In 1995, there was a sea change in video game consoles, both in what they looked like there and in the type of games they played. The fifth generation consoles have been introduced in North America, including the original Sony Playstation and the Sega Saturn. Nintendo was preparing for the future with the upcoming Nintendo 64 and dumped the past with the termination of the original NES system. This left the Super Nintendo in an awkward position – on the one hand, developers made games as good as ever before for a system they knew well. On the other hand, who wanted to play yesterday’s system?
If the Super Nintendo really became yesterday’s system, a game that explores the craziest possible version of history would fit perfectly. And Wild guns, a mostly forgotten shooting gallery game, fits the bill.
If you are a paid Nintendo Switch Online subscriber, you can play Wild guns currently free by downloading the Super Nintendo Entertainment System app.
Like many Super Nintendo games, Wild guns was hastily made. Creator Shunichi Taniguchi, who looked back in an interview in 2013, said that his boss at Natsume, his game developer in Tokyo, “told us to develop a new game with two conditions: fast and cheap.” The match was made in five months with a team of three, but it bursts with creativity.
Inspired by the space adventure manga of the late 70s to mid 80s Cobra and spaghetti vests like The good, the bad and the ugly, Wild guns contains two main characters, Clint and Annie. The original tutorial covers the plot of the game, where Annie’s family wants revenge on the Kid family and Clint is her hired space hunter.
There is no significant difference between the two, except for a few different animations (Clint pulls out a lever for bombs while Annie throws hair in the air), but I play with Annie joyfully. Beyond a few characters like Samus from Super Metroid and Terra Branford of Final Fantasy III, there are not many female main characters in SNES games. Although the game itself does not offer much of plot or dialogue, it is gratifying to see her blow through the eternal waves.
Despite the title, shooting is only one aspect of Wild guns. I made my first attempts to focus my guns, but I died quickly again and again, dimming my screen in an old-fashioned gray. The purpose of Wild guns is not to kill most enemies, but to survive them. As soon as I started jumping and double-jumping around the screen, dodging their bullet targets and heeding Annie’s calls for ‘Look out!’, I started living a little longer, although using the Switch Online’s rewind button is often handy. has just arrived.
It was worth it, however, because the enemies of Wild guns is something to behold. They start out as standard cowboys and robot destruction casts, but they become increasingly random. There’s a distinctive non-Western man with a knife trying to stab you. There’s a man with a leopard print wearing hula hoops on a moving robo train, and the hula hoop shoots circular freezes that make your character vulnerable to attacks.
What are these people doing in a Western space? It’s hard to say, but the real surprise I felt when I saw them, and when the sudden rush to evade their attacks, was a real roller coaster of emotion.
Looking back, Taniguchi says that the Wild guns team ‘still thought it was the golden era’ of the Super Nintendo, not really worried about what’s coming down on the pike fast. At its best, the Wild guns screen is a series of continuous explosions, from dynamite to robots, and it’s hard to predict where it’s going. But it makes you want to find out.