The Last Bounty Hunter is a live-action laserdisc video game

Laserdisc video game

A laserdisc video game is an arcade game that uses pre-recorded video played from a laserdisc, either as the entirety of the graphics, or as part of the graphics.-History:...

 released by American Laser Games

American Laser Games

American Laser Games was a company based in Albuquerque, New Mexico that created a wide variety of light gun laserdisc video games. The company was founded in the late 1980s by Robert Grebe, who had originally created the system to train police officers under the company name ICAT , and adapted the...

 in 1994. Like almost all of the games produced by the now-defunct company, it was a rail shooter and, like the two installments in the Mad Dog McCree

Mad Dog McCree

Mad Dog McCree is the first live-action laserdisc video game released by American Laser Games. It originally appeared as an arcade shooting game in 1990....

 series before it, was set in the Old West. Filmed at Old Tucson Studios in Tucson, Arizona

Tucson, Arizona

Tucson is a city in and the county seat of Pima County, Arizona, United States. The city is located 118 miles southeast of Phoenix and 60 miles north of the U.S.-Mexico border. The 2010 United States Census puts the city's population at 520,116 with a metropolitan area population at 1,020,200...

, it was one of the company's last releases before it was forced to close down. It was also re-released by Digital Leisure

Digital Leisure

Digital Leisure, Inc. is a Canadian publisher of software. The company formed in 1997 with the vision to acquire, remaster, and publish numerous classic video-based arcade games such as Dragon's Lair, Dragon's Lair II: Time Warp and Space Ace. These three games were among the first to use...

 in 2002 and was eventually packaged with Fast Draw Showdown

Fast Draw Showdown

Fast Draw Showdown is a live-action laserdisc video game, released by American Laser Games in 1994 for a limited number of platforms. As one of the last live-action rail shooters released by the company, which began the series with Mad Dog McCree, it is also arguably the shortest...

 by Global VR

Global VR

- History :The company was originally founded in 1998 starting in a garage with just four employees. On July 11, 2003 the company moved into its current facility. As of the move the company employed about 100 employees...

 as an arcade cabinet under the name Six Gun Select.

Plot

The storyline of The Last Bounty Hunter is relatively simple, as is the case with most rail shooters similar to it. The player steps into the shoes of an anonymous bounty hunter

Bounty hunter

A bounty hunter captures fugitives for a monetary reward . Other names, mainly used in the United States, include bail enforcement agent and fugitive recovery agent.-Laws in the U.S.:...

 who rides into a busy town in order to track down and bring to justice four outlaws whose control over the territory is widespread. Handsome Harry, Nasty Dan, El Loco, The Cactus Kid and their respective gangs are terrorizing the peaceful citizens of the county and it is up to the player to defeat them.

The beginning of the game pits the player against a group of bandits attacking a fort commanded by a United States Army

United States Army

The United States Army is the main branch of the United States Armed Forces responsible for land-based military operations. It is the largest and oldest established branch of the U.S. military, and is one of seven U.S. uniformed services...

 general

General

A general officer is an officer of high military rank, usually in the army, and in some nations, the air force. The term is widely used by many nations of the world, and when a country uses a different term, there is an equivalent title given....

, Clinton Briggs. With each scenario, the player fights his way to the final enemy, one of the four outlaws, each of whom can either by wounded and apprehended or shot dead. The point, or "cash", bonus is higher if the final boss is taken alive, by means of shooting the gun out of their hand before they can fire. However, this must be done within a small target area, and within a certain amount of time to prevent them from firing first. Once in a while, the action will take a break to a setting which involves a duel with one enemy or a group of men standing in which only one actually takes part in the duel. The player must shoot only after the shooter goes for his gun and not shoot any of the other men. In the meantime, the player must battle their gangs in settings such as a train station, a casino and the scorching heat of the Great Plains

Great Plains

The Great Plains are a broad expanse of flat land, much of it covered in prairie, steppe and grassland, which lies west of the Mississippi River and east of the Rocky Mountains in the United States and Canada. This area covers parts of the U.S...

. The ending sequence depends on the way in which the criminals were brought to justice. Depending on who was captured alive, they might come back and try to either bribe or shoot you. There are also stages that appear randomly depending on the current stage selected. One example is starting with El Loco causing different scenes for the Handsome Harry or Nasty Dan levels.

Gameplay

The player receives an amount of money for each neutralized outlaw; this money translates into points. Throughout the game, three different weapons can be used: the standard six-shooter, the seemingly more powerful shotgun

Shotgun

A shotgun is a firearm that is usually designed to be fired from the shoulder, which uses the energy of a fixed shell to fire a number of small spherical pellets called shot, or a solid projectile called a slug...

, and a gun that holds more bullets then the normal six-shooter, which can be found as a bonus at times by shooting oxen skulls, hanging lanterns, and wooden wheels. Showdowns take place at random, though more frequently and with greater diversity than in Mad Dog McCree; one of the gunfighters is Wes Flowers, the star of another American Laser Games release, Fast Draw Showdown

Fast Draw Showdown

Fast Draw Showdown is a live-action laserdisc video game, released by American Laser Games in 1994 for a limited number of platforms. As one of the last live-action rail shooters released by the company, which began the series with Mad Dog McCree, it is also arguably the shortest...

.

As in other related games, shooting and reloading are done exclusively via mouse

Mouse (computing)

In computing, a mouse is a pointing device that functions by detecting two-dimensional motion relative to its supporting surface. Physically, a mouse consists of an object held under one of the user's hands, with one or more buttons...

 or light gun

Light gun

A light gun is a pointing device for computers and a control device for arcade and video games.Modern screen-based light guns work by building a sensor into the gun itself, and the on-screen target emit light rather than the gun...

. Getting hit or firing upon a civilian

Civilian

A civilian under international humanitarian law is a person who is not a member of his or her country's armed forces or other militia. Civilians are distinct from combatants. They are afforded a degree of legal protection from the effects of war and military occupation...

 results in the loss of one of three lives and an appropriate sequence involving a gravedigger

Gravedigger

A gravedigger is a cemetery worker responsible for digging graves used in the process of burial.-Fossors:Fossor or Fossarius , from the Latin verb fodere 'to dig', referred to grave diggers in the Roman catacombs in the first three centuries of the Christian Era...

. There is one load/save slot and a second player can be introduced at the start of the game.

Acting

Much like that of the earlier Crime Patrol

Crime Patrol

Crime Patrol is a live-action laserdisc video game released by American Laser Games in 1993.-Storyline:Crime Patrol, just like the company's previous releases, didn't focus so much on the storyline as on the general concept of the game, which was in essence its being a rail shooter. A plot is still...

, The Last Bounty Hunters acting is generally considered average, yet offset by humour. Examples include an overweight sheriff who literally flees at the first hint of trouble, to the point of abandoning the jail during a break-out, and various one-liners by almost all of the characters, such as the Undertaker, whose lines include "Have you considered our layaway plan?" and "Good thing you're such a lousy shot, or we'da never met!", or the an elderly doctor, who has lines such as "I've gotta practice! YOU need to!".