Yesterday, my copy of Mad Dog McCree: Gunslinger Pack arrived in the mail. I played it for an hour or so, knowing that this would probably be the first and last time that I put the game into my Wii.
Sober, I mean.
I have a good deal of sadly misplaced nostalgic affection for Mad Dog McCree, a clunky, silly Western shooter using live-action video that debuted as an arcade game in 1990. It was one of the first really hot games for the emerging PC CD-ROM format, and represented what we all carelessly, wrongly assumed was the Future Of Videogames: live-action video of real human beings.
Whoops! As it turns out, that never happened, although that didn’t stop quite a few gamemakers from trying to help it along in the mid-to-late 90’s with gems like Sewer Shark, Marky Mark: Make My Video, etc. Unlike those, Mad Dog is at least sort of playable today because the point-and-shoot gameplay is as simple as can be.
Which is why, just in time for its 20th anniversary (!), Majesco has released a budget Wii version, which includes the game’s 1992 sequel and a later American Laser Games title called The Last Bounty Hunter.
Unfortunately, I think it released it a bit late. Mad Dog McCree probably would have been a huge seller, say, when the Wii launched in 2006. Or when people were buying damn near anything in 2007. Now, with tons of Wii shovelware on the market and retailers being a lot more picky about what they stock, Mad Dog is out in the weeds.
Amazon doesn’t carry it. Nor Best Buy, nor Target. GameStop doesn’t carry it. In fact, GameStop currently only lists 595 Wii titles. The ESRB says it’s rated 1421 Wii titles. Since about 500 of those should be downloadable games, that means there’s, oh, 300 Wii games that the nation’s predominant games specialty retailer doesn’t even want to bother with.
Remember, I don’t think that’s a bad thing per se. I think that’s the market sorting itself out. It’s just a little annoying when a game comes out and nobody seems to carry it. In fact, near as I can figure the only major U.S. retailer that has Mad Dog in stock is Wal-Mart, from whose website I obtained it.
Why did I enjoy going back and playing through it and why am I sure you probably won’t? One’s ability to enjoy Mad Dog McCree today is entirely predicated on whether you played it back in the day. Because if you came into contact with it in the early 90’s, you probably played it a lot. It was awesome! Real people talking to you! And even then, you probably realized that the script was terrible and the production values were low (although it probably cost a good deal more to make than the average game in 1990).
Today, to hear all those old familiar lines spoken again and see it in high-quality video (relatively, I mean; this is what the PC version looked like), it’s a trip down memory lane and worth the $20.
That’s one of the points I wanted to make when I said that Wii shovelware can be a good thing: Some shovelware is the kind you actually care about (quality of your reasons notwithstanding).
However, if you never played the original, you will think this is the stupidest thing ever and one of the worst games on Wii.
Image courtesy Majesco