1995 saw a sea of changes in video game consoles, both in appearance and in the type of games they played. The fifth generation of consoles was being launched in North America, including the original Sony Playstation and the Sega Saturn. Nintendo was preparing for the future with the upcoming Nintendo 64 and scrapping the past with the discontinuation of the original NES system. This left the Super Nintendo in a strange situation – on the one hand, the developers were making games as good as ever for a system they knew well. On the other hand, who wanted to play yesterday’s system?
If the Super Nintendo had really become yesterday’s system, a game exploring the craziest possible version of history would be a perfect fit. AND Wild weapons, an almost forgotten shooting gallery game, fits the bill.
If you are a paid Nintendo Switch Online subscriber, you can play Wild weapons now for free by downloading the Super Nintendo Entertainment System app.
Like many Super Nintendo games, Wild weapons it was done in a hurry. Looking back on a 2013 interview, creator Shunichi Taniguchi said that his boss at Natsume, his Tokyo-based game developer, “told us to develop a new game with two conditions: fast and cheap”. The game was made in five months with a team of three, but it is full of creativity.
Inspired by space adventure manga from the late 70s to the mid 80s Snake and spaghetti westerns like The good, the bad and the ugly, Wild weapons features two main characters, Clint and Annie. The original instruction manual covers the game’s plot, where Annie’s family seeks revenge against the Kid family and Clint is her hired space bounty hunter.
There is no substantive difference between the two, other than a few different animations (Clint shows a lever for bombs while Annie throws hers into the air), but I found it gratifying to play with Annie. In addition to some characters like Samus from Super Metroid and Branford’s Land Final Fantasy III, there are not many main female characters in SNES games. While the game itself doesn’t offer much in the way of storyline or dialogue, watching it make its way through the endless waves is rewarding.
Despite the title, shooting is only one aspect of Wild weapons. I spent my first few attempts focusing on my weapons, but I was dying quickly again and again, my canvas fading to an old gray. The aim of Wild weapons it is not killing most enemies, but surviving them. After I started jumping and jumping twice across the screen, dodging bullet targets and answering Annie’s calls for “Watch out!”, I started to live a little longer, although the frequent use of the Switch Online back button still was useful.
But it was worth it, because the enemies of Wild weapons they are something to see. They start out as standard cowboys and robotic destruction lockers, but they become more and more random. There’s a distinctly non-Western guy with a knife trying to stab you. There is a man wearing a leopard print that hula hoops on a moving robot train, and the hula hoop fires circular icy bursts that make your character vulnerable to attack.
What are these people doing in a western space? It’s hard to say, but the genuine surprise I felt at seeing them, and then the sudden rush to have to dodge their attacks, was a real roller coaster of excitement.
Looking back, Taniguchi says that the Wild weapons the team “still thought it was the golden age” of the Super Nintendo, not too concerned with what was falling fast. At its best, the Wild weapons the screen is a series of constant explosions, from dynamite to robots, and it is difficult to predict where it will go next. But it makes you want to find out.