Gunbuster is a lightgun-based First-Person Shooter (FPS) for up to four players, first distributed into arcades by Taito in 1992. It was released as “Operation Gunbuster” in North America and as “Gun Buster” in Japan.

Unlike many lightgun shooters of the time Gunbuster features free-roaming movement, and is not ‘on-rails’. The game feels like a true FPS – in the mould of Wolfenstein 3D (which came out the same year as this on home computers) – and players use a joystick to move around, and a cabinet-mounted gun to turn left and right and to shoot. Think of the joystick as your feet and the gun as your head and you’ll understand the control system.

The Gunbuster cabinet came in two different styles – a single monitor two-player version, and a dual monitor four-player version. The game can be played by either one or two players in mission mode, or as multiplayer team-based, 2v2 deathmatch.

The premise of the game is based around cyborgs committing crimes in the year 2160, and you are a cyborg bounty hunter – called a “Gunbuster” – paid (by humans) to chase them down and kill them. Why a cyborg needs money, though, is anyone’s guess. Maybe for an oil change?

In mission mode you’re basically given contracts by a handler called “Sourcer” and you must go out and fight your target, head-to-head, inside a small arena. Each mission is basically a boss battle where you try to destroy your opponent before they do the same to you.

The player’s life bar is shown at the bottom of the screen, and your target’s life bar is shown at the top of the screen, and unfortunately the gameplay is little more than a close quarters war of attrition in a confined space.

If you lose all your health before your opponent does: an explosion will fill the screen indicating your demise (but if you put more money into the machine you can continue where you left off – which is what the people who made this game were banking on). If you manage to empty your opponent’s health first, you’ll win the round, earn some money, and be sent back to Sourcer to choose your next, more difficult, opponent. The first three opponents are fixed, then after that you’re give a choice between two targets to go for. There are only seven rounds in total, though, with an eighth and final ‘secret boss’ round.

Since Gunbuster does require some coaching for beginners, instructional messages pop up at the start of the game, explaining what to do, which is a little annoying, but I guess necessary.

The aiming sight changes to indicate when you can use your ‘special shot’, which you fire using the second button on the gun. This secondary shot does more damage than your regular shot, and takes a little while to re-charge.

Personally, I didn’t find Gunbuster interesting to play at all, although it did initially look promising. Maybe back in 1992 it might’ve been fun, but the small, uninteresting environments, the limited gameplay and the visual chaos didn’t do much for me.

We’ve been spoiled by many great First-Person Shooters over the decades, so a game as basic as this just doesn’t illicit a great deal of excitement from me. IMHO Gunbuster is not even as interesting to play as Wolfenstein 3D, so this isn’t a tech issue, it’s an under-developed gameplay issue. Gunbuster might have been technically innovative back in 1992, but the game’s designers took the gameplay in the wrong direction and missed out on it becoming a landmark video game.

More: Gunbuster on Wikipedia