Who Killed the Light Gun?

The Xbox consoles are notoriously pegged as gaming systems for people who love to shoot things.  Why, then, does the one "kiddie" console on the market have the only library of gun simulator games?

The common image of the original Xbox was that it was a shooter's console, especially when compared with Nintendo's reputation for kid-friendly games and the PS2's image as a broadly popular machine with support for everything from Japanese style RPGs to action adventure titles.  The PS2 had plenty of first person shooters, and the Xbox had other popular game types represented, but the "shooter" label has always stuck close to Microsoft's brand.

With this history, I find it strange that the original Xbox had only three games that supported the use of a light gun (unless you count Silent Scope Complete as three games).  That is less than 1/4 of the number of gun games on the PS2.  In my first flirtation with an actual Wii this weekend, I found myself playing no less than three games that are, for all intents and purposes, the successors to the light gun genre.  The Wiimote is basically a light gun, and titles like Wii Play, Red Steel, and Call of Duty 3 allow you to point the remote and shoot it like a gun.

I didn't realize until holding the silly Wii thing that I missed the style of play so much.  Over my gaming life, the overwhelming majority of my arcade tokens were tossed into games that let you fire guns.  Even after home consoles were competing solidly with the graphics power offered by arcade cabinets, light guns were a sweet treat you couldn't often experience in your living room, especially if you owned the black and green beast from Microsoft.

Am I the only one who loved them?

One gun game problem was that you could never completely control your characters movements.  Time Crisis made me giddy by letting me duck for cover, and House of the Dead let me occasionally choose left or right on a branching path, but you couldn't call it freedom.  Maybe players today are unlikely to tolerate playing a game completely on rails.  Then again, some of us are willing to tolerate Paperboy.

Nintendo has broken free of the linear limitation of light gun games thanks to the two controller design, letting you use the light gun as you would a second analog stick.  I'm no engineer, but there has to be a way for companies not named Nintendo to improve the way a light gun game plays.

I don't want to hear about anti-gaming reactionaries preventing light gun games from being made.  Letting you physically pretend to shoot things and people hasn't stopped Nintendo's march into the hearts of moms and dads everywhere.  Since when did the family console become the only console to let you pack heat?

Microsoft, I'm going to ask this as nicely as possible:  Where the hell are my light gun games?