WELCO METOT HENEX TLEVEL - Mad Dog McCree

Developer: American Laser Games Publisher: American Laser Games Year: 1993

Here we are with another American Laser Games joint. This time it's Mad Dog McCree, which was actually the very first arcade game released by ALG, and set the standard for their subsequent releases – shooting galleries using full-motion video story scenes and targets.

Unlike Konami's FMV shooter Lethal Enforcers, Mad Dog McCree is truly video based. That is to say that all backgrounds and characters are part of the same video footage as opposed to separate videos of enemies popping up against a static image background. It makes everything look far more natural and allows for a much more cinematic experience. Rather than a shooting gallery with seemingly random enemies popping up, each level plays out as an actual dramatic scene complete with dialogue.

The downside to this approach is that the people on screen aren't viable targets until the game is programmed to consider them as such. For example, in one scene in Mad Dog McCree you enter a saloon with five cowboys standing at the bar and sitting around a table. Every one of them is about to try to kill you, but shooting them before they draw their weapons is an impossibility. You'll just use up ammo for zero result.

The challenge is to react when each man pulls his gun and shoot them in that order. MDM is a one-hit kill game, so make one mistake and you're worm food. It's kind of cool in a way, but mostly it's just annoying. It also reduces the replay value to absolutely nothing once you've played enough to memorize every scene.

The Sega CD conversion suffers even more based on the awful resolution and color depth. Mad Dog McCree is one of the few FMV games on the system that went with full-screen rendering (not even any sort of HUD bordering the screen to hide a bit of windowing). The problem is that the rendering is terrible. Everything is so washed out and pixelated that it's really hard to see what you're looking at. Enemies at any great distance from the viewpoint in particular are really hard to see because of this. It results in a lot of cheap deaths.

Plus, because the game is done via branching video rather than sprites popping up over a static background, every successful hit results in a video hitch while the system seeks the proper track. It's very disorienting to see a bottle you've just shot shatter .5 seconds after. And since you get the standard swimming pixels during FMV playback, it's painfully obvious that the whole game freezes after every successful shot is fired.

But hey, American Laser Games got a lot of mileage out of this game. It hit loads of different consoles, eventually living on past its parent company and getting released for formats like DVD players (through Digital Leisure) and even the Wii Virtual Console. It's a perfect example of the new things developers were willing to try in the 90s, and keep trying and trying, even when the format really didn't work.