Gotcha! The Sport! (Actual NES Capture)

This is a capture of me playing Gotcha! The Sport! for the NES. This is not an emulator. This footage was recorded directly from my front-loading NES using a real Gotcha! cartridge and the NES Zapper.

Gotcha! is one of the few Zapper games that I grew up with during the NES era (alongside Duck Hunt and Hogan's Alley). One of my friends in elementary school had this game and I used to play it as his house in between other games like Top Gun, Mega Man 4, Bart vs. The Space Mutants and Super Mario Bros. 3 (he lived just around the block from me, so I'd often ride my bike over to his house).

Even though LJN is notorious for their often poor quality NES games, Gotcha! stands out as a decent, if not good Zapper game. It's essentially a capture the flag game, except with paintball guns. What makes this game stick out is the fact that you need to use an NES controller in conjunction with the Zapper. You have to use the D-pad to move your screen right and left while shooting with the Zapper. This game is often referred to as a two-player game because one person can man the Zapper while the other person moves the screen with the controller. That's actually how I used to play the game with my old friend. While it's not very exciting for the person using the controller, we'd just take turns whenever we felt like shooting. And these types of games were typically played in short bursts anyway.

Like other Zapper games, this one just repeats the same levels until you get a game over. There are three different stages: Forest, Bronx and Winter. Once you beat all three the game repeats the stages in the same order. You can also select the difficulty level in the beginning. I think the game officially ends once you max out the score with all 9s, but I've never gotten that far.

I played through the game on advanced and managed to clear all three stages without getting hit, but I once I got to round 4 I intentionally lost to show the game over screen, and to show just how fast the enemies shoot on advanced. The AI can actually be brutal on this difficulty level.

This game is notorious for one glaring flaw: the enemy hitboxes are smaller than the enemies themselves. So even though you can technically be firing right at a person, the game won't register a hit because the white box is smaller than the person on screen. I find that you can counteract this problem by simply aiming a little lower each time you fire.

The Zapper won't work with an HDTV, so I used my old Philips Magnavox CRT TV to play the game. Since the Hauppauge only outputs through component cables (a format not supported by my old TV), I used a distribution amplifier to split the NES's audio/video signal and send one set of cables to the CRT TV while sending another set of cables to a DVD Recorder, which was then connected to the Hauppauge.

Recorded with the Hauppauge HD PVR and a composite connection at 60 frames per second. I used a Toshiba model D-R550 DVD Recorder to upconvert the NES's native 240p signal to 480i so that the Hauppauge could capture the console's audio/video signal.