After a fairly mellow 2017, the Japanese arcade industry seems to have awoken from their slumber as we’re just getting hit with news left and right. Not complaining, just observing. 😉

Shoot Away – A Quick History

Arcade Mode - Shoot a certain number of clays each round; each clay missed you lose a life. Game pigeon iphone 6. Move up the levels, get high scores and try to get on top of the online leaderboard. Mini Shooting Games.

• Be the sharpest shooter in the West in this skeet shoot-out. How to play Skeet Shooter Mouse = Aim & Shoot Spacebar = Reload Shoot as many clay pigeons as you can, reloading every 2 shots.
• Clay pigeon shooting, also known as clay target shooting, is a shooting sport involving shooting a firearm at special flying targets known as clay pigeons, or clay targets. The terminology commonly used by clay shooters often relates to times past, when live-pigeon competitions were held. Although such competitions were made illegal in the United Kingdom in 1921, a target may still be called.
• Become a master of clay-pigeon shooting in this Skeet Challenge game. Enjoy playing Skeet Shooting, a free online game on Silvergames.com! Controls: Arrow keys = Move the scope, Spacebar = Shoot Games like Skeet Shooting.
• The outdoor clay pigeon shooting frenzy is real. Pack your shotguns, take your equipment and accessory and go to a competition. Publisher: Play Cool Zombie Sport Games sp.
• The Laser Clay Shooting System (レーザークレー射撃システム) is a light gun shooting simulation game created by Nintendo in 1973. The game consisted of an overhead projector which displayed moving targets behind a background; players would fire at the targets with a rifle, in which a mechanism of reflections would determine whether or not the 'laser shot' from the rifle hit the target.
• Clay kitten shooting is a free online game. Click to play on toogame.com.

When you read the headline, it is certainly possible that the title Shoot Away didn’t ring any bells. I’ve never seen one in the US and most gamers were only exposed to the titles via mini-game additions that Namco put into console ports of titles like Time Crisis II or Point Blank DS.

The first Shoot Away appeared in 1977/1984 (US arcade pages all say ’84 but the Namco JAEPO page calls it “the 1977 masterpiece game” – the burnt orange does look more like one of those aesthetic choices that were all the rage in the 70s), promising a realistic as it could get recreation of skeet/clay pigeon shooting with genuine looking shotgun controllers. It would have been quite the sight to behold back in ’84, offering something that looked quite different from anything else you’d expect to see at an arcade. By the images I’ve seen, these were not dinky plastic controllers and they weren’t small either. The cabinet stood out with a huge screen, although it was not an LCD display – monochrome images of the clay pigeons were projected onto the screen that you would shoot at.

The game has 33 stages and different challenges that you will love to tackle.Get it.BMX-Tricks: Ride your cycle and perform different stunts on the track to earn extra points in stipulated time. Defeat the bad people and move to the next levels.Download it.Bloxorz: The aim of this game is to roll the block such that it falls in the square hole inside the board. You can ride over grills, on tables etc. The game has certain levels and you have to meet some targets to clear those level.You can download this game.Batman: Play the heroic Batman game to save the Gotham city from bad people. Pigeons manager game.

A sequel was released in 1993 entitled Shoot Away II that consolidated the control panels into one, still used long shotgun controllers and increased the size of the projection screen. This is the version that was ported to consoles as mentioned.

Shoot Away Pro

Clay Pigeon Shooting Games

Fast forward to 2018 and Namco is bringing the game back but not just for Japan it seems – the JAEPO 2018 webpage translates this as “For worldwide”. I reached out to Bandai Namco Amusements America about this but they have no comment on it at the moment so we’ll just have to hold tight regarding news on distribution. Judging by the cabinet, I imagine this would be easy to offer to FECs as the latest in the ‘world’s largest’ kind of games which Namco has with World’s Largest Pac-Man.

As for the game itself, it still promises to give us a solid recreation of skeet shooting using “masterfully crafted shotgun[s]” as you blast the clay pigeons on a 100″ screen. Namco actually tested this out in Japan in December and from that we get more information thanks to this thread on Twitter. From that, the screen appears to still be a projection screen as opposed to a 100″ LCD display; there is what looks to be a touchscreen built into the control panel and like the originals, it offers three modes of difficulty for players to enjoy. The guns are heavier than your typical light-gun which might take some getting used to; I also read a comment saying that it has a ‘satisfying analog crack when the clay pigeon shatters.’

If this is destined for a worldwide release then I imagine that we might see it as soon as Amusement Expo at the end of the month; if it isn’t there but Namco still wants to bring it over, they don’t have to wait for trade shows to debut it or test it but IAAPA would be the likely chance that I would see one. What are your thoughts on this upcoming resurrection of an old concept?

Nice PingPong

Clay Pigeon Shooting

Before ending this post, if you hit up the JAEPO page then you probably noticed another unique game lumped in with the Overseas releases – Nice PingPong. I don’t have much info on this one either but it looks like a ping pong/table tennis concept that could work as attendant-less coin-op and work for a single player against the machine. It certainly appears to be modeled after something that an FEC would go for, hearkening back to the big sports game simulators of the late 90s/early 00s that were the rage for a time. Given that this is classified as an overseas game, the flyer is all in English and it has ticket redemption, keep an eye out for it in the US sometime soon.