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Tranquilizer Gun - Arcade (1980) |
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Arcade Flyer |
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Video games at the beginning of the 1980s heavily focused on one of two basic elements: Shooting and running. If a game didn’t involve a lot of shooting, then it would have involved a lot of running from opponents, usually in a large maze that requires you to be quick and think ahead to avoid your captors. The epicenter of the single-screen maze genre is Pac-Man, a game which needs little introduction or explanation to any and all gamers. As with most genres, Pac-Man may not have been the first in its field, but it was often billed as the one that boosted the popularity of maze games and led to the inevitable production of copycats. If you have not heard of “Lock ‘n’ Chase” by Data East or Konami’s “Tutankham,” they may have been eclipsed by Namco’s pizza-shaped yellowman. If you are also not familiar with Tranquilizer Gun, then that’s okay too, as not many remember this little slice of Sega’s pre-SG-1000 days. Being released the same year as Pac-Man, Tranquilizer Gun was not quite as famed, but amongst Sega’s really early releases, it is one of the more interesting. Tranquilizer Gun has less in common with Pac-Man and more with Midway’s Wizard of Wor, which focuses on shooting monsters as much as dodging them within a maze. As a zoo officer, the goal of TQ is to take up your tranquilizer gun (hey, that’s the name of the game!) and utilize it to subdue rogue animals on the loose, where you must take them back to your captive truck. You have infinite ammunition to take down the four types of wild animals: Snakes, gorillas, lions, and elephants. Snakes only take two shots to knock out and award you the least points for captivity. Gorillas and lions take even more punishment (three and four shots respectively) but reward greater scores for snagging. The trickiest creature to capture is the elephant, which takes about five shots and somehow moves fast for its size. All animals have the ability to move in and out of the shrubbery which makes up the maze; you have to really watch yourself at all times in case any hostile animal just suddenly shunks out of a nearby wall and gets the jump on you. When you tranquilize an animal, their prone body lies still for thirty seconds, with an overhead timer indicating their remaining unconsciousness. Simply walk over them while they’re out and drag them back to the truck that you rode in on. You move and fire slower when you have one of them in tow, so it’s best to plan a quick route back to the truck. A counter appears on the truck with each corresponding animal to indicate how many you have picked up, starting at thirty seconds. If you let an unconscious animal go for too long, they’ll wake up enraged, but thirty seconds is generous enough. What you really have to watch out for is if any creature walks outside of the maze and lurchers towards your truck. They may attack the truck and rob you of all your hard-earned captives. To potentially avoid this catastrophe, you can actually move the animal truck around the edge and park at one of the maze’s other outside openings. Keep avoiding and capturing the animals until you have enough to move on to the next round, and make sure you do so in the red time limit indicated on the truck. Otherwise, the animals go crazy and make it nearly impossible for you to survive. Tranquilizer Gun is alike most of the other maze titles from its time, albeit with a unique premise and mechanic that gives it a different feel. Whereas most games at the beginning of the eighties were about violence and blasting stuff, TG took a pacifistic approach to its gameplay and offered up something alternatively entertaining. Tranquilizer Gun remains one of Sega’s more obscure retro titles, but it did somehow worm its way into one of the least likely places imaginable. It never had a port to any of its consoles except their very last one as an easter egg. TG is somehow an unlockable secret on the Dreamcast release of Dynamite Cop, the sequel to the beat-em-up Dynamite Deka (better known outside of Japan as Die Hard Arcade). If you complete all of Dynamite Cop’s special missions, you get to play TG for as many times as you wish. A bit of an odd place to put one of their oldest games that didn’t get much love before, but it’s a neat little nugget that gives a glimpse into how Sega operated before they went to the console market. Plus, its animations are a bit smoother than the original and the sounds actually work proper (instead of the mute rendition on current emulators), so it’s actually the definitive version. Just don’t expect Tranquilizer Gun to make the cut for any modern Sega compilations; not that it’s a bad game, it’s just decidedly obscure and less popular than most of Sega’s other games at the time. |
Tranquilizer Gun(Arcade)
Tranquilizer Gun(Arcade)
Tranquilizer Gun(Arcade)
Tranquilizer Gun(Arcade) |
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