Gumshoe

released on Jun 06, 1986

Jennifer's been kidnapped! Now's your chance to prove you're a sharp-shooting detective by helping Jennifer's father find the five diamonds that will pay her ransom. You'll use your Zapper light gun to blow away anything that gets in your way. But even with the Zapper, this case will be hard to crack. Because not only are the diamonds hard to find, but you only have 24 hours to find them! What's more, you'll have to think fast and shoot even faster, because ferocious monsters, diving airplanes and hungry man-eating sharks will stop at nothing to prevent you from getting to the diamonds. Think you're a sharp-shooting detective? Well, you better be. Because if you're not, it's curtains for you in this quick-on-the-trigger Nintendo Light Gun game! A direct port of the game was released for the Nintendo VS. System arcade machine in 1987.


Released on

Genres


More Info on IGDB


Reviews View More

Neat use of the Zapper, and that's all it's got going for it

A forgotten little NES novelty that combines an auto runner with platforming all controlled with the Zapper. It's challenge is mainly designed around that (somewhat mitigated when playing it on PC).Cool little black box game tho. Feels like a game a father and son would grow up with.

Super Sharpshooter Flappy Bird

An ill-conceived use of the lightgun and terribly unfair. Not fun at all.

A sort of continuation of Hogan's Alley C-mode. Logic is a bit atypical, since you have to shoot the obstacles and Stevenson's character to make him bounce. Good difficulty and concept.

Up there with Solar Striker with it's anonymity among more casual Nintendo fans is the NES black box title "Gumshoe", which has gone pretty much unreleased in Japan and on any other kind of service. It many ways it represents Nintendo's strive to invent and create new gimmicks, but it also represents how much of a bunch of nincompoops they can be.

This is a Zapper game like Duck Hunt or Wild Gunman, but instead of being mostly a target shooting game it is also a platforming game. You see, Detective Dipshit over here has a problem with his legs, he can only keep running and running and can never stop unless he puts himself into a pit or gets killed by oncoming objects. You can help Detective Dipshit on his quest to find the pink panther rip-off items by shooting him to make him jump to avoid obstacles. This sounds fun in theory, but in addition to needing to pay attention to where Detective Dipshit is and keep him from blundering his way into death traps, you also need to shoot objects that come his way on-screen. Now keep in mind, I am emulating this and technically cheating by using a mouse as my firing weapon. The game is still very very hard, and very very annoying to play.

I seriously cannot imagine trying to play this thing with a real Zapper, because in addition to needing to be more precise than I am with a mouse you also need to deal with the Zapper's one in fifteen ability to mysteriously fail to register a hit. In a generic target shooting game like Duck Hunt it's not the worst deal, but here it could mean a lost life and lost progress. It's woeful. This is kinda like Pac-Man 2, except devoid of all the dopey charm and all the meme potential front-loaded into this dumb piece of music that Hip Tanaka composed after smoking a big blunt.

A really really dumb game, big recommend to try it yourself sometime.