Introduction
So, after ten years of loyal service, your 8-bit Nintendo system finally packed it in… right when you were getting itchy to play a game of "Duck Hunt". Never fear, the guys from ActLabs just may have the answer to your problem, with their new "Act-Labs GS".

The GS (Gun System… get it?) is a slick-looking two gun set with a supplemental controller which looks kind of like a flashlight with a thumb joystick on the top. This additional controller can simulate a mouse for games like Quake, in which you have to do more than just shoot. The unit is typical Act-Labs gray, and typical Act-Labs quality-built. It doesn't feel like a piece of cheap junk when you pick it up (the Super NES so-called Super Scope comes to mind). The unit requires the gameport as well as a monitor pass-through, and each gun (or one gun and the controller) plus AC power are all wired back to the games control box. As such, it requires some serious wire-management skills to keep it from becoming a tangled mess. It ships with one game, "Remington Top-Shot", made by Head Games Publishing (an Activision affiliate).

Setup & Installation
Setting up the gun was a breeze, once we figured out that we had to set the desktop to 640X480 in order to calibrate the guns for Top-Shot, as it runs at that resolution. Actually, that fact is clearly stated in the product information, but we didn't bother to read the instructions before trying to set things up :) The setup program is very intuitive and the music that plays during installation is pretty catchy. The only odd thing about the calibration process, which consists of taking several shots at a bulls-eye, is that the last two or three shots always seemed to go a bit left of where I was aiming. It didn't appear to bother the accuracy of the gun in the game, though. They were always uniformly accurate, and were solid-feeling and ergonomic. The guns worked best when used about 18" to three feet from the screen. Any further than about four and half feet didn't work at all, even in a dim room. Unfortunately, as there aren't many supported games right now we had to rely on Top-Shot for most of our testing. Future versions of such games as Rainbow Six, and the Deer Hunter series will apparently support the GS.

The GS & Games
Top-Shot is a target range simulation that is set up to look like an outdoor gun club with four different ranges: paper target, skeet shooting, outdoor range and distance range. The paper target, or indoor range, is a paper bull's eye that you can move forward or back, exactly like the one Mel Gibson shot a happy-face on in the original Lethal Weapon (remember?). The outdoor range is a bunch of building facades with pop-up assailants and innocents. The skeet shooting and distance range are, well, like skeet shooting. The paper target range works pretty much flawlessly, but not so the other two… the outdoor range has bad and good guys looking almost exactly the same, so I shot a bunch of innocent bystanders in my pursuit of justice, and the skeet shooting tends to pull the screen off-center whenever you shoot near the edges of the screen. This will result in the clay pigeons being shot partially or completely off the screen… and you really will have to be a "top-shot" to hit clay pigeons which don't show up on the screen. There is also a safety presentation included, and there is a plethora of guns available to be used. The game is a simulation, as I mentioned, and unfortunately simulates very well the fact that a target range is only fun for so long. What I mean is, even shooting clay pigeons with an assault rifle loses its novelty value after a while. Going back to "Duck Hunt" for a minute, although technically far superior, "Top-Shot" doesn't have anything to make it fun, like the ducks spiraling into the ground, or the smiling dog to gather your kills…and giggle his guts out when you miss entirely.

There is a third party Quake II conversion (freeware) out called Gun Frenzy, which we used to test the GS's versatility in the more-than-just-shooting genre. They also make a conversion for Half-Life, which we didn't test out. They can both be downloaded from http://www.glitterstream.net . The game was pretty fun, and the shooting was a blast in one-player, but anyone trying to use this in a multi-player frag-fest would get soundly spanked. Any Quake-genre player worth his grenade launcher uses a combination of mouse and keyboard to get the most out of his two hands, and you simply can't get all the control of the mouse on the GS's supplemental controller. You would need three hands to get all the controls required plus be able to use the gun (and if you had three hands, your Quake-ability would be the least of your problems). Hence, anyone trying to use the GS against competent Quake-sters would end up a bloody piñata in no-time-flat. I think it is necessary to emphasize that isn't the fault of the GS, but a limitation of any gun hardware to this point. The fact is, all a gun does is shoot, and you can't use half of your resources (one of your two hands) just to shoot. That's why Act-Labs is (wisely) marketing the GS more towards tactical simulations and strict shooting games.

Many thanks out to Greg Hanna who co-wrote this article with me.