GAME CLEAR No. 282 -- Mad Dog McCree

Mad Dog McCree (1990, Arcade)

Clear Compilation: Mad Dog McCree: Gunslinger Pack (2009, Wii)
Original Developer: American Laser Games
Original Publisher: American Laser Games
Port Developer: Digital Leisure
Port Publisher: Majesco Entertainment
Clear Version: Wii
Clear Platform: Wii U
Clear Date: 3/4/26

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Why should I care?
The future of gaming is LASERDISC.

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There’s a snake in my boot

Here at the Nixon Computer, we are big fans of full-motion video (FMV) games. Well, at least we seem to play a lot of them. In my MAGFest panel last year, I praised some great examples of the genre and went over its history. The earliest such games took advantage of the random accessibility of LaserDiscs to power branching-narrative experiences. I briefly shouted out Mad Dog McCree in my talk, but I had not played it, so I didn’t discuss it at length. Fortunately, the Wii got a very competent port of the game, so now I have. The game suffers from many of the issues of its live-action FMV peers, but it shares their underdog charm.

The story of Mad Dog McCree could’ve been written by anyone with a pulse. The titular “Mad Dog” and his gang have taken over a quiet Western town. You assume control of a silent, gunslinging stranger who just rolled into town. A local prospector gets you up to speed on the town’s plight, and you set out to make things right. You progress from cutscene to cutscene by mowing bad guys down in little shooting gallery scenes. As you free the town from the gang’s clutches, the citizens fill you in on Mad Dog’s hideout outside of town and how to get there. He’s got the mayor and his daughter. Using the tips you’ve gathered, you pursue him and bring him to justice. The acting is predictably mediocre, but it’s cute in the sort of way something like Medieval Times is. It serves the plot well enough, and the doctor/undertaker that scolds you every time you lose a life is genuinely funny.

Typical of the genre, the controls are simple: aim (with the Wii Remote IR pointer), fire (with the B button), and aim off-screen and fire to reload your six-shooter. The gameplay is demanding — you need to be quick in dispatching the bad guys that pop out from behind the scenery. Occasionally, you have to be so quick that I’d call it cheap. This isn’t necessarily surprising for a quarter-munching arcade title, but it’s annoying nevertheless. Having said that, the gameplay moves along at a nice pace, and the stitching of the video between when a bad guy appears and when you shoot him (or he shoots you) is as smooth as you could ask given the inherent difficulty of that task. With the few cheap-shot exceptions, it’s pretty easy to get into a flow with this game.

The Wii Remote serves the function of a light gun perfectly well, especially if you slot it into the Wii Zapper peripheral. People clowned on the Zapper a bit back in the day since it’s just plastic with no actual hardware features, but it does a pretty good job of making the Wii Remote and Nunchuk combo feel like a light gun! The first Mad Dog game makes no use of the Nunchuk, but it’s still nicer to aim with the Zapper than the Wii Remote alone.

A clean playthrough of this game would take maybe 20 minutes or so. I took closer to 40 because of deaths and retries. In order to continue, you have to win a quickdraw “showdown” against a random mook. You have, as far as I can tell, infinite tries at this, but your score does halve every time you fail (and every time you run out of lives).

Mad Dog McCree is sort of perfectly mid. There’s no reason to run out and play it, but it really seems like American Laser Games accomplished what they set out to do here. Branching FMV adventures did not end up being the future of gaming some hoped they’d be, but I reckon I’ll always be endeared to them. See y’all at Mad Dog II.