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?
Kneejerk “it’s a camera, they’re spying on you” gave way to “wait no this is sensible.”
Neural networks were getting super good at any complex task with a simple approximate output. It’s only all this LLM and generator nonsense that got the money-addicts horny and soured any mention of “AI.” A webcam-- sorry, a smartphone camera module that takes a photo and goes “yep, that’s a bright rectangle, you’re pointing at <0.23,0.71>” would be a pain to code from scratch, but relatively straightforward to train.
Of course they might still be using that to spy on you, because we’re trapped in the belly of this horrible machine and the machine is bleeding to death.
It’s gonna be a camera on a stick. Physically, that’s about all it can be.
The hard part of bringing back lightguns has been going from “here is an image of somebody’s living room” to “there’s a screen in this image, and the camera is centered on this specific pixel.” Complex input - simple output. Neural networks are great at that. (Especially when being a little bit off is perfectly fine.) So namedropping “AI” in this product isn’t just trend-chasing nonsense, or a pointless unrelated feature.
But it is still taking pictures of your living room.
The old technology was able to work flawlessly with just a point in the screen and light detection. Why would we need something more complicated now?
Because the old technology had a point on the screen. LCDs light up all-at-once. All the pixels change color at roughly the same time. The whole image is there, the whole time. There’s nothing to detect besides the entire bright rectangle.
Why do you think these peripherals have been gone for twenty years?
OLEDs can light up one spot at a time.
But they don’t.
Nevermind that I don’t own an OLED TV, and I’m betting you don’t either. LCDs won. And if you’ve got a simple way to make LCDs and lightguns “just work,” there’s a niche retro community waiting to throw money at you.