I grew up playing light gun games like Area: 51 and Time Crisis in my local arcade. Before them, I pointed a large grey zapper at a sizzling CRT playing Duck Hunt with my cousins. Needless to say, I’m no stranger to arcade guns, but I’ve never played an arcade shooter quite like this. At CES 2020, I got to try out On Point, a new arcade game from Taito and UNIS that plays a lot like the Time Crises of my youth, except it uses actual airsoft pellet guns.
The game features a vertically oriented 55-inch screen down range from a tube-fed airsoft gun. The gun feels weighty in your hands, with realistic kickback and, at least on the unit I played, accurate iron sights. For safety, since this is a live-firing weapon, there’s cameras and sensors in both the gun and on the screen to ensure that the gun won’t shoot unless it’s pointed at the screen. There’s also a sensor to keep it from shooting if a person is detected (in case someone decides to jump in front of you), and for further safety, the final production unit will have safety walls to further keep interlopers out of the line of fire.
There’s a variety of game modes, including breaking (virtual) bottles and plates, an accuracy-testing bulls-eye mode, and a police-trainer score attack course. A soft-plastic barrier prevents the pellets from damaging the video screen, with a collection tray below to automatically feed ammo back into the gun.
On Point was released in Japan last year, and is scheduled to start shipping to arcades stateside in March of this year.
For more from CES 2020, check out our roundup of the 8 coolest things we saw at the show.
Source: IGN.com This New Arcade Game Is Like Time Crisis but With Real Airsoft Guns