there are plenty of different kinds of video games out there but throughout the
history of gaming a huge part of the
appeal of games has been the fact that many of them allow us to pretend to
shoot at things and although we do most of our shooting these days with a
Gamepad or a mouse and keyboard a lot of you might remember the days when we had
actual replica guns to fire at the screen I'm talking of course about light
guns the things that you could use with your NES to play duck hunt and just
shoot that stupid dog over and over again because he keeps laughing at you
but even though light guns are a rarity these days they were a little ahead of
their time back in the mid 1980s considering that the concept of
controlling your video games by pointing something at the screen didn't really
take off again until Nintendo introduced the Wii in
2006 however the light gun actually has
a history that goes way back before home
video games in fact all the way back to
1936 with a Contraption called the seaberg Ray o light that appeared as a
wooden cabinet containing you guessed it a mechanical duck with a tube attached
to it that could sense light a rifle
that came with it fired a light beam that would make the duck fall mechanical
light gun games like these eventually gave way to arcade games that
used a light gun that worked with CRT monitors which found their way into the
home as accessories for consoles like the NES and Sega Master System so when
you pointed your NES zapper or Sega
light phaser at the screen and fired at a criminal a water foul or whatever the
case may be the screen would very briefly go blank then redraw only the
targets as white blocks the light gun
could then detect whether it was pointed at one of the white areas and then if so
the game registered a hit later light guns like the Nintendo Super scope which
looked like something you might use to invade a small country defended by a
clone army of Marcus Phoenix allowed for greater Precision by detecting the
change in brightness at a certain point on the screen once it was refreshed to
figure out where the gun was pointed but hold on a second the way that light guns
work sounds pretty straightforward so why have they gone out of style ah well
sometimes as technology moves forward stuff gets relegated to history's
Dustbin simply because it was designed to work with something else older which
is exactly what happened to our beloved light guns you see old CRT screens had
much lower display leg than modern LCDs
when LCDs started to dominate the market they offered Crisp Images and low power
consumption not to mention being lighter and thinner but they've never been as
quick as tube monitors due to fundamental differences in how they work
light guns don't work with modern screens because their display leg is
just too high so they can't draw those white targets or change the brightness
quickly enough for the gun to register it and even though the light gun is
considered a retro piece of tech the quick respon that you could get from a
light gun paired with a CRT actually hasn't been matched by modern solutions
like the Wii remote which tend to have a much higher very perceptible latency
when you're pointing them around but of course if you can't still play games
with them you can at least use your light guns as accessories for your next
Halloween costume just don't try to walk through airport security with one
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