Gun.Smoke
Arcade
Nostalgia Factor:
Gun.Smoke is a game that I didn’t know when I was growing up. It was released for the arcades in 1985, so I would have only been about three years old at the time. It must have either not been a popular game, or it was phased out very quickly as I do not recall seeing it anywhere when I was a kid - and I visited a LOT of bowling alleys, skating rinks, and arcades in my youth. It was also ported to the NES in 1988, but I don’t recall ever hearing about it or seeing it on the NES either. It was a game that always managed to completely evade my attention, for some reason or another.
I first became aware of this game in late 2021 – 36 years after its initial release. When I got my RetroPie, it was one of the first things I added to my queue. When I saw that it was a 1985 game, I thought oh perfect – this would be a great game to check out for my little 40th birthday game review tour. I played it on my Pie, using save states to help me along since the game was so ungodly difficult, I never would have been able to beat it without them. I got all the way to the second-to-last stage of the game... when disaster struck. I saved my progress in the middle of a tough fire fight. I don’t know what I hit or what I pressed, but this menu popped up on the screen, covering up everything that was happening in the game while it still continued to play. In a moment of panic I hit buttons to try and close this menu, but I must have accidentally made some kind of selection. The game bugged out on me, running at about three times its normal speed, making it virtually impossible to play. The problem persisted even when I exited out of the game and came back. No amount of troubleshooting worked. I had completely and irreparably messed the game up on my RetroPie.
I almost just moved on and put Gun.Smoke in my rearview mirror. To be honest, I didn’t like the game very much anyway. If I was going to accidentally wreck a game on my RetroPie, at least it was something I didn’t enjoy that much. But I kept thinking back on the game. Thinking back on all the unfinished business I’d be leaving behind. The OCD part of my brain does not like to start games and then not finish them. I’d end up finding an alternative way to play this game on my laptop. And I’d end up beating it – using save states of course. Was it worth all of that hassle, though? I guess it’s time to give you the rundown.
Story:
There are bandits that are terrorizing a town in the Old West, and it is up to you to track them down and brutally murder them.
Gameplay:
The best way I can describe Gun.Smoke is that it is like a mix between Sunset Riders and classic arcade shooters like Ikari Warriors or Guerilla War. Like Sunset Riders, the game is set in the Old West. Also like Sunset Riders, each stage begins by showing you a wanted poster of the big bad villain you are trying to kill. You have to fight through the stage, kill the bad guy at the end of the stage, and then move onto the next one. Rinse and repeat until you beat the final boss at the end of the game. But aside from the general premise, this is where the similarities end.
Gameplay is more like the aforementioned Guerilla War or Ikari Warriors. It takes place from an isometric/overhead viewpoint. You control your character, who tends to hang out near the bottom of the screen. The screen itself is constantly scrolling upwards. You can move up, down, left, and right on the field of action. You can fire your weapon in three different directions in front of you. Enemies are constantly popping up on the screen to try and shoot you. You have to dodge their shots and kill them before they kill you. And kill you they will.
Gun.Smoke is insanely hard. Insanely hard. It gives the phrase “bullet hell” a brand new meaning. There are constantly bullets coming your way. I think I’ve counted something like a dozen or more of them on the screen at one time before. Just staying alive becomes a near-impossible feat – on the very first stage of the game! One hit and you die. You don’t just jump right back in with another life, you have to go back to the game’s latest checkpoint, which in many cases can be something like two or three minutes in the past. There are no checkpoints before boss battles, so if you die during a boss fight you have to replay half the entire stage again. One of the many reasons I didn’t feel guilty using save states. Life’s too short for that shit.
Your character can only fire forwards, and this caused many, many problems as I played. Enemies appear on the screen from all directions. In front of you, off to the side, even behind you if you are high up enough on the screen. Once an enemy gets behind you, it is very difficult to stay alive. He’ll fire shots at you constantly, constantly. And since you can only fire in the forward direction, this makes it very difficult to kill him. You have to zig and zag all over the screen, hoping to trick the enemy into moving up on the screen and getting in front of you – all while dodging about 90 bullets and trying to kill other enemies in the process. The enemies just simply do not stop coming and do not stop shooting at you. I’ve always considered myself good at games like this, but Gun.Smoke humbled me FAST.
