According to Engadget, Nintendo is releasing Duck Hunt to the Wii U's Virtual Console on Christmas Day. Though Nintendo is notorious for reissuing (and reissuing, and reissuing) its old games for new consoles, this is actually the first time Duck Hunt has appeared on any console aside from the NES. Let's call it a Super Smash Bros. tie-in—it wouldn't be the first time Nintendo dusted off a long-dormant franchise after including one of its characters in Smash.

I was first exposed to Duck Hunt when my parents bought the NES Action Set. I never knew it by that name, since I was playing games while I could barely read, but I know it now because the Action Set came with an NES, two gamepads, the obligatory Super Mario Bros., and a copy of Duck Hunt with an NES Zapper light gun. I still have that NES, and I've kept it in reasonably good working order, but in recent years when I've pulled it out, Duck Hunt is one of the few games that doesn't actually work. You can fire it up and connect the Zapper, but your "shots" never actually hit anything.

This isn't because your Zapper is broken, but because of your shiny new HDTV. The Zapper is a simple piece of hardware, but to work it relied on some technical trickery exclusive to older CRT TVs.

Every time you pulled the Zapper's trigger in a game of Duck Hunt, the screen would briefly flash. This was more than just a graphical effect to accompany the simulated 8-bit gunshot noise—it's actually a pair of quick flashes. First, the entire screen turns to black as the Zapper's photodiode fires up. Then, the target areas (the parts of the screen with ducks or clay pigeons in them) would briefly flash white—if multiple targets were onscreen, those white squares would be displayed at separate times.

If the diode sees black, sorry, you missed. If white light is reflected back, the NES knows you hit something, and that annoying dog pops out of the grass holding your quarry. The initial black flash ensures that you don't score "hits" by pointing the light gun at a light bulb or other constant source of light—Senior Gaming Editor Kyle Orland tried the light bulb and the "white sheet of paper" tricks with his retro NES setup, neither worked—and the system draws targets one at a time so that it knows which duck you hit based on when the Zapper detected light.

All of this flashing happens so quickly that it's not visible to the human eye, and the precise timing involved is where newer plasma and LCD TVs trip up. The Zapper and Duck Hunt worked with CRT televisions because those TVs all had a consistent amount of input lag, the time between when you press a button and when the result of that button press is shown on screen. As many console and PC gamers know, the move from CRT TVs and monitors to LCD and plasma versions came with a greater amount of input lag, the amount of which varies from screen to screen.

This is a major concern for competitive PC gamers—entire databases exist that are dedicated to comparing input lag in different monitors—and even more casual gamers may have run into it if you've ever had to calibrate your TV for a timing-sensitive game like Guitar Hero or Rock Band. In games like Duck Hunt that pre-dated the need for such calibration, things are just going to stop working.

To skirt around all of this, the Virtual Console release of Duck Hunt has apparently been modified. An on-screen crosshair will reportedly track the motion of your Wii Remote rather than bouncing light off of some extra accessory. A similar effect was used with the makeshift "Wii Zapper" that shipped with Link's Crossbow Training. It won't quite capture the feel of the original, but it's better than having to buy a whole new Zapper to throw on your ever-growing pile of different Wii controllers.