A Tale of Two Zappers

No Nintendo Entertainment System would be complete without its trusty light-gun, the "Zapper".  And while emulation marches on and the Wii is giving us perfect replicas of our 8-bit favorites for downloading, there's been very little success in replicating the functionality of this venerable light gun.  Go ahead.  Try playing Duck Hunt on one of those "Flash game" websites or something similar with your Wiimote.  It's not the same.  No loud click or disoriented screen flash.  It just you... pointing and clicking at something.  Maybe similar enough to satisfy some people. To me - no where near as fun.

The Zapper wasn't the first home light gun, but it was the first one that was iconic.  To this day, everyone still pictures two things where they hear Zapper:  that little futuristic pistol and the snickering dog from Duck Hunt.

The Zapper originally matched the color-scheme of the the NES Control Deck: a nice two-tone grey with orange trigger.  It never looked anything close to menacing but sometime along its lifespan, it had to play by the federal regulations placed on toy guns.  That's why those tardy to Nintendo's party got to sport the unattractive orange pistol.  It matched the control deck quite poorly - as in "not at all".  It was so bright, people can see you playing Gumshoe from six blocks away.  Ugly, ugly thing.

I thought I was being petty with this blinding weapon of mass pixel destruction.  But I was not alone.  I whipped out a copy of Bill Barker's Trick Shooting.  My girlfriend remarked that my orange monstrosity I was pointing at my TV was not "the real Zapper".  I was secretly proud.  I tried using the gray one, but it seems to be nonfunctional.  I put it on eBay without actually knowing it was broken.  Thank goodness it didn't sell.

Our Zappers may look awesome to nostalgia freaks and anyone hanging out around Hogan's Alley, but our toys looked like laughable pieces of nonsense compared to what our friends in Japan got to use:

They don't mess around.  If you're going up against some crazy shooter in Wild Gunman, you don't want to look like a fool with your silly outer space stun gun.  

Sadly, technology is not being kind to our favorite little light gun.  Good luck playing with modern LCD or Plasma displays; you're canine companion will die from excessive fits of giggling considering all the ducks you'll be missing.   Keep that in mind before you throw away your old tube television.   You don't want to play to shooting stages of Bayou Billy with a control pad, now do you?