[NES] Hogan's Alley - Author of Review- NeoMagicWarrior

One of the launch titles for the NES, Hogan's Alley is one of the few light gun games worth playing. Based on the FBI training facility of the same name, Hogan's Alley is a police simulator game with three modes of play: indoor shooting range, outdoor range, and trick shot.

In the range modes, cardboard cutouts of characters are flashed for brief periods of time. Hits on bad guys produce spinning sprites simulating a bullet hole in the board. Hits on civilians produce a red background and a loud beeping sound. Coding for the game may be corrupt however, as shooting a police officer results in the red screen and beeping as if the player hit a civilian instead of a bad guy.

Indoor range mode features a blue background and three targets, as well as a timer on the top of the screen. This timer indicates how long the targets will be available to shoot, ranging from about 3.0 to 0.5 seconds. Afterward, the targets scroll off the screen, and are replaced with three new ones.




Outdoor range mode features a fake gangster town with a generic black background. The mode moves from an apartment building, a gun shop, a construction site, and then back to the same apartment for another round. Targets scroll out into windows, from behind walls, and across the screen as the player tries to hit them.

Trick shot mode is completely different from the previous two. A series of openings on the left side of the screen are labeled with point values, and barrels are shot from the right. The object is to hit the barrels and bounce them from the right to the left.

All modes feature the same HUD on the bottom of the screen, displaying the high score, the player's score, the current round (more on this later) and the miss count. 10 misses (shooting civilians, missing bad guys, or dropping barrels) results in a game over.

Presentation: 6/10:
Nothing special, and yet nothing horrific on the eyes either. Main problem here is the round indicator on the HUD. It goes from 1-99 fine....then goes to gasp 1 again! It literally makes you want to stop playing, as your round isn't tracked kinda takes away from the experience.

Graphics 5/10:
For a NES game, the graphics are pretty decent, although nothing to gawk at. The game mainly loses points here for its lack of backgrounds. THREE screens use a plain black background. Only the indoor shooting range has a colored background, and the only difference is that it is blue instead. The sprites are clear, and unlike most early titles, characters actually look like real people... except the gangster with the glasses...not sure what his problem is >.>. The construction site's trademark “keep out” sign made it funny enough to find itself on a t-shirt for a graphic arts project of mine.



Sound 4/10:
Sound is defiantly NOT the strong point for Hogan's Alley. Many of the sounds in the game are downright obnoxious, especially the beeping when you miss. It seems to be ten times louder than the rest of the game, so you either have to play with the volume down too low, or go deaf whenever you miss. On the positive side, your neighbors will be able to hear your epic failure. And the weird grinding noise the targets make as they move gets unnerving really quickly.

Gameplay 7/10:
Hogan's Alley, despite the flaws is a darn fun game. That being said, its only fun for short bursts. It gets very repetitive very quickly, and unlike Duck Hunt, does not continue to climb in difficulty past the first 40 or so rounds.
Replay Value 8/10:
Under normal, logical thought processes, this score should be lower. The fact that I'm even coming back to review a game made back in 1984 should say enough. For quick bursts of fun, Hogan's Alley rivals almost any of the classic NES games available. The main drawback is the light gun itself, which requires a tube-based TV...and even some of those don't work right.

TOTAL: 30/50
Hogan's Alley isn't Tetris, Mario, Metroid, Zelda, or any of the quintessential NES titles. What it does provide is a fun gaming experience for short bursts of playtime.

 

try adding in some pictures of the gameplay, it will help

 

Good review I'd say, but you can play this and other light gun based games on an emulator using a mouse. Of course the game looses any form of difficulty as using a mouse is very easy, but the targeting sensitivity on a mouse is not so good & in faster paced games like Barker Bill's Trick Shooting you tend to miss more than actually scoring a hit.