Why Super Scope 6 makes for the perfect anti-burglary training program
Super Scope 6 (1992)
Super Scope 6 (1992)
When things go bump in the night and the wife's jewellery is about to get stolen by junkie housebreakers, you can forget about any kind of fancy house alarm systems - you need a good weapon under your bed.
Of course, there’s a simple answer to this conundrum - if you happen to live in a place with liberal gun laws, you can just charge down with a semi-automatic and blow the burglars away before they can do the same to you. That’s not a possibility here in Ireland however, so we have to take the much more humane approach of smashing invaders' skulls instead.
So it’s got to be a melee weapon. But which one to choose for your loadout? Well, I can't recommend a knife. Worst case scenario, you'll accidentally slash yourself, or your docile little dog (so much for Fido’s protection). Or worse, you could even end up in a desperate knife fight against the robber, someone who has much more experience with bladework than you.
One night, a friend of mine heard someone burst into his house and rummage around the downstairs hall before running away into the night. Not standing for this, my pal grabbed a combat knife he happened to own, and they went off in hot pursuit of whichever scumbag entered their home.
Never found him of course, but I asked my mate what exactly he was planning to do with such a nasty looking knife if he managed to catch up with the guy. He didn't really know, and nor did I. But it probably wouldn't do much for your court case if you were to stab someone to death with a proper blade, nowhere near your own property. So knives are out.
How about some sporting instruments? A tennis racquet won't quite cut it, though if you happen to have one of those machines that fires out tennis balls at high speed, I suppose you could lure the burglar into a Home Alone trap and take 'em out with a barrage of tennis balls.
Golf is a bit more like it - if you're an easily frustrated player like me, you've probably smashed a golf club or two against something in anger. By all means, go all Happy Gilmore on any homebreakers you can catch.
The only problem I can see is that just one or two full-force whacks from a golf club can leave it bent into a musical triangle rather than a deadly weapon. Even a driver, which is bloody powerful and would probably leave your opponent comatose, can’t stand up to much battering scrutiny.
For such purposes, you really can't do better than a bit of firm wood. Here, you've got several regional variants to choose from. In the US, you can employ a baseball bat. In the UK, you could use a cricket bat. And here in Ireland, just to be different, we use a hurl, otherwise known as a hurley, which we use in one of our national sports which is called ‘stick fighting’.
You don't have to feel "region locked" by this choice either - cricket is getting more popular in Ireland, for example. You don't even have to be Protestant to play it anymore, either.
Feeling a bit overwhelmed by the choice of tool to cause brain-damage with? Well fear not, because I have just the one you need. It's called the Super Scope, and it was designed for use with early Super Nintendo games before getting quietly pushed aside, only to return years later as an item in Super Smash Bros of all things.
The Scope, to put it bluntly, is an enormous plastic bazooka with a scope-implement attached, enabling you to fire precision rocket blasts. You might think I'm cheating here, since I've already ruled out guns as a means of home protection. This surely means ordnance and rocket launchers as well, right?
But I actually don't recommend that you fire a single shot from your Super Scope at anybody, because ammo is a very big consideration - this thing wants six AA batteries at a time, and they better all have plenty of juice because the Super Scope will drain them in very short order indeed.
No, your better bet is to pistol-whip, or I suppose scope-whip, your assailants. It's made of some pretty sturdy plastic, so she'll hold together. You can also activate the Turbo button for some turbo-whipping, if you think it'll take more than a few smacks for the robber to change his mind.
If you're gonna be toting a bazooka around your living room, it would serve you well to have at least a little bit of bazooka training under your belt. So let's look at the official training programme, Super Scope 6 - a selection of six minigames on your SNES, designed to familiarise you with your new rocket launcher.
Broadly speaking, there are three cuddly puzzle games, and three hardcore shooting games. Importantly, the latter shooting games feature sexy anime lieutenants, albeit only for a few brief seconds.
Before getting to the games, you are invited to test your aim. Ah, it gets a bit tricky here - the Scope only works on CRT tellies, so essentially no hardware from the last twenty years will work. You’ll just have to hope that your housebreakers are actually three 1970s televisions in a trenchcoat. If not, it’s Goodnight Vienna because none of your shots will land.
Even on a CRT TV, your first calibration shot will hit the bullseye, all looking good. But then your follow-up test shot will be totally wide of the mark. Still, no need to worry. It’s a rocket launcher, how much accuracy do you really need?
Anyway, needs must, time to train that trigger finger and figure out which way the Scope should point. The three puzzle games on the cartridge are found under an umbrella title called Blastris - yes, it's Tetris with blasting Bazookas. No, I'm afraid it isn't very fun.
There's both a horizontal and vertical version of this Tetris game, although the vertical version is more like Connect-4. You'll use the Scope to quite literally blast away parts of the pieces as they fall, with some funky music playing in the background. So if you’re angry about being foiled for the millionth time by those blasted Z- and S-shaped Tetriminoes, here's your chance for revenge.
There's also a whack-a-mole game, also played with a rocket launcher, rather than a traditional hammer. You need precision aiming here, and you're not gonna get it, but it's still the best of the Blastris games. I'm just not entirely sure what whack-a-mole has to do with Tetris.
Well, those are the Blastris games. Accidentally hit LazerBlazer in the menu though, and you're taken to three far better games: first up is Intercept, where you’re onboard a ship and you need to shoot down missiles before they reach the other side of the screen and somehow blow up in your face.
Then there’s Engage, where you're travelling at a zillion miles an hour and trying to take out enemy ships and missiles before they whack you in the face. Lastly, we have Confront, where it's a far more straight-forward rigmarole of shooting down alien fighters before they can let rip at you.
Take five hits in any of these modes and you're brown bread, which is a shame because it’s not just your diamonds and pearls at risk here - you're probably Earth's last hope for survival and all that. But then again, this is a cute and colourful Nintendo game, so the anime lieutenants will just give you a kiss and a bit of TLC before you go back out and join the war effort once more.
You can keep playing the games indefinitely too, or at least until those batteries run out. After that, you're left with an awkwardly long paperweight that you might as well feed to the burglars if you're gonna stop them.
Wouldn't you much rather smash a cricket bat against their heads, Shaun of the Dead style? Especially if you can get all the force and trauma triangulated onto the burglar’s temple via the fat, pointy end of the bat. Keep the Super Scope and its companion game close by in your bedroom if you like, but you shouldn’t expect to get much use out of it. I doubt anyone would want to steal it, either.
1 August 2025