Sinden Lightgun Review (PC)

Growing up in the 90’s, I was a huge fan of going to the local arcade — shoutout Big Apple in Woking — with friends, punching the everloving mess out of Fist of the North Star, screeching around corners in Daytona USA or Sega Rally, dancing up a storm in Dance Dance Revolution, or slide tackling fools in Virtua Striker. But really, whenever I entered any arcade my eyes were scanning for one thing and one thing only — where are the light gun games?

Ever since blasting ducks on Duck Hunt on a friend’s NES, I fell in love with the lightgun genre. House of the Dead, Silent Scope, Virtua Cop, Time Crisis… the list goes on. Hell, I even enjoyed some of the more questionable titles like Mad Dog McCree or Area 51. Anything that let me point a (pretend) gun at a screen and fire was ripe for my loose change.

Over the years I’ve made sure to keep hold of my home lightgun titles too, from the Sega Saturn and its port of HotD to the Dreamcast port of HotD2 and Xbox port of HotD3… yes, that’s a lot of HotD, but it’s easily my favourite lightgun series. In addition, I’ve a handful of donated CRTs up in the loft, just in case the one I have set up breaks and I need a backup. My wife totally doesn’t mind me taking up all this space either…

All this is to say: I love a good bit of lightgunning action, which is a shame as since the LCD TV took over, us lightgun fans have been out of luck. Old lightguns don’t work with LCDs due to incompatibility with refresh rates (as a basic explanation), and so if you don’t have a CRT handy, well, your lightguns are only good for reminiscing and collecting dust. There have been a few attempts over the years to bring it back, with one promising option being the PDP Mars lightgun from 2019; sadly, after a weirdly muted launch (seriously, at a separate PDP event just before launch, some UK staff seemed confused at how I even knew what it was, let alone I’d been told I was being sent one for review) with just three games, it disappeared off the gaming landscape never to be heard from again.

Thankfully though, there is another option, and one that is proving to be far more versatile and better supported: the Sinden Lightgun. I’ve been following this gun’s development for a long time now, from early prototype to finished product, but not having a capable gaming PC until recently, could only look on wistfully at the fun people were having.

Well, that’s changed now, as not only do I have a gaming laptop, but Sinden were kind enough to send me a lightgun to check out what I’d been missing!

What makes the Sinden different from both traditional lightguns and the PDP Mars is in its implementation; thanks to some far-too-clever-for-me technical wizardry, it works on any screen and with a wide array of games thanks to a dedicated community. The basics are that rather than having an external camera, the Sinden’s camera is located in the gun itself and looks out of the chamber. When it detects a screen — specifically with a software-enabled white border around it — the gun effectively becomes a huge mouse. Again, the tech behind it is very clever and not something I’m going to even attempt to dissect, but I will say that it just works. Like, almost as simple as plug-and-play to get the Sinden set up. Installing the software from their website is simple, and running it offers up all manner of options to tinker, though out of the box it’s good to go in my experience. I will note that I did have a slight issue running the newer software in that it kept lagging and freezing, but the older software — while slow to initially load — works perfectly still.

Playing with the calibration screen shows the camera in action, the white outline on the screen filling in with a blue block when detected. The mouse can look a little jittery but this is only when using it as a mouse cursor — in games it works flawlessly.

The gun itself is solidly built as well. Coming in an unassuming black box, there’s minimal extravagance to the package, but opening it reveals the gun to be nicely secured with soft padding. The one that was sent to me is the default Sinden Lightgun, though a more expensive option with recoil is also available, each in a multitude of colours. The default one is nice and weighty enough though, with a very satisfyingly clicky trigger, a chunky pump-action slide on the underside, and a host of buttons and a D-pad for menus. It also sports a much longer USB-A cable than I’d expected, coming in at 5m. For my personal setup, this means I can leave my laptop where it is and still move to the sofa on the other side of the room to play on the OLED.

Response times are immaculate. This is easily seen by just moving the mouse cursor around before loading a game. The mouse is accurately tracked at all times, and the claim on their website that it has “speed equal to a CRT lightgun” rings true for me. In-game, you’d be hard-pressed to find any instance of slow response or missed shots outside of your own bad aiming — it really does feel as good as a true arcade gun has ever felt.

Of course, all the fancy tech in the world is no good without games, and as mentioned before there is a host of games and emulators that have tremendous support for the Sinden. On Sinden’s website are links to all manner of excellent Wiki guides and a Discord forum that mean even if you’re not super technically minded — like yours truly — you should have minimal issue getting something up and running.

As for what to play? Well, there are ways and means to find games of all kinds if you just do a bit of asking around. There are also plenty of guides on how to dump ROMs of your own games and get them working too… I’m sure there’s a way to search for them somehow…

Got what you need sorted? Good.

Each game and method of playing requires slightly different settings, but again, the Wikis and Discord are godsends for figuring it all out. There are even games on there that fans have made solely for the Sinden, again with simple instructions on how to set it all up.

The key being that the white border has to be in play to get the gun registering properly. While watching videos of this, I’ll admit it looks a bit… I don’t think cluttered is quite the right word, but by the very nature of how it works it does chop off a small edge around the play space and is quite noticeable. When you’re actually playing though? I honestly didn’t even notice it was there 99% of the time. On a few occasions I forgot to turn it on and it took me a good few seconds to figure out why I couldn’t shoot, such is its forgettableness in action. Perhaps playing on a smaller screen might make it more obvious, but both on my 24-inch monitor and 65-inch OLED it blended into the background within seconds of shooting.

The Sinden setup recommends checking out Dead Containment’s demo as a test case, and frankly, this is a fantastic example of what the gun can do. It’s a shame that development on this early access title seems to have stalled, as the two levels on offer are well-paced and balanced, and even offer alternate pathways and hidden collectibles. As a tech demo for the gun, it’s about as good an intro as you could hope for.

Again, the Sinden Wiki has helpful pages of all the lightgun games available on Steam and Windows, including the great HotD Remake. Yes, we’re back to HotD, but that was the real impetus for wanting to explore the Sinden for me. And with the second game’s remake coming out soon, I knew it had to be time to get in on the action.

Of course, most lightgun titles will be of the older variety, and so getting emulators up and running is all but essential. Be it ports of arcade titles or old console classics, there are plenty of guides and options out there to help you get the best out of the Sinden.

Conclusion

But, no matter what you choose to play, the Sinden is quite frankly better than we could ever have hoped for in its recreation of the arcade lightgun feeling. That it works on any screen, is easy to set up, and looks and feels great in the hand is a modern miracle. And it’s so awesome to finally be able to get back to one of my personal joys in gaming on a regular basis. For £90 for the default version, I really can’t recommend it enough even if you only have one or two games you want to play — as I’ve found — once you get that bug back in you, there are plenty more awesome lightgun games — old and new — to discover and have fun with. And you can even set up dual guns for two players, though that is for another day for me — for now, I’m quite happy solo blasting my way to Curien and his Magician.

Hardware provided by the manufacturer for review purposes.