I remember my anticipation for Gun Smoke. It was the winter of 1988 and my best friend received it for Christmas. Unfortunately a snowstorm meant I was stuck in the house for days waiting eagerly. It’s not that I had even heard of Gun Smoke before. It was a new game, which is all that mattered. Out of all of his Christmas games that is the one I needed to play. I didn’t care about Bases Loaded and Dr. Chaos can go die in a fire. In the end Gun Smoke was worth the wait and is a pretty damn good arcade port to boot.
Gun Smoke was originally released in arcades in 1985. The town of Hicksville has seen better days. The Wingate family and their army of bandits have taken over and ravaged the people. The people have had enough and hire the outlaw Billy Bob to bring them to justice. Gun Smoke was ported to nearly every format available in the 80s to varying results. Capcom’s NES version makes significant changes from the arcade. Some are for the better and some are worse. Despite the differences it still retains the feel of the arcade game and is a good game overall.
To enjoy Gun Smoke you’ll have to adjust to its control scheme. Gun Smoke is essentially an unconventional vertically scrolling shooter. Both buttons fire diagonally in either direction; to shoot forward you must press both at the same time. The arcade had three separate buttons, making this a necessary concession. As odd as it may sound it actually works in practice. The game is designed around this, with enemy waves appearing at odd angles on purpose. It also makes positioning play a heavier role. To be completely honest it is actually a detriment to fire head on as your bullets cover less space.
Billy Bob isn’t completely helpless in his pursuit of the Wingate family. The various barrels lying around contain numerous power-ups. Boots increase walking speed while bullets raise shot speed. There is also invincibility, a mega bomb, and extra lives. If you find the odd horse in a barrel (…yeah) you can ride along and survive a few shots. Things start to deviate from here.
Your score which was previously meaningless is now a money counter. The money accrued is used for a number of purposes. There are two merchants in every level who sell various items. The first sells a variety of secondary weapons with limited ammo. The second is more important as they sell a horse, ammo and the most important a wanted poster. The biggest change in Gun Smoke is requiring a wanted poster to face the end level boss. Reaching the end of a level without the poster causes it to loop endlessly until you come prepared.
It’s a change I’m not sure I’m fond of but isn’t as obnoxious as it sounds. If you are studious in killing every enemy and collecting every item you can easily build up the money for each poster. It increases in price with every new level but so does your reward money. More importantly if you scour every inch of each level you can find a wanted poster free of charge. The imbalance it causes can’t be denied however. Juggling your money to buy new weapons or the wanted poster defeats the point of their existence.
I do think the wanted poster and everything it adds was done to offset the missing content. The NES version of Gun Smoke has six levels to the arcade’s ten. Potentially making the player loop each level once or twice makes the experience longer. I wouldn’t say it makes it better though. I will say that Capcom have done a good job with the villains they did keep. Each adds variety to the game in terms of environments and enemies. Its just a shame the experience might be favorable for some.
Gun Smoke was a pretty brutal game in the arcade but is manageable on the NES. There aren’t as many enemies for one and the additional weapons help tremendously. It picks up significantly toward the end when enemies spawn from behind which is unfair. Extra lives are easy to come by and overall the game is balanced fairly.
In Closing
Considering this was an early NES title Gun Smoke holds up considerably well. Gun Smoke was released before Capcom’s golden era following Mega Man so isn’t as well known. With its decent graphics, excellent soundtrack and tight gameplay Gun Smoke remains a nice fit in any NES owner’s library.
