It's easy to have a defeatist attitude about the Virtual Console. At this point, unfulfilled expectations come pretty much standard with every new release. Nobody batted an eye when 1080 Snowboarding lacked Rumble Pak support, and everyone's just kind of accepted that the TurboGrafx-16 emulator's crappy video filter is never going to be fixed. Sure, there are rare glimmers of unprovoked effort on Nintendo's part -- like how StarTropics faithfully duplicated the game's famous letter-in-water trick in its manual -- but for the most part, there's a certain low standard of presentation quality we've come to expect from Nintendo's recent VC releases.
And now we've come to this. Operation Wolf is a light gun shooter that lacks light gun support. A line has been crossed.
Have you ever tried to play a light gun shooter with a controller? Well, in most early cases, you couldn't. Many NES-era light gun games had the good sense to require you to actually use a gun peripheral. But if you've ever tried to use the crosshair-and-joystick option offered by modern gun games, you've probably come away frustrated and unfulfilled.
A light gun provides more than just that sick little thrill you get from deciding when and where a pixelated duck will die -- it's a requirement in any gun game, if you want any kind of control precision or accuracy. Elemental Gearbolt is one of my favorite games, for instance, but it's completely awful if you try to play it with a regular controller. Time Crisis 2, Point Blank, and many more otherwise great games suffer in the same way. They're fun with a gun, but suck horse nuggets with a D-pad.
Basically, Operation Wolf on the Virtual Console sucks horse nuggets.
Before it came to the NES, Operation Wolf was a dumb, linear, shallow quarter-sucker of an arcade game that also happened to be a lot of fun. The plot's the usual crap about killing terrorists and rescuing hostages, but the most important part was the machine gun-shaped hunk of metal bolted to the arcade cabinet. It rattled every time you fired, and everyone in the arcade always knew when someone was playing Operation Wolf, because it was loud as a bastard. The limited ammunition and swarms of enemies often meant that your quarter would end in a minute or two, but man, it was worth it just to have that gun shake your contact lenses loose as it rattled against the side of your head when you looked through its sights.
The NES version of Operation Wolf was a mostly faithful rendition of the arcade game, with all the expected downgrades to graphics and sound. It also gave you the option of playing either with a control pad or with a Zapper. The control pad was probably your best option, honestly, since trying to physically duplicate the rapid fire of a machine gun with multiple presses of Zapper's stiff trigger is a good way to make your finger break off.
Still, though, you'd want to try playing it at least once with the Zapper. It IS a light gun game, after all, and it was a nice option to have, as impractical as it was. It may have been a lot easier to aim with the Wii Remote and rapidly press the B button to fire in the Virtual Console version of Operation Wolf, and it would've been even more workable with the Wii Zapper, since its trigger gives much less resistance than the NES Zapper.
Unfortunately, we are not given the chance to experience this for ourselves. Instead, we're merely given the opportunity to waste five dollars on a Zapper-neutered version of a watered-down port of an arcade game that's by no means great to begin with.
It's not so much the lack of Zapper/Remote aiming support that bugs me as it is the fact that this oversight is mentioned nowhere in the Shop Channel prior to your purchase, as if it's some kind of minor feature that you'd never miss, like Rumble Pak support. No, this is different. Without a gun-like input device, what's the point of playing a light gun shooter?
Light gun support for future Virtual Console games is as inevitable as it is trivial. Don't let Nintendo's laziness fool you into thinking that making a Wii Remote-guided cursor overlay for Duck Hunt is some kind of huge technological hurdle. Freeware NES emulators have included light gun support for years, and Xbox homebrew emulators even allow you to use Xbox gun peripherals to play light gun-supported NES games.
The inclusion of Duck Hunt in widely available lists of rumored upcoming Virtual Console releases suggests that Nintendo will attempt to incorporate gun support in VC games at some point. It's extremely disappointing to see that in the meantime, Wii owners are being deceived with a crippled version of Operation Wolf that fails to document its shortcomings prior to purchase, and in no way represents the Virtual Console's full potential.
