Gumshoe (NES)

A peripheral like the NES Zapper has plenty of obvious uses. Many games just take the gun peripheral at face value, making shooting ranges or setting up bad guys to blast or animals to hunt. Gumshoe, though, breaks away from the norm with a most unusual premise: a platformer where you shoot a man to make him jump.

 

One day, a detective named Mr. Stevenson receives a letter from a mob boss who has kidnapped his daughter Jennifer. Mr. Stevenson must bring five Black Panther Diamonds to the mafioso in order to save his daughter, so he takes off in a hurry, walking forward at a pace you have no control over. The NES Zapper isn’t really contextualized in the game in any way, but for some reason, to protect Mr. Stevenson and help him move, it’s on the player to shoot both him and the hazards in his path. Mr. Stevenson won’t take any damage from you shooting him to make him jump, but he is incredibly fragile when it comes to enemies and obstacles, the player having to figure out when it’s best to shoot the gumshoe to make him jump or when the crosshairs should be turned on the enemies instead.

It is a nifty concept but one with a few inherent flaws. Mr. Stevenson’s forward movement remains at a consistent speed, and since he’s usually close to the center of the screen, you have very little time to react to the objects that fly in from the right. It is possible to shoot down many enemies with one or two shots, although the timing can be difficult due to low screen real estate, meaning it’s not hard to make Mr. Stevenson jump by mistake if there’s an enemy right in his face. Our hero starts off only able to take one hit before he dies, and while you can get power-ups to make him survive more or receive protection from certain types of attacks, they’re somewhat rare and never really enough to accommodate the fact that you only have three lives total to beat the entire game. Were death easy to bounce back from, Gumshoe would be a game you could power through and learn to accept its flaws, but Gumshoe’s levels are packed with ways to strip away your lives that you hardly have enough time to deal with. Some levels load the screen with a bunch of enemies coming at you at once, but the most common issue with Gumshoe is the one that helped it stand apart: the platforming.

 

Gumshoe’s movement forward is out of your control, but by shooting him you can make him jump upwards, the player even able to make him jump in midair or juggle him near the top of the screen. His jumps will always come out the same though, having a set arc he needs to complete that leads to most of the issues with the game. Starting with the very first level, the game adds damaging skull blocks that you need to carefully jump around or you’ll likely face instant death. You’re forced to make plans for how to make Mr. Stevenson jump with little time to prepare, leading to doomed arcs as the slowly scrolling screen reveals some hazard you couldn’t have anticipated. You can shoot down incoming enemies, but the skull blocks are persistent and it’s often hard to try and keep Stevenson jumping around safely while dealing with incoming enemies at the same time. Some stages are a breeze thankfully, and those ones quite tellingly have fewer skull blocks to worry about. There is another quirk to the platforming though that adds a strange layer to the affair. If Mr. Stevenson reaches the end of a platform, he’ll walk forward and drop like a brick, making it fairly easy for him to drop down into deadly pits if you aren’t fast enough to save him. It’s something you’ll learn to expect after the first death to it, but it complicates an already flawed mode of navigation. Gumshoe has no simple area to ease the player into learning how the light gun and the detective interact. Right off the bat the first level is placing down skull blocks and enemy arrangements that require perfect shooting to avoid instant failure.

Outside of the inappropriately difficult task of just keeping Mr. Stevenson alive, you also have the goal of collecting the five diamonds, one being found in each of the game’s stages. The game is usually fairly kind in making sure you’ll grab them, having a sound cue alert you that one is coming up and dialing back the constant deadly hazards a bit to let you have a chance of grabbing the jewel, but I’m sure there’s some bad ending if you don’t grab them all where you need to replay the game to find the ones you missed. The game already loops after the ending anyway though, so it would hardly feel much different honestly. There is a strange supposed limitation on the player, the game having a clock ticking away that will cause you to lose if it runs out, but since Mr. Stevenson is always rushing forward, he’s hardly in any danger of running down the clock. The only way to even slow things down a bit is by exploiting a helpful trick where hitting the side of a platform will cause the gumshoe to bounce backwards, earning you some time to fix the path ahead of him to be safer. There are also red balloons around the level, each one giving your light gun extra bullets to fire at enemies, but the balloons are so abundant you’ll never run low and shooting Mr. Stevenson doesn’t waste any, so it’s another game element added for seemingly no reason.

 

Those aren’t the only odd additions to Gumshoe though, as the way it brings you back from death is difficult to figure out. There doesn’t seem to be a proper checkpoint system, but dying in a stage will set you down in a somewhat altered version of the level. There’s a desert section in the first level I skipped entirely by dying and a populated island segment of the water level that I never saw outside of watching a video after playing, so I can’t quite figure out how it decides what to omit from your second run in a level, just that it seems to simplify things a bit so dying is at least a tiny bit more avoidable. All these unusual complications hardly add anything to the core gameplay, and that core’s sloppy design means that all the bells and whistles do nothing to help realize the idea the developers were going for.

THE VERDICT: Gumshoe feels like one of those games where the developers hit on an interesting idea but had no idea how to execute it. The game world is not conducive to the gunfire-based platforming, and almost all of the game’s attention was devoted to adding pointless elements that have no real impact on the central experience. For Gumshoe to work its elements had to accommodate the limitations of the gameplay style, but instead it seems like the developers made a regular platforming world and added in the unusual control method after, making for a mix of elements that don’t agree with each other the majority of the time.

 

And so, I give Gumshoe for the Nintendo Entertainment System…

A TERRIBLE rating. Jumping by shooting your character was always going to be a somewhat disconnected experience, but a general sense of helplessness permeates the majority of Gumshoe. His constant forward rush and set jump arcs make it hard to get him to do what the level design requires of him, and the enemies and obstacles are far too lethal for Mr. Stevenson to have a decent chance of getting past them without extreme persistence and memorization. A control gimmick loses its appeal shortly after its shown all it can do, and it comes on the game to issue more challenges to the player that explore the ways the unusual controls can add something unique to the gameplay. Gumshoe’s use of the NES Zapper is lazy though, the novelty trying to distract the player from a unforgiving hodgepodge of poor level design and pointlessly included elements.

 

Trying something new with a controller type that heavily suggests its intended gameplay style does make Gumshoe interesting conceptually, but when you pull back the curtain and see what lies beyond the advertising pitch, you’ll see that the game does not know what to do with its novel idea. After playing something like Gumshoe, a simple light gun shooting gallery doesn’t seem so bad.