Point Blank: Finally, a Parlor-style Shooting Game

The Swap Shop in Fort Lauderdale holds several memories for me, from the time our family bought a Nintendo 64 to the time I bought a Stitch plush for myself.  However, in spite of those recent activities, the arcade was one of the most memorable things about the Swap Shop.  When the circus was not performing, my brothers and I would often hang out in the video arcade that occupied the second and third levels of the main building.  Of the many games they had throughout the years, Point Blank caught my eye.


Point Blank as developed by Namco is another shooting-based video game, designed in 1994 as an arcade game.  Unlike many games today with all kinds of deep stories, this casual shooter had no story and was set up like a shooting parlor with multiple microgames.  Depending on the difficulty and stages you choose, the microgames themselves range in difficulty from the easy to the VERY HARD.

Second, each microgame has a specific task for you to complete, from shooting ninjas and gangsters to protecting Dr. Don and Dr. Dan from hazards in a given field.  If you succeed, you get to continue to the next stage of your choosing.  Fail and lose a life, depending on shooting the wrong targets or missing your quotas, needless to say that this has happened to me on the VERY HARD levels riddled throughout the game.

Personally, as a casual arcade-goer, I am a fan of many of the shooting games that are available, but The House of the Dead, Area 51, and Time Crisis tend to get boring and predictable, especially with the fact that those games involve all kinds of violence against humanoid targets.  However, Point Blank offers a good break to all those realistic video games and may even give children something to look at.  The graphics may be dated with GIF-looking images as your targets, but they still attribute to a good construction of a game.  Even the ending sequence is a bonus stage that you can do to determine how many rockets you light in the night sky, which is pretty amazing in my opinion since there are no good or bad endings.

Concluding, Point Blank holds its own as a great arcade game.  The violence and subject matter is only as high as a shooting gallery.  The microgames included have a difficulty that you can control.  The graphics are pretty simple and solid for when the game came out.  I hope someday that I can play that or the second part in an arcade or on the DS.