Sure Shot: They Made THAT Into a Video Game?

Sure Shot is a small title lurking unnoticed in a shadowy corner of the interwebs, created by MDickie. It’s a basic shooter, putting you in control of generic soldiers, against a cast of... oftentimes equally generic soldiers. “Huzzah,” you say, “that only describes about eight million different games I know of.” (that ‘huzzah’ is quite unlikely, I’ll admit, but that’d be the gist). At this point, we’d have to explain the bonkers twist and general originality that earns Sure Shot some attention. Even with the vast prevalence of army games, you’ve never seen one quite like this.

The campaign puts you in control of two soldiers, all that remains of a unit sent into enemy territory. Now stranded alone against the opposing horde, they hit upon the ‘sure shot’ tactic. This involves taking position on opposite sides of an area, and watching your seemingly lobotomised opponents blunder happily into the middle. At which point you sandwich them with gunfire, or shoot them right up as I believe they say in the military.

The glaring flaw in this questionable tactic, however, is that stray bullets seem magnetically attracted to your partner’s face. As such, you’ll need to take great care with each of your full-auto weapons. Fortunately, these guys seem to be of the same stock as Predator’s ain’t got time to bleed uber-soldiers, and so you have a reasonable amount of hitpoints to work with. To obtain gold medals in each stage, you’ll have to carefully ration your shots so as to kill opponents without sending excess slugs of pure leaden injury into your friend too. At the same time, being too cautious with the trigger results in one of the bad guys reaching either of your men and pummelling them in the groin (which is likely just desserts for your crafty, underhanded and foolhardy strategy).

Sure Shot is the kind of odd little vintage any fan of arcade titles will want to check out. The charming cartoon-ified graphics are a treat. It’s quirky and compulsive, and surprisingly tactical for a game controlled by two buttons (Two more if we include the dynamite each guy controls by pulling a string to adjust what appears to be the most obvious tripwire in the history of tripwires). The fact that it was remade in Star Wars form, featuring Han Solo and Chewbacca, only adds to the appeal.

For more about Sure Shot, visit MDickie here.

Article by Chris Littlechild