Learn to Love Your Gun With ‘Receiver’
3rd May 2013
When you shoot a gun in BioShock or Far Cry, you don’t have to think much about how that gun works — you press a button to fire, a button to reload, and that’s about it. Receiver, on the other hand, is a first person shooter that’s almost entirely about mastering your weapon. And it all started with The X-Files. When David Rosen from developer Wolfire Games picked up a replica SIG Sauer P226 as part of a Fox Mulder halloween costume, he says he “had a lot of fun just playing around with the slide and ejecting and inserting the magazine. It seemed crazy that there were so many games about guns, but none that let you actually play around with them and see how they work.”
Receiver was originally developed over the course of nine days as part of the “7 Day FPS Challenge,” and just this week was released on Steam. In it, you play as a sort of disembodied handgun, infiltrating a virtually empty building in search of 11 different cassette tapes. The only things stopping you are are the drones and automated turrets littered through the hallways, as well as your ability to handle a gun. What makes this so challenging is just how many actions are required. If you’re using a revolver, for instance, you’ll need to dump out all of your shells in order to reload, and then put in each new bullet individually. Each of these actions requires a different combination of button presses, and you’ll need to memorize these sequences to be successful. (This concept could also be ideal for the next generation of Microsoft’s Kinect sensor.)
May 3rd, 2013 at 22:24
Shot a Sig pistol on an electronic course at the NRA convention today. They didn’t warn me before shooting it that it had a CO2 cylinder in it and when it was fired at the screen, there was recoil approximating a 9 mm cartridge firing. It was very cool!