Time Crisis is a 1995 light-gun shooter video game developed and published by Namco for arcades. The game's story focuses on Richard Miller, an intelligence agent, who is ordered by his superiors to rescue an abducted woman from a vicious tyrant seeking to reclaim control of their former country from their homeland's new government.

The Story Behind Time Crisis

Richard reaches the island and rams his explosives-rigged boat into the castle's exterior to create an entrance. To make the large areas in the hotel work on the hardware, the team left the portions of these areas not visible to the player unrendered. The first installment in the Time Crisis series, the game differentiated itself from other light-gun shooters of the time by incorporating a pedal that controls when the player character takes cover to reload and avoid enemy fire.

Richard is alerted by V.S.S.E. to the presence of an illegal arms factory posing as a Sercian hotel, with ties to Wild Dog's organization. Richard collects the wounded Rachel and escapes in Wild Dog's chopper just as the rest of the castle goes up in flames. Should Richard fail his pursuit in the arms factory, he will instead be redirected to the parking lot.

How Time Crisis Plays

The port features an exclusive Special mode, in which the player's performance, such as how quickly they can clear an area, affects the path they take through the game, resulting in multiple possibilities and endings. Each playthrough sees the player given a predetermined number of lives, in which one is deducted when the player is hit by an enemy, or fails to avoid being hit by a hazard in the current battle, with the game being over when the player runs out of lives or time. The PlayStation version also allows players to use the pedal from a racing wheel peripheral.

However, it differs from such video games by use of its cover system - a gameplay mechanic in which players can duck behind cover to avoid enemy fire and reload their weapons. Each area consist of a series of gunfights, in which players must defeat a predetermined group of enemies in order to advance to the next battle. In the arcade version, a foot pedal is used to toggle between ducking and attacking positions; in console conversions, a button command replicates the foot pedal's functions.

Why Players Still Load It Up

The British Computer and Video Games complained at the slowness of the PAL conversion, with reviewer Tom Guise saying that though he otherwise preferred Time Crisis over Virtua Cop, when it came to the games' respective British home releases he favored the fully PAL-optimized Virtua Cop. Electronic Gaming Monthly named the PlayStation version "Light Gun Game of the Year" at their 1997 Editors' Choice Awards, noting that the game won the unanimous vote of the editors. And though GamePro questioned the accuracy of the bundled GunCon peripheral, reporting that "there are times when dead-on shots seem to miss", the overwhelming majority of critics deemed it the best light gun yet released for the PlayStation.

While they added that this was not as much of an accomplishment as it normally would be, due to the weakness of that year's competition for the category, they also said the win was well-earned by Time Crisiss graphics, sound effects, and additional modes of play. GameSpot praised the reload button on the GunCon for forcing the player to use a more realistic two-handed grip, while Computer and Video Games and Electronic Gaming Monthly both said stepping on the standard joypad's buttons offers the best combination of accuracy and similarity to the foot pedal. The lack of a multiplayer mode was also criticized, since this was a standard feature in light gun shooters.

Time Crisis — Frequently Asked Questions