Sega’s got to be pretty brave to release their old light gun shooters on Wii. It started with Ghost Squad, then House of the Dead 2 & 3 Return, and now, the much less succintly-named Gunblade NY and L.A. Machineguns Arcade Hits Pack. Like the previous titles, you obviously get two games: 1996’s Gunblade NY and 1998’s L.A. Machineguns: Rage of the Machines (though considering that you also fly around San Francisco and Las Vegas in that one, it’s more like “Pacific Time Zone Machineguns”) — two games in a series where you control the machine gun of a slick helicopter gunship, fighting back the forces of some evil alien android army. And I’ve already said more than I need to about the story.
However, I mention Sega’s bravery because — and let’s just get it out of the way — these games are hideous. But they’re also 3D games from the ’90s; a simpler time where textures were a novelty. They’re straightforward, and they’re filled with noise, from constant machine gun sounds to corny music to laughable voice acting. And yet, at that point in time, we expected nothing less from Sega arcade games. And for that, I can’t really fault these games for looking so obviously dated. If nothing else, they’re good ports. Both games have been reformatted in widescreen (already a big advantage over Ghost Squad and HOTD) and move just as fast and smooth as the original versions. They haven’t been easy to access otherwise (even if you did prefer to straight-up pirate them for a PC emulator like MAME and its ilk). And good luck finding an arcade that has them, or at least one that isn’t a weekend road trip away. When it comes to budget-priced compilations like this ($29.99, for the record), I’d personally much rather have more obscure games that are easy to pick up and play with one controller than thumbing through the same 20 Genesis games we’ve seen for years.
