The following “G’AIM’E Ultimate with TIME CRISIS” unit was provided by the manufacturer for review purposes. A video review will be made available later next week.
Forget Dino Crisis1, Bandai Namco Entertainment’s arcade classic ‘TIME CRISIS’ is here to grace your living room floor with a new kit from an unexpected little corner of the world: this is the G’AIM’E Gun and console, a light-gun system designed for play with either TIME CRISIS on its own or with STEEL GUNNER 1 and 2 plus ‘POINT BLANK’. No longer do you have to drive down to the few arcades left in your area (thank goodness mine’s a twenty-minute drive!) to play a cabinet classic—you can hop right into the action at home with a system that almost feels too good to be true.
Because this is a plug ‘n play system, surely there’s got to be a catch: Can a cabinet-based game with specific hardware play just as well at home as it can on a thirty-year-old piece of hardware, barely holding their own in the corner of an old building?
The answer is yes! A lot better than you would think, anyways.
About a week back, I was graced with the presence of the “G’AIM’E TIME CRISIS+ ULTIMATE” bundle, which includes the company’s mini-console with four games built in, two of their signature light-guns, a pedal for use with TIME CRISIS, cables and the like, and these really cool little collectibles themed after TIME CRISIS—really showcasing that this whole system was kind of built just for the game, in a way. It is worth noting that the kit comes in a Basic and Premium package, the former forgoing everything but the light-gun and console and the latter coming with everything but an additional light-gun, AC adapter (with multiple heads for different power plug standards), and said collectibles.
The console itself uses USB-C for just about every connection including power delivery and the controllers themselves, so you don’t have to worry about grabbing anything special to turn on the console besides a USB-C capable charging head with 5V/2A support. Our little G’AIM’E unit appears to be not much more than a stripped-down Android box that runs you through the basics and calibration at every boot, featuring naught more than a Power and Reset button on the front.
Next up, the guns! These things are quite nice to hold, with a bit of heft at the grip of the controller helping to keep the balance as you aim and fire digital bullets at the telly. On each side you’ll find A and B buttons along with an “Insert Coin” and Pause button (the latter being quite nifty!). They don’t have true recoil like a cabinet would, however, as they’ve opted for a mild rumble. These aren’t wireless controllers, but the cable does stretch out to about 4m max, give or take—and if you’re not a fan of tying up wires, you can print a 3D holster from the company’s website to store it with ease (still trying to get mine sorted, it’s a big model!). Thank goodness for my local library, where I can freely 3D print whatever I so please.
The cool thing about the G’AIM’E (I want to point out how… Clever that name is) is that the device scales from the smallest of screens to well over 65 inches. That means you can plug this unit into just about anything, so long as there is a game mode on there and have the same results you would from your bedroom telly. I tested this console and the light-guns across my TVs and took it around town a bit to see how the console would perform. Because again, these are just light-guns with a camera in right at the nozzle—surely it doesn’t work as well as you’d think it would. But after running the calibration, the results were quite good.
G’AIM’E best describes their light-guns as controllers that utilise an “AI that’s been trained against hundreds of different screen types”. So, rather than have an additional LED system you need to drape around your television set, all the device needs to do is see part of the screen to its job. For the most part, I had no issues shooting what I needed to shoot across all four games, but the G’AIM’E unit does seem to favour particular environments over others. For example, I found that I got the best results when playing with my living room’s lights on with the curtains closed. At first, I figured the light-gun would work best with the lights off and curtains closed, so that the camera can better spot what’s on the TV. But that wasn’t the case as I experienced in a game like TIME CRISIS.
Of the four games within the G’AIM’E, I spent the bulk of my time with that aforementioned game. And look, no offence to the likes of STEEL GUNNER and POINT BLANK, the former of which turned out to be quite fun, but I’ve been dreaming about having access to TIME CRISIS at home for a little over a year now. The COVID-19 pandemic sort of accelerated my appetite for everything retro as my spending more or less doubled, picking up consoles and games, left-and-right. Of course, picking up cabinets is a lot harder and games like TIME CRISIS were sadly out of reach. Part of why I like the G’AIM’E unit isn’t because it’s brought a classic home but mainly because its plug ‘n play utility makes it viable for everyone to get in on on-rails shooting.
