If you've ever fired a plastic gun at a screen, you'll know precisely the type of game I'm on about: the on-rails shooters where you fire at the digital equivalent of tin ducks as they shuffle to and fro. Between the mid-eighties and nineties, a whole gallery of gun games appeared in arcades, riding on the (camouflaged) shirttails of Taito's 1986 megahit Operation Wolf.
I still remember seeing my first Op Wolf cabinet at a funfair when I was aged ten: the vast, incredibly realistic looking Uzi sub machine gun strapped to the front of the cabinet; the earthy, Rambo-like graphics; and most of all VIOLENCE like I'd never seen - helicopters exploding in mid air, soldiers reeling back from dreadful head wounds, hand grenades, throwing knives... it was the kind of game that would have left my mother jaundiced with horror, but left me in a state of mesmerised astonishment...
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