Reply 1: You could play it with a controller..............I would rather smash the controller into tiny pieces and pierce a rabbits eyes with them, before wrapping it in a cheese curry sausage roll penis. Wibble!!!!!!!
Reply 2: It's better with a gun.
Reply 3: a light gun is a pointing device for computers and a control device for arcade and video games. The first light guns appeared in the 1930s, following the development of light-sensing vacuum tubes. It was not long before the technology began appearing in arcade shooting games, beginning with the Seeburg Ray-O-Lite in 1936. These early light gun games, like modern laser tag, used small targets (usually moving) onto which a light-sensing tube was mounted; the player used a gun (usually a rifle) that emitted a beam of light when the trigger was pulled. If the beam struck the target, a "hit" was scored. Modern screen-based light guns work on the opposite principle - the sensor is built into the gun itself, and the on-screen target(s) emit light rather than the gun. The first light gun of this type was used on the MIT Whirlwind computer.
The light gun, and its descendant, the light pen, are now rarely used as computer pointing devices, because of the popularity of the mouse and changes in monitor display technology - traditional light guns can only work with standard CRT monitors.
The video game light gun is typically modeled on a ballistic weapon (usually a pistol) and is used for targeting objects on a video screen. With force feedback, the light gun can also simulate the recoil of the weapon.
Light guns are very popular in arcade games, but had not caught on as well in the home video game console market until after the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES), Sega Master System (SMS), Sega Mega Drive, and Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES) systems. Nevertheless, many home 'Pong' systems of the 70s included a pistol or gun for shooting simple targets on screen.
Traditional light guns cannot be used on the newer LCD and plasma screens, and have problems with projection screens.
The following are famous example of light guns:
Magnavox Odyssey Shooting Gallery the first gun for a home console was in fact a big rifle, which looked very lifelike and even needed to be "cocked" after each shot
Nintendo's NES Zapper for the NES, arguably the most popular example of the light gun
XG-1 for Atari XE-GS Action Max, a console that used VHS tapes for games, solely controlled by a light gun
Light Phaser for Sega Master System
Super Scope for Super Nintendo, shaped like a bazooka
Menacer for Sega Mega Drive
Sega Lock-On for Sega Mega Drive
Namco's GunCon and GunCon 2, first to read the video signal in the accessory (rather than internally in the console) and said to be highly accurate; used for PlayStation and PlayStation 2
Dreamcast light guns for Sega Dreamcast
Magnum Light Phaser For Spectrum / Commodore 64
The Wii Zapper for the Wii console is designed to house the Wii Remote and Nunchuk, giving a light gun feel (although the Wii Remote itself does not use traditional light gun technology).
There are also light guns for Sega Saturn, Xbox and several other console and arcade systems. Recent light gun video games include Time Crisis 4, Virtua Cop 3, and The House of the Dead 4.
The Wii Remote can be seen as a successor to this technology, and it can be used relatively accurately with CRT, LCD, plasma, and projection screens. Like the NES Zapper, it is "bundled" with the system, but unlike traditional light guns, the Wii Remote serves as a primary controller. If coupled with the Nunchuk attachment, the Wii Remote allows for a potentially seamless union between first-person shooter gameplay and "light gun" implementation. Namco's GunCon 3 also uses a system similar to the Wii Remote, using 2 infrared LEDs and sensors in the gun, as opposed to the traditional light guns.
The "light gun" is named because it uses light as its method of detecting where on screen the user is targeting. The name leads one to believe that the gun itself emits a beam of light, but in fact most light guns actually receive light through a photodiode in the gun barrel.
There are two versions of this technique that are commonly used, but the concept is the same: when the trigger of the gun is pulled, the screen is blanked out to black, and the diode begins reception. All or part of the screen is painted white in a way that allows the computer to judge where the gun is pointing, based on when the diode detects light. The user of the light gun notices little or nothing, because the period in which the screen is blank is usually only a fraction of a second (see persistence of vision).
as far as equential targets, the first detection method, used by the Zapper, involves drawing each target sequentially in white light after the screen blacks out. The computer knows that if the diode detects light as it is drawing a square (or after the screen refreshes), that is the target the gun is pointed at. Essentially, the diode tells the computer whether or not you hit something, and for n objects, the sequence of the drawing of the targets tell the computer which target you hit after 1 + ceil(log2(n)) refreshes (one refresh to determine if any target at all was hit and ceil(log2(n)) to do a binary search for the object that was hit).
An interesting side effect of this is that on poorly designed games, often a player can point the gun at a light bulb, pull the trigger and hit the first target every time. Better games account for this either by detecting if all targets appear to match or by displaying a black screen and verifying that no targets match.