And TIME CRISIS is one of the kings of this genre. This is a coin vampire of a game, and it will test your pattern memorisation as it pits you against baddies that will shred your health like nothing. This is a singleplayer-only title and utilises the pedal that comes with the Ultimate edition of the console (it can also be purchased separately). By pushing the pedal, your player character Richard Miller (fancy name) will pop out of cover and allow you to fire back at enemies. Popping in and out of cover at the right time is key as you both dodge all kinds of fire so long as you’re not visible on screen. Really, this is how you do an on-rails shooter—not that getting-shot-off-screen rubbish freely available on the App Store. All danger is clearly indicated to the player and it’s up to you to decide when to fire back at your foes.
Now there were times the light-gun struggled to shoot at the parts of the screen that I was aiming at. As I mentioned earlier, how your environment is set up is really important. In my case, dark rooms gave me much worse results than if I had my lights on. You also need to stand back a good distance depending on the size of your screen, but even then, sometimes the shots you throw out don’t always seem to hit their mark. Funny enough, games like STEEL GUNNER don’t have this issue despite the more frantic nature of those games. In my video review of the G’AIM’E console, coming next week, I’ll demonstrate some of the accuracy problems I encountered in more depth (and by then, I’d have gone to my local arcade to remind myself how accurate the original cabinet was).
But for what it’s worth, I did figure out the quirks of the light-gun’s aiming over time and got way better times over the last few days. Nothing like those top ranks though, finishing TIME CRISIS in ten minutes seems absurd to me.
Now I did have some trouble with the G’AIM’E console. The first issue I ran into was getting the unit turned on. See, the Power button is a squishy push and requires the user to hold it for a little more than three seconds before the console turns on. The Reset button, however, is not like this, and as a result I had no idea why the unit wasn’t turning on. Like a terrible IT Crowd skit, I had a sinking feeling in my stomach that my unit was dead. Or that I was a buffoon. Thankfully, my contact assured me that it was neither: I was just impatient. Still, having to hold a power button to turn on the system is a choice and not one I think is particularly intuitive, especially since powering off the unit doesn’t require you to hold down the Power button.
Second up were audio issues, the bane of my existence with any retro game really. Over the week, I had strange problems with the console as sometimes the unit would boot up with no sound. Sometimes the audio would cut out completely and not return until I reset the console—killing what would otherwise have been a good run. This issue was completely random as there were days that I wouldn’t run into this problem at all. Still, G’AIM’E’s support was happy to help me figure it out and have the unit swapped out so they could test for the issue themselves.
Something worth noting is that this unit is completely offline. It cannot connect to the internet nor are there any leaderboards besides the one’s built into the games. Not a knock against the unit—I actually prefer it this way as I’m not entirely keen on plugging more devices into my network. Plus, it means that G’AIM’E has to get their console right out of the gate, and I would say they’ve done a great job here. But I presume that, down the line, they’ll try to license more classic arcade titles and considering that this console has no way to expand its library either physically or over the net, I find that to be a bit disappointing.
Would I say that the G’AIM’E console set up is worth it? Yes, I would. Considering a whole cabinet can run you well over thousands of dollars not to mention how bloody big the thing would be and the repair costs to maintain the system. The Ultimate package would run you $200 USD and gets you four games on a box that can scale up to major screen sizes, with its maker telling me that even projector-based screens work just as well as a TVs. It’s ease of access and set up is this console’s selling point and I can wholeheartedly recommend G’AIM’E’s light-gun and its console to anyone who loves a good on-rails shooter. It just works. ∎
You can pre-order the G’AIM’E console right now over on the company’s official website. The prices range from 99.99 USD all the way to 199.99 USD, depending on the bundle you choose to get. Shipping costs will vary based on region and import duties and taxes may be applicable. Units are expected to ship in December of this year.
- Yes, I know they have nothing in common. Besides the name, really. ↩︎
