Light-gun games before Time Crisis left the player standing in the open, soaking up fire while they shot back. Namco’s 1995 arcade game gave them somewhere to hide. A pedal on the floor of the cabinet let the player step out from behind a crate or a pillar to shoot, and lift their foot to duck back into cover, reload and let the bullets pass. Hiding was safe, but the clock kept running, so the player could never stay hidden for long: Computer and Video Games called it “a racing game” as much as a shooting game. Edge first saw it at Japan’s biggest coin-op show in 1995 and thought it “could eventually render Virtua Cop obsolete”.
Fast facts
- Developer and publisher: Namco.
- Arcade: 1995, on Namco’s System Super 22 board; one player, with a pistol and a foot pedal.
- Story: agent Richard Miller rescues the President’s kidnapped daughter from the terrorist Sherudo Garo, over three stages each ending with a boss.
- PlayStation: Japan, June 1997 (¥7,800), packed with Namco’s GunCon gun; Europe and North America in the autumn of 1997 (£59.99 with the gun in the UK).
- Reviews (PlayStation): Edge 8/10; Computer and Video Games 5/5.
- Sequels: Time Crisis II (1997), Time Crisis 3 (2003), Time Crisis 4 (2006), Time Crisis 5 (2015), among others.
Duck and cover
Namco showed Time Crisis at Japan’s Amusement Machine Show in 1995, the JAMMA show, on its System Super 22 board, the same hardware as its rally game Dirt Dash. Edge thought both games owed a debt to Sega, with Time Crisis paying “compliments to … Virtua Cop”, but that Namco had “improved on the formula by including an innovative pedal feature that allows the player to duck and hide behind objects”. GamePro’s arcade preview in April 1996 called it “a definite Virtua Cop killer”.
The pedal works the opposite way from what many first-time players expect. As Computer and Video Games warned, “pressing the pedal swings you out from behind cover, not the other way around! Release it and you immediately duck.” Ducking reloads the gun, so there is no need to shoot off the screen to reload as in Virtua Cop. While hidden the player cannot shoot or see the enemies, who move about in the meantime. Each area has a time limit, topped up at checkpoints and by shooting special “time bonus” enemies. CVG’s preview put it plainly: “Spend all your time behind walls and crates and you end up going nowhere at all!”
Namco’s team explained the idea in terms of the cinema: “In typical detective dramas and movies, the hero is always waiting for his chance to move against the enemy. Hiding in safety then taking a risk to appear and face the danger. This is the unique excitement of Time Crisis!” It also left out some of Sega’s ideas. There are no innocent bystanders to avoid, which Edge regretted, so speed counts for more than target recognition. The team’s own tips were to watch the enemies’ colours: red soldiers are the most accurate and carry the heavy weapons, so shoot them first.
The player is Richard Miller, sent to rescue the President’s kidnapped daughter from Sherudo Garo’s fortress. CVG described the arcade machine as Namco’s “smash-hit £8,000 coin-op”.
The PlayStation version
Namco had once said it would not convert its System 22 games to the PlayStation because they could not be arcade-perfect, CVG reported, and Time Crisis broke that vow. The conversion took a team of 20 people 15 months. Namco’s team told CVG that the PlayStation could not draw anything like the arcade board’s polygons, so the team cut their number and halved the frame rate from 60 to 30 a second. Where the arcade game threw many enemies at once, the PlayStation version held some back until others had been shot: “Only someone who played the arcade version a lot would notice.”
The gun came in the box. Namco’s GunCon (called the G-Con 45 in Europe) is a replica of the arcade pistol with extra “action” buttons on either side of the barrel, and a cable that plugs into both the controller socket and the console’s video output, so it can time the television picture itself; the light gun entry explains how. It had no recoil, unlike the arcade gun, and at launch only Namco’s own games supported it. The pedal became a button: Edge described holding down “the red action button near the end of the gun barrel” to stay out of cover, with an option to reverse it. Namco admitted to CVG that “without being able to press down on the pedal, Time Crisis isn’t quite the same”, and said that using the gun’s button rather than a pedal let it cut the price. It recommended a racing wheel’s pedal for players who wanted to use their feet. CVG’s own favourite was a second joypad on the floor, tapped “(gently) with your toe”.
The conversion also added a whole new game. The PlayStation mode, which took half the development time and ten extra staff, sends Miller through a lakeside hotel on branching routes that depend on how fast the player clears each area: up to the rooftop pool, through the casino, into a jewellery shop, or down to a warehouse full of ninjas. Namco’s designers photographed hotels near Tokyo and factories for reference, and dropped three planned set pieces, an outdoor restaurant, an exploding missile room and a boat chase, as too ambitious.
Reception
Edge gave the Japanese release 8/10 in August 1997, calling it “a videogame symphony of destruction” and “a definitive arcade experience”, “at least equal to AM2’s efforts”. It was less taken with the lack of civilians to avoid, and summed up the plot as “girl gets kidnapped by criminal syndicate, boy infiltrates criminal syndicate, boy gets girl”. CVG gave the UK release its top mark, five out of five, in November 1997: “Namco’s greatest home conversion by far”. Its reviewer wished the gun had kickback and found the UK version slightly slower than the Japanese, but called the GunCon “the best light gun on the market”. GamePro in America enjoyed the pace but warned that “there are times when dead-on shots seem to miss”. Sony reissued the game in its budget Platinum range in Britain by November 1998. Public sources give no reliable sales figure for either version.
Later
Time Crisis II followed in arcades in 1997, and the series continued with Time Crisis 3 (2003), Time Crisis 4 (2006) and Time Crisis 5 (2015). New guns went with it: the GunCon 2, packed with the PlayStation 2 versions of Time Crisis II and Time Crisis 3 from 2001, and the GunCon 3, released with Time Crisis 4 on the PlayStation 3 in Japan in December 2007, which found the screen with two infrared markers instead of timing the picture, so that it worked on flat-panel televisions.
Sources
- Edge issue 27, December 1995, pp. 10–14: report from the JAMMA show (System Super 22, the pedal, comparisons with Virtua Cop).
- GamePro issue 91, April 1996: arcade preview (the story, Story and Time Attack modes, the duck pedal).
- Computer and Video Games issue 182, January 1997: PlayStation Expo report (the GunCon’s button in place of the pedal, no recoil, the time limit).
- Official U.S. PlayStation Magazine volume 1 issue 1, October 1997: the GunCon packed with Time Crisis at $59.95.
- Edge issue 48, August 1997: Time Crisis (PlayStation) review, 8/10, ¥7,800.
- Computer and Video Games issue 190, September 1997: import review (the pedal’s direction, the timer, the GunCon’s connections and lack of kickback).
- Computer and Video Games issue 192, November 1997: UK review, 5/5, and interview with Namco’s team (Naoto Kumagai, Hiroyuki Onoda, Koichiro Maeda, Koji Nakagawa): the conversion, the hotel mode, the pedal, play tips.
- GamePro issue 109, October 1997: US review.
- Computer and Video Games issue 204, November 1998: Platinum reissue.
- Official UK PlayStation Magazine, Platinum special, 1999: the G-Con 45.
- Wikipedia, “Time Crisis (video game)” and “Time Crisis” (web, secondary): release dates and the later games. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_Crisis_(video_game)
- Wikipedia, “GunCon” (web, secondary): the G-Con 45 name, GunCon 2 and GunCon 3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GunCon