800 Wii Points will buy you this week’s one and only addition (after a few weeks of drought) to the Wii VC library. It’s decent enough and we’re calling it fun enough to buy.

Take Nintendo’s classic NES Wild Gunman, throw in a healthy mix of arcade classic Cabal and you pretty much have Wild Guns.

Both components are solid games and would be totally cool if they showed up on Wii VC. Doesn’t the Wii remote scream for those titles?

Wild Guns had/has so much promise in the formula, it’s a shame the controls kill the experience in the end.

Concept is simple, it’s an old fashioned wild-west-shoot-out in a modern robot twist, a-la Future World. You know, sort of like if robots took over and we’re all in the wild west type of thing. I half expected Yule Brenner to pop out somwhere. I like Yule Brenner, so that’s a good thing.

Your D-pad controls an on-screen reticle up and down, while correspondingly moving your character left and right. You can dive, jump, and double-jump as well to avoid bullets and various baddies coming at you. All of those components (except for the jumping) remind me of Cabal and it’s one of the reasons I like this game.

Beyond the D-pad controls, a bunch of weapons get assigned to 2 buttons (third button for rolling/jump/double-jump). You get a screen clearing bomb weapon (limited of course) and unlimited (but limited when upgraded) primary shooting weapon.

The controls are just okay enough, but they’re also a pain in the butt. Something that didn’t get fixed in the translation to Wii VC.

Unfortunately, you have jump, roll, bomb, shoot, melee attack (for when guys get up close), and lasso (what western doesn’t have a lasso scene?) assigned to 3 (that’s right): three buttons.

That’s six actions assigned to 3 buttons. I’m not sure if the developers expected this game to so fast and furious that folks wouldn’t be able to find everything or just lazy programming.

I’m going with lazy as it doesn’t seem hard to assign roll (left/right) to SNES’s shoulder buttons (L/R) and assigning the rest to the main X,Y,A,B buttons. That would have solved just about all the issues.

The melee attack is useless as bad guys only get right next to you a few times in the game, so that could be an automatic function. Instead, the controls actually make it an automatic function shared with the primary shot button. The lasso is also mapped to that button and only a hurried tapping of the shoot button will sometimes cause you to whip out the lasso, which stuns your enemy for a moment.

Jump and roll work the same. They’re both mapped to the same button, so you’ll find yourself rolling when you wanted to jump or otherwise. On-screen action makes it nearly impossible to exactly control when you’re going to jump or roll. The bullets keep flying and you want to keep moving. The problem is, rolling happens when you’re moving and jumping only happens if you stop moving. Which means you’ll get shot and killed when you’re trying to jump to avoid the shot since you’re covered on both sides.

Make sense yet? Yikes….

Hold down the primary shot button and you’ll keep firing. You might be inclined to tap the shoot button, I know I did since it felt natural and better to shoot where I wanted and not spray shots everywhere.

If you do that though, you’ll fire off a few rounds and then your guy(or gal) will go into lasso mode and he/she will whip out a rope that stuns enemies. A rope to a gunfight? Something about a knife to a gunfight comes to mind….

It’s silly, but holding down the shoot button sends out endless streams of bullets, but you’ll never use the lasso function then. Which begs me to ask why it was there in the first place???

If you overlook the control issues I’ve laid out, then you might enjoy the game. It took me a few go-arounds to finally accept the controls and never use the certain weapons, but jumping/rolling still got me to the point of rolling into an on-coming bullet when I was trying to jump over it.

Presentation is classic 16-bit, but what gets me is this game could have been a whole more fun than it turned out to be. All the elements are there for a solid game: robots, dude and gal with guns, boss fights, and lots of action. Sound is actually decent as you’ll hear everything that’s on-screen.

All that and two-player simultaneous? I’d say go for it normally.

Unfortunately, the controls kills the experience for me and it’s too frustrating to keep going beyond the first two stages. Believe me, I wanted to keep going as this title would’ve been exactly what I wanted this week.

Sorry folks, but I can’t recommend this title due to the terrible controls.

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