It was easy to miss this juicy detail during today's Nintendo Direct, but to clarify the original NES Duck Hunt is coming to Wii U Virtual Console. This is most likely to coincide with the Duck Hunt dog's inclusion in the new Smash Bros, something players of the DS game have known for a few weeks now. The only info we have now is that the game will require a Wii remote to play, which makes sense.
It got me thinking, though. A light gun like the NES Zapper functions quite differently than a Wiimote. You actually had to aim down the sights of the Zapper to zero your target; the Wiimote approximates a crosshair on the screen, and uses IR tracking and bluetooth triangulation to calculate the target's position. While light gun ports were popular on Wii, they never played exactly like they did on old consoles or in arcades.
Still, it's quite welcome to have one of the seminal light gun games finally show up on Virtual Console. It's something I've wanted ever since Nintendo teased it on the Wii Play demo disc, especially considering old light gun tech isn't compatible with flatscreen HD TVs. That said, I'll be keeping my NES plugged into an old CRT TV...for now.
