Time Crisis is bringing back the nostalgia with a new AI powered gun compatible with modern TVs. This kit from Achievement Electric will allow you to use light guns conveniently without needing to worry about acquiring an old CRT or tinkering with setups.
The AI Gun Con system comes pre-loaded with the original Time Crisis game, designed for all LCD monitors. The pricing starts at $89.99 for a basic unit and goes up to $119.99 for an arcade mode setup which includes a pedal controller.
Expect an official release date announcement soon as the Tokyo Game Show approaches shortly.
Would you want to know more about how AI is used in this device before buying?
Computer vision stuff has been labelled AI long before LLMs hit the scene and that’ll be what’s going on under the hood of this thing too. Sinden’s light gun required a big white box/border to be drawn around the edge of the screen so that it could track the movement of the box to understand where the gun is being pointed. Which is pretty ugly and you still had to mess around with getting emulators set up to use it (thus the product was pretty niche).
If Dashine have got a model that can detect displays without the need for a border, that alone is epic. But also, by shipping a mini games console with the gun so you can just play a game with no messing about, it’ll get better sales numbers and possibly reignite interest in light gun games outside of the emulator space. Naturally there’s no light gun games on Steam, PS5, Xbox stores right now so you need the gun on the market first before you can energize developers to ship games for them. So Dashine have been smart with this and might “trigger” a return of this genre to living rooms. Fingers crossed!
The new part is using AI as a marketing buzzword, it was previously mostly just used as a descriptor to put complex systems in simple terms, but now it’s being used in marketing to pretend things have something like Data from Star Trek’s brain running them 😅
Weirdly I’d say it was the other way around. Late 90s marketing used “AI” to inflate basic decision trees whereas “AI” in the context of this gun running an ANN model is a better application of the term. I’m old though; AI has been a buzzword since the 80s when every org wanted their own expert system (all pitched/marketing as “AI”). There was so much groundwork for these “AIs” that never really came to be - like the whole Semantic Web movement with RDF in the late 90s and ontologists in every major org. And now you can practically replicate that with few-shot.
I’m not suggesting we’re near Data, far from it, but that AI has been a buzz word for a lot longer than people have noticed. It’s just a lot of the technology is now commodity and in consumer products, so the average person gets marketed to also. I remember pitches about the C128 and big orgs like GM swinging around AI for things like “it’s got more RAM” and “we’re using a database”.
Oh I see, I guess the hype had died down by the time I was old enough to be aware of any.