The worst thing about video game arcades – worse than crowds of sweaty DDR players, curt staff or sticky floors – is the terrible calibration on most light gun games. Dumping $ 2.00 into your chosen shooter to find out you need to aim the light gun across the room to hit anything is heart breaking. Worse is when you flat out just can’t shoot anything in the bottom third of the screen with the game’s overused, worn out controller.

Nevertheless there are some games you just won’t get anywhere except the arcades. And so you battle the crowds of fast stepping idiots and carefully feed in just one credit at a time into the Ghost Squad machine, slide your game card in and pray the guns work this time.

Until now. Sega has come to our rescue, giving us Ghost Squad on the Nintendo Wii. The objective: make the in-home experience not only faithful to the arcade one, but also different enough to warrant your money.

Ironically the game’s strengths are its downfall. Remaining faithful is this game’s only fault. Just like the arcade version, this game has only three missions. Just like the arcader, it gets a little repetitive despite an effort on the developers part to mix things up - providing different paths and different weapons to get you through the game.

Ghost Squad plays like every other light gun game you’ve ever played – an achievement worth noting for anyone who has an LCD, as most light gun games won’t work on them. First you choose which of the three missions you want to play, then you point and shoot at any enemies on the screen. The game adds further challenges into the mix with certain objectives for you to complete mid mission – you defuse claymore mines, secure hostages and engage in hand-to-hand combat at different points in the game – and these successfully change things up.

The graphics are quite good for a Wii game; while the character modelling makes for some hilariously poor acting Ghost Squad still looks polished. The sound is great too – guns sound like guns and everything is very clear.

The added modes - Party and Training – bring four players into the mix as well as babes in bikinis (no, really). If you beat the game on arcade mode once (that’s all three levels completed once) you unlock Ninja mode, where you and three friends play through the normal game throwing stars instead of firing bullets. And should you beat the game as a Ninja, all your enemies become babes in bikinis, and you shoot them with a dolphin gun. How decidedly anime.

It’s a cool distraction and four player action is definitely fun, but the arcade game is where it’s still really at. It is, for all intents and purposes, a 1:1 copy of the arcade game. The level structure, upgrade system… everything about the game is a copy. It does have Party and Training modes, adding longevity to the title, but overall I don’t think the game itself is designed for the in-home experience. In the arcade longevity isn’t a priority; at home the player doesn’t have to worry about pumping $ 2 coins in every few minutes, so they can play the whole game in one sitting if they please – it defeats the challenge and makes the game repetitive.

No matter, really – the game is fun. If you’re looking for a light gun game and you’re tired of playing Virtua Cop on your old school TV this is definitely the best light gun game for home consoles right now. It’s not the best game - not even the best light gun game - but in terms of “next-gen” rail shooters it’s a winner.