Mad Dog McCree DVD
Score: 20% ESRB: Teen Publisher: Digital Leisure Developer: American Laser Games Media: DVD/1 Players: 1 Genre: Miscellaneous
Graphics & Sound: For those who don't remember the glory days of laserdisc arcade games, Mad Dog McCree was a hell of an innovation for its time. Everything presented to the player was in a full motion picture format that responded to input from the connected lightgun, sort of like a filmed version of Lethal Enforcers II. It was cool to 'play' a movie back in 1990, but let's throw it on a DVD for Xbox gamers twelve years later and see what happens. Well, it all looks the same (fortunately), but any appeal ends with the visuals. I'll admit, the set and cast do pretty well to portray a stereotypical Old West town, but cheesy acting and bad scripts can only provide cheap entertainment for so long. Music (possibly borrowed from Little House on the Prairie) and sound effects (mostly lame gunshots) do little to enhance the experience.
Gameplay: The arcade version had a few options available to the player: you could gun down bad guys in different orders, reload off screen, and shoot bullhorns for bonus points with time to spare. On the DVD version, you're stuck with moving a crosshair slowly around the screen at predestined points with your remote, and firing a single bullet before Mad Dog's boys have the chance to pop off a few rounds. Sound easy? Just try beating it without dying at least 50 times -- and until you've watched the same terrible scenes over and over just because the Xbox remote can't register movement fast enough, you do not yet know true madness. Worst of all, the game exhibits a small half-second pause at each action frame (every time a shot is fired, basically), breaking the movie's flow and messing up the arcade feel entirely. Since it's a problem limited to DVD hardware, you'll get these annoying pauses no matter which system you play the game on, be it an Xbox, PS2, PC or Panasonic.
Difficulty: Two difficulties are available: Gunslinger (which makes the game impossible to play, since there's no lag time given to position a shot before dying), and Deputy (which must be used, and still makes everything hard as hell). This wasn't really a tough game in the arcade by any means, but fooling around in the DVD version is like trying to play Dance Dance Revolution with an Atari paddle.
Game Mechanics: Maybe with some sort of DVD lightgun, this title could become mildly enjoyable. Unfortunately, that'll never happen and the Xbox DVD remote will always be a crappy substitute for games designed as shooters. The weirdest thing about Mad Dog McCree's control scheme rests with the fact that in some areas, you don't even need to rely on your quickdraw skills with the cursor. For example, in the showdown scenes (where, in the arcade, the gun had to be holstered until it was time to draw) you've got control as soon as the sequence begins, so you can casually place the crosshair on your opponent's head, press the fire button, and seconds later watch the 'crazy varmint' fall back as if shot immediately after he drew his gun. It would've just made sense to change things a bit for these scenes so that players would have to press the action button as soon as guns were drawn, therefore maintaining a shred of real gameplay from the original. But alas, the programmers were just too lazy for that. In all honesty, it would be fun to own the arcade version of Mad Dog McCree. There's no denying its place in gaming history, and hey, this was a pretty good shooting title at the time of its release. However, any other form of it should be avoided like the plague -- this goes for the CD-I, 3DO, Sega CD, and Windows versions as well. Just find a vintage arcade with the original and play a few times for nostalgic purposes; adding this one to your Xbox collection would be the biggest mistake of your lifetime.
-Ben Monkey, GameVortex Communications AKA Ben Lewis
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