You can pick up items as you go, most of which are uncovered by shooting and destroying barrels. This was always a double-edged sword for me, because if you stop and take the time to destroy barrels, enemies will begin to surround you since they constantly respawn so quickly. You have to weigh the benefits of going after gun/speed increasing items versus getting hit and having to go back to the last checkpoint – losing whatever item you would have picked up in the process. Another reason I didn’t feel guilty using save states as I played this.
The item that was the most helpful to me was the horse. When you ride the horse, you immediately get a speed boost. Not only this, but your horse can take up to three hits before you are thrown off of it. Three hits in this game is HUGE. If you even get hit once when you are on foot, you immediately die. The horse was really the only major item that I would go out of my way to collect.
I don’t know if this game is long, or if it just seems long because of all the dying you do. It’s ten stages long. Each stage would take about 5 to 7 minutes to beat without dying. With dying, some of them are about half hour long. Seriously. You die a LOT in this game and I cannot stress that enough. By the time I got to level 5 or 6, I was just DONE with this game. It felt like I had been playing it for hours and hours on end. Imagine my chagrin when the game pooped out on my Pie and I had to play the whole thing from the beginning over again.
One last complaint before I move on has to do with the boss battles. I don’t know what system this game uses for hit detection, but it is absolutely terrible. Most bosses have a power gauge with about five bars. Each hit takes a bar off, until zero remain – and then the boss dies. This is how it should work, I should say. I can’t tell you how many times I would sit there and just fire round and round into the boss, only to have nothing happen whatsoever. Other times I would shoot the boss and he would take damage immediately. There doesn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to the hit detection. And honestly it ended up making these boss battles feel very, very cheap. Particularly when you get killed and have to replay half the stage over again, only to die in the first 20 seconds fighting the boss again. Very frustrating. Yet another reason I don’t feel any guilt about using save states to beat this game.
Graphics:
You better get used to looking at the same color scheme over and over again. Lots of dirt and sand. Lots of empty looking buildings. The occasional tree or body of water. There's nothing too impressive about the stage visuals.
The characters populating this world are nothing to write home about either. I mean, you get what you see and nothing more. Little guys in cowboy hats with big guns. Some of the bosses have a little bit of personality, but that's it. I would never say this game is ugly, because it is not, but I do have to say that its graphics are as completely middle-of-the-road as you can possibly get.
Sound:
The music is nothing special either. The best I can say about it is that it matches the game's visuals and tone perfectly. To be honest, however, I could barely hear the music over the firing of the guns and all the game's constant little sound effects.
Overall:
From what I've been able to gather from a few of the retro gaming Facebook groups I'm in, Gun.Smoke is a revered title that people remember fondly. I feel as if I'm going to get some hate for the grade I'm about to give this game. My sole criteria when I review a game is if I had any fun or not. And I'm sorry, I just didn't have any fun with this game. I also don't have any nostalgic feelings for it, so even nostalgia can't save it from the misery of me giving it a D+.
It's too hard. That's really what it boils down to. You die constantly. You get sent back to checkpoints and have to replay long sections of levels over again, probably dying multiple times along the way. If you're lucky enough to make it to a boss unscathed, you better hope luck is on your side and you don't get hit by one of the 40,000 projectiles or enemies that are all over your screen.
All the levels look the same. There's little variety in the scenery or the enemy types. The power ups you get are weak and completely underwhelming. You barely even notice that they've done anything. Really, the only power up worth getting is the horse.
What can I say? I wasn't impressed by Gun.Smoke. I like these types of arcade games. I like the game's concept. It just didn't come together in the fun department for me.
THE GRADE:
D+
1984:
1985:
Gun.Smoke (the review you are reading!)
and coming shortly,
1985's Gradius
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