Hogan's Alley

The Short


Pros
- Simple light gun game where you shoot the bad guys and don't shoot the innocents
- Three game modes
- Game where you shoot the cans is actually quite challenging and fun

Cons
- Games A and B (where you shoot pictures of people) are slow and very dull
- Almost impossible to lose if you are even remotely good with the light gun
- Cycling through the lineup of enemies/city between shooting parts is so slow
- Really isn't much here to get excited about

We're hittin' up the black box titles. 

The Long

I really like the concept of the lightgun. It's just...a gun, and you shoot at things on your tv, and magically it works (if your TV is old. If you have a new TV, you're SOL). I like it so much I own two of these things for some reason (the orange and original gray one), as well as a handful of the lightgun games for the NES. I say handful, because seriously...they didn't release a whole lot.

This has nothing to do with the Hogan's Alley review, by the way. I was just pointing out I'm desperate for lightgun games, so I'll try anything at this point. Unfortunately, after replaying Hogan's Alley, I'm just not feeling it. With the exception of Game C, of course.

Plus, I always shoot the professor. Not my fault he looks like Gang-A!

So what do you do in Hogan's Alley? Well, if you thought "shoot gangsters," you were wrong, because these aren't real gangsters! The concept behind Hogan's Alley is that the alleged "alley" is actually a police station, and you are participating in one of those practice ranges that cops use to test their marksmanship. Well, that's too bad, and here I thought I was actually going to be able to shoot some dudes.

You have three game modes, which I will now briefly outline, complete with screenshots because text is for tools. 

Protip: Don't shoot the guy on the right. I know you want to, but...he isn't bad, I swear. 

So the first game mode involves wheeling out three characters with their backs to you. The game then flips them around and you have to shoot the bad ones (and not the good ones) within a time limit (usually a couple of seconds). They then wheel out the next batch and it repeats. That's it. That's the whole mode.

If this sounds monotonous, you are right. Had the game some sort of technological ability to tell you how close to the head or chest or whatever your shot landed, perhaps you'd have some goal to strive for. Or if it didn't take eight years between shooting sessions while it was moving the stupid cardboard dudes in and out, maybe it would be more tolerable. Or if it was actually, you know, hard. The only difficulty I ever had was I kept shooting the stupid Professor, and that was because I legitimately didn't know he wasn't a bad guy. Once I figured that out, I played for something like ten minutes without dying. Just going and going and going, never really getting any harder, never getting interesting either. 

NEXT.

At least Game B takes you outside. 

Game B ditches the boring lineup thing for an "urban" setting. Now you circle around a fake city, and instead of wheeling out the guys three in a row it wheels them out through various windows and what not. You then shoot the professor about ten times before realizing he isn't a bad guy, then shoot the bad guys. As you cycle around it goes from day to night, which was a nice touch, but ultimately this is just as boring as Game A, except now you don't have to look in just a straight line. And, like Game A, it takes forever to move between shooting sessions.

Couldn't they have the guys move more? Or move back and forth, or hide behind things for trick shots? Duck Hunt and To The Earth had moving targets, so I know we have the technology. Why are they all stationary? Why is this game so BORING?!

NEXT.

Game C is easily the best on the cart. 

After the awful first two games, does it get any better? Well, yes. For Game C Hogan's Alley ditches the "shoot cardboard cutouts of people" idea and instead just throws cans at you. Yep. The goal of the game is to shoot the cans and knock them up into the air, trying to land them on different areas for more points. The lower down the more points you get, and if you are the best shot in the west and land it on that little platform you get MEGA POINTS. 

Yeah, where did this game mode come from? It's totally unrelated to the rest of the game, the title, or anything else offered here. Maybe that's why it's actually the only interesting part in the game. 

While it won't exactly hold your interested for extended periods of time, it's actually challenging (unlike Game A or B) and shooting for high scores can be fun. Eventually there are so many cans on the screen it gets kind of bananas, and you'll find yourself shooting like a crazy person to survive. So hey...it actually scales in difficulty. Novel. 

This one gets a pass, even if it does get a bit repetitive due to it's simplistic nature. 

Whoops. Sorry, lady. 

As it stands, Hogan's Alley hasn't weathered the test of time very well. While I'm certain the concept and execution was something pretty impressive back when the NES came out, playing it these days is boring, fruitless, and honestly unenjoyable. While I do like Game C quite a bit, it isn't enough to pull this whole game up to the "worth playing" territory, and while collectors will want to own it to complete their "Black Box NES" collection, I hardly doubt anybody comes home from work thinking "Oh may! I can't wait to bust out the Zapper and play some Hogan's Alley!"

While it doesn't have as slow a start a To the Moon, considering only one game in this whole package is worth even looking at, I say with a heavy nostalgic heart that Hogan's Alley is weak. 

Two out of five stars. 

Both those stars were for you, can game. I'm sorry it had to end like this.