“Target: Terror”
Genre: Light-gun, first-person shooter
Developer: Raw Thrills / Leviathan Games
Publisher: Konami
Platform: Nintendo Wii
Price: $40
ESRB rating: M (mature)
Grade: C-

We here at Game Guy HQ aren’t certain exactly what the thinking was over at Raw Thrills and Leviathan Games when the designers and planners concocted “Target: Terror,” and without long grilling of them under hot lights at Gitmo we’re unlikely ever to find out. So, indulge us for a moment. Here’s what we think happened:

The game makers received an assignment to create an old-fashioned shooter, one patterned after the arcade-house games of yore (“yore” being 1982), when point-and-shoot outweighed plot and substance. Just put some intimidating characters up on the screen, have them run out from behind cars, trucks, half-open doors, decorative ficus trees and explosive barrels of toxic waste with guns blazing and snarls menacing.

Because this kind of behavior happens so often in reality, the game makers also had to make sure the targets were easy to spot, even for the most unwitting neophytes. So they dressed the characters in black hoods, ill-fitting sweat suits, sadomasochism-inspired leather pants and sport coats made of dynamite.

Oh, and there had to be one guy swinging a chainsaw like he was trying to swat a fly with it.

They believed further that none of these characters should be allowed to hang around where everyone else does, such as the mall, the grocery store, the beauty parlor — places where their mere presence is certain to fray the fabric of our civil society and underscore the real value of terrorism. No, these characters should loiter in locations where they blend right in: an airport, a nuclear power plant, the north tower of the Golden Gate Bridge.

There also should be so many of these characters running around that no self-respecting terrorist organization could afford either the ammunition budget or a decent health plan for all of them, and that even players unable to aim could pick off one or more of them without trying.

And then … what? Just shooting around at any dark figure that moves is bound to lose its appeal after 10 minutes, 15 minutes, half an hour. How about adding something different, something surprising, like …

Mini-games.

Not just any mini-game, though. They should be fast-paced, challenging, and maybe a little funny. Like using a nine-iron to nail passing golf carts with explosive golf balls, or … wait for it …

Flying turkeys strapped with dynamite!

The thinking on “Target: Terror” seems to have stopped there, however. Maybe by then the makers were just laughing too hard at their own humor to keep going. Or maybe, like Game Guy, by that point they were bored silly.

Nevertheless, the game makers had this project and they had a deadline. One wonders what might have happened though if they skipped the deadline and kept thinking.

Yes, “Target: Terror” has all you see mentioned above and — well, not a whole lot else. Players can pick up improved weapons along the way, such as shotguns, machine guns and freeze rays, and they win points not only for gunning down terrorists in blood-spattered glory (hence, the “M” rating), but also for shooting out a certain number of window panes at the airport, for blowing up a certain number of toxic waste cans at the nuclear plant, and for not hitting any of the innocent civilians who stray past — although there are so few it’s difficult to make them targets even if one tries.

Overall success is measured in “life” points. Each time players are hit, they lose a life, indicated by a heart-shaped icon on the screen. Losing too many hearts before completing a mission — that happens either by getting shot or by shooting one of the innocents — forces players to crack into a credit bank. The bank starts out holding 40 credits and can hold more more depending on the difficulty level. Using up all of the credits before completing the 10 sets of missions, however, puts players back at the game’s beginning.

For a little while, Game Guy was entertained, because he likes shooting up stuff as much as the next gamer. But he bounced from one mission to another within a few minutes and was done in about the same amount of time it takes to tip back a three-martini lunch.

And what did he pay for this abbreviated pleasure? $40.

Not $10, which Game Guy figured this was worth. Not $20, which he’d expect to shell out for something with a better plot that might lure him back. (Even with two people playing, there’s not $20 worth of entertainment for either one of them.)

Nope, it was $40. And on top of that, Game Guy had to sit through pointless pseudo news reports from a bubble-headed anchor advancing each mission in the worst acting performance since Jennifer Lopez in “Gigli,” and had to endure repeated and long load times for low-budget graphics that jumped and skipped throughout gameplay — a sure sign of frame-rate issues that certainly should have been resolved the first time this game came out in 2004.

Game Gut never blew that many quarters at once on even the best title at the arcade house.

So, while it’s possible to have a little fun with “Target: Terror” and its bursting turkeys and whatnot, gamers’ smiles are likely to diminish quickly once they get a good look at what they bought.

In this case, it isn’t much. That’s why this title has “rent” written all over it.