while capsules of the rainbows burst all around you? Adrenaline-pumping insanity requiring total coordination could only be properly captured in one form. A combination of one standard controller and one Nintendo Zapper light gun. With one hand, you deftly eliminate your foes, and with the other, you swerve frantically as you advance towards headquarters, all the while praying that you aren't taken out of the game by just one well-placed shot.

At least, that's how it works in theory.

The Nintendo Zapper element of the game is handled fairly well. Enemies appear and you must blast them, just like in virtually all Zapper games. The gun is reasonably responsive, depending on how well you've taken care of it over the years. If you point at an enemy and you haven't taken your light gun with you into any mosh pits, they ought to fall down without a hitch. And without bloodloss. Instead, you get a pretty splattering of random-colored goo as the ''bullet'' explodes all over your opponent. That's right, in a sense, this game is non-violent. Technically, you're not killing anybody, just blasting them one good and knocking them out of the game. So, in a sense, this isn't a homicidal rampage game... it's a feel-good homicidal rampage game!

However, to be quite honest, it's difficult to botch light-gun control when making a game. The real test for this game's controls is how well the normal controlller works. Well, the commands for it are simple, to say the least. Up, down, select, A, and B all fire off rockets of nothingness at nothing. In other words, you have left, right, and pause. To be kind, pause works. However, left and right are sluggish to the extreme. They move you horizontally in your first-person perspective, which defies laws of common sense but would work for this game if they would actually move you at any speed. Although it is possible to evade an attack, it's not feasible, since shooting the opponent is much faster than scrolling them off screen.

Herein lies the issue. When an enemy actually is threatening to attack you, they stand still and a little bar appears beside them that indicates either that they're aiming at you or running low on gasoline and refueling at an astounding rate. After a set amount of time, they Gotcha! You can adjust this time by selecting a different difficulty level on the menu that comes up right after the title screen, which is really the only effect that selector has. While the enemy is aiming, you have the aforementioned duration to eliminate them from gameplay. You can scroll them off the screen, or you can just give them a good blast from the light gun. Now, when character movement is this slow, that's simply not a good idea! The One True Way to play Gotcha!: The Sport is to hold the D-pad to the right, shoot anything that moves, and when you stop moving, shoot the pretty flag which magically puts it into your inventory. Then you hold left on the D-pad and shoot anything that moves until you win the level. This is especially crucial to gameplay when you consider that there's a timer, and, blast it! There's not enough time for you to double back just to dodge one measly bullet, soldier! People's lives are at stake here!

After triumphantly returning to the cheering cries of your team with the enemy's banner held high in hand, you leave the unimpressive opening level and go to a level that plays nearly the same but now has a new background. Backgrounds include a city and a forest. Once you beat all of the game's four levels, it cycles you back to the first one. And you just keep carrying on, playing the same four stages ad nauseam. Bang bang flag bang bang win; bang bang flag bang bang win. The ''difficulty setting'' is as much a misnomer as ''high-paying McDonald's job.'' The hardest setting in the game still gives you more than enough time to shoot things while they stand still like morons and go ''whooo whooo'' with their rifles. Running out of ammo is impossible because if you hit an enemy, you don't lose a bullet. I guess you just load your gun with the souls of the fallen and keep on truckin'. To be honest, I have no idea what happens if you run out of ammo. It's never happened to me.

Although the game suffers from a disgusting case of lack-of-replay-itis, it still has a personality of its own. The enemy soldiers crawl, walk, and hide in an attempt to deceive you and stain your shirt with all hues of the spectrum. They take things very seriously, and when somebody points a gun at you from a skyscraper window, you may be taken by surprise. When you see a combatant slither across the ground, carrying your pennant, you might grin at their attempt to get by you before you shoot them one for the good ol' team... even if your team never seems to actually help you out at all. I suppose they took your entire side hostage, which they most likely deserved if they couldn't shoot people standing still with meters coming out of their Nikes.

Even though I may seem highly critical of Gotcha!: The Sport, the fact of the matter is that despite the repetition and lack of difficulty, it can be a rather entertaining game. It was one of the first attempts to bring paintball to the video game format, and although it doesn't exactly ooze from every pore with hyper-realism, it puts up its dukes and challenges you to a fight. Should you accept its desired battle? Only if you like shooting people and capturing flags... and if you think about it, many popular first person shooters of the modern era are no more developed than that.

Is Gotcha! perfect? No way. Is it a good concept? Yeah. Is it worth a play, even with its flaws? Definitely. It doesn't feature amazing special effects, musical compositions by Beethoven reincarnate, or the difficulty of Battletoads. Nonetheless, despite its shortcomings, it can entertain. This game can truly stand up for simple gaming fun, even if it sometimes serves as an example that inelaborate works are a very different beast than ocean-deep gameplay, and when made too easy, often don't send you running back to your controller.

Reviewer's Score: 6/10, Originally Posted: 04/16/02, Updated 04/16/02