The Lone Ranger (1991)

The Lone Ranger's story is simple: the President has been kidnapped by outlaw "Butch Cavendish", and you, "the Lone Ranger", must kick his butt. Said journey of adventure will take you across eight stages, culminating in the final showdown against Butch Cavendish. It's a decent-length game for the NES, though the length of the stages is rather inconsistent (you only get passwords at the end of each stage). For example, the third area involves exploring a large area and taking down three tricky bosses; the fourth area has a very linear path and only one boss to defeat. You'll face off against outlaws, desperadoes, wild animals, and ninjas. (Yes, there are freaking ninjas in this game. Foreign immigrants = ninjas. They're also the most annoying enemies in the game.)

You have a small arsenal in the game, but most of the time you'll be using the Lone Ranger's signature silver bullets, which always kill mooks in one shot and pass through multiple enemies. You can punch people, which is exactly as useful as it sounds, and the standard bullets occasionally take two shots to kill mooks in the top-down and side-scroller stages—which frequently led me to taking hits accidentally until I went solely with silver bullets. You can also purchase TNT, which you can only carry 10 sticks of and have a sad blast radius. (They function as smart-bombs in the first-person sections, but have a delay that will likely get you shot.) One of the most unique aspects of The Lone Ranger is that your gun actually has a limited capacity—though you can purchase up to 50 clips of each ammo type, each clip has six shots and must be reloaded by pressing B again when empty. Keeping an eye on your ammo becomes as important as being a good shot.

As mentioned thus far, The Lone Ranger has three main modes of gameplay, and unlike many games, manages to do a solid job with each mode. The top-down mode is most common, with the Lone Ranger walking around towns or hostile areas, dodging bullets and blasting outlaws. Simple, but takes quite a bit of strategy to avoid enemy shots. The side-scroller sections add platforming, and while the Lone Ranger controls well (you can shoot in any direction but downward), there's a few jumps that go from "tricky" to just plain annoying. The first-person sections can be played with the Zapper, and probably should if you value your sanity, because they are extremely difficult. While wandering the first-person areas, you'll encounter ambushes along the way, requiring you to blast outlaws and their thrown projectiles from all sides. Later ambushes requires lightning reflexes to gun down all enemies without taking hits, and one poor move can lead to getting a huge chunk of your health blasted off. There's plenty of bosses along the way, and while the early few can be brute-force beaten in a damage race, later bosses will require thinking and reflexes to avoid damage. (Except for the ninja boss who creates two clones of himself. It's like the developers forgot what silver bullets do.)

The Lone Ranger is quite a challenging game, with plenty of enemies and health pick-ups being rare. Once you get good at dodging bullets and gunning down waves of outlaws, it's a very rewarding game with a decent amount of variety in the gameplay.