Please do not adjust your television set, mostly because this probably isn’t on your TV.

We’re back! By “we” I of course mean “me” but as Tryzon will attest, I’m more than happy to have guest writers.

Anyway, to celebrate the sites return, I propose a competition. Competitions need prizes, or so I’ve heard, so this ones prize is a gifted copy of Plain Sight on Steam (hence the link to the games Steam page.)

What do you have to do to enter? Show me your latest gaming exploit! Be it an awesome castle in Minecraft, 1000G on Super Meat Boy or simply finding something cool/awesome in Fallout New Vegas.

“How do I enter?”, you ask? You can either post your proof of your gaming prowess (say, a photo, or a link to a verifiable source) in the comments section or you can send me your proof on twitter! (I’m @mehall if you’re not already following me.)

I think we can safely say that not every race this season will be like “Bore-rain”, with Alonso, starting 3rd on the grid spun around right at the start, yet ending just off the podium in 4th.

My predictions were close, with Vettel on pole, the Mercedes GP team in 5th and 6th with Button taking the 4th I predicted for Rosberg. We again had Sutil punching above his weight, and the HRT team bringing up the rear, though with both Virgin drivers starting from the pit lane, Senna and Chandhok got a slight boost.

Talking of Chandhok, massive congratulations due for finishing his 2nd Grand Prix, and congratulations to the entire HRT team, onwards and upwards!

Who were the losers of the day? Schumacher broke his front wing in a scuffle at turn 1 of the first lap. He made good time catching up, but Jamie Alguersuari held him up until his Pit stop, and then again after, only getting by in the closing laps to secure 10th place and 1 championship point.

Vettel too lost out, once again due to reliability issues, this time a brake failure sending him off into the gravel trap.

(Paying the bills)

Bad end to the day for both Webber, no points, and Hamilton, 6th place, as Webber ran into the side of Hamilton as Hamilton struggled to get by Alonso. Hamilton unhappy with the teams decision to pit him a second time, but the way Lewis runs through his tyres make me thibk he would have had a blowout like the one in China two years back, and that mistake cost him the championship.

Winners of the day were the three men on the podium. Jenson made a risky early switch to dry tyres from the intermediates, which paid dividends bringing him home in P1. Kubica pulled his Renault into 2nd, silencing critics of the Pole, and proving he’s still a contender. As mentioned, Massa came in 3rd after holding off Alonso’s seemingly grippier car for around 20 laps. Massa proving he won’t be bullied into submission by Alonso. We’re on race 2 and the championship is wide open, so I’d expect no quarter if I were Fernando.

On a final note, I’d like to thank Heikki Kovalainen for a twitpic he posted at Bahrain:

Can you imagine what it would be like having that as your few, driving 150 mph into a corner with 20 other cars doing the exact same?

At 7am tomorrow, the second grand prix of the 2010 F1 season will commence. At time of writing, I haven’t watched the qualifying, or even looked at the results of it, but here are my predictions for what may have happened, and what may happen tomorow.

Firstly, Alonso or Vettel for pole, unless there is rain or something else. HRT’s drivers Karun Chandhok (apologies for any misspelling, this post is from my phone and I will review it later) and Bruno Senna will bring up the back of the field. Like Bahrain, they may choose to start from the pit lane, but I have strong hopes for at least one of them to last at least half way.

Mercedes GP – Schumacher will once again be out qualified by Rosberg, but I expect it to be closer to 2 tenths, and 4 and 5th places. I also expect a Force India to top 10 qualifying and to get points.

Talking of getting points, none of the new teams will, but Heikki and Jarno will be there at the end, and a safety car late on could maybe push the higher.

Anyway, I’ll be up from 6am ish, so check my twitter page for updates (follow me!) or drop your own predictions in the comments below.

Today, Red Steel 2 was released. I never got too far in Red Steel 1 because, like many of you, I found the controls fiddly and inaccurate and the graphics weren’t impressive, even if it had been a GameCube game, let’s be honest.

Let me just let you know that if you invest in Red Steel 2 (henceforth “Red Steel”, and if I refer to the old one, I’ll say “Red Steel 1″) it’ll put those Motion Plus you bought for Wii Sports Resort (and maybe Grand Slam Tennis or Tiger Woods 10) too good use. If you haven’t bought Motion Plus yet, you can get it with Red Steel for an extra £10, which is a pretty good price, given the game on it’s own is only £34.99

Red Steel is a different beast from the first one. Ubisoft have listened to the criticisms from the first one, and the invention of the Motion Plus, with some good coding, has removed most of the problems. I will just say that swinging the katana whilst not locked on can be annoying at times due to the camera turning, and that you need a bit of room to do some of the actions (especially the “Tiger” special move, which launches your foes into the air) but these are minor complaints, especially compared to the original.

You are a banished member of the “Kusagari”, a clan of fighters from the town/city of Caldera. Overnight, a group of bandits have attacked Caldera, and all of the Kusagari are now missing, you are the last one left. Having returned from your banishment, you aim to free the city and reclaim your honour as a Kusagari. The story so far (I’m not finished yet, but I’m more than a few hours in) seems fairly dry and obvious, but the art style more than makes up for it. The art direction is a sort of Manga/cel-shaded type thing, but it’s not quite either, and it’s full 3D graphics. It looks great, not just for a Wii game, but as a game for this generation. It’s not full HD, this IS the Wii after all, but it doesn’t need to be, it’s not yet another brown/grey/green mess trying to be “realistic”, it’s a game set in the Wild West, with guns and katana’s.

(paying the bills)

You start with your katana and your gun. You can choose how to fight, and there is plenty of ammo to go around. I tend to try and pick off a bit of health from distance before getting up close, as when you get enemies to low health, there are katana “finisher” attacks, which earn you more money than the regular attacks. You can also get plenty of money from destroying everything and anything that looks destructible (and some things that don’t look it but are )

What do you use this money for, you ask? Well about 40 minutes in you will meet Sheriff Judd of Caldera, and once you have, you’ll shortly be able to use his “shop” to buy new guns (the first extra one is a double-barrelled shotgun) or weapon upgrades for your current weapons, as well as ammo (and ammo upgrades too).

You also earn money by completing the missions which are driving the plot along. Missions are usually “Go here” or “kill/destroy X number of things”, and you do spend a fair bit of time going from A to B, either to get new missions, or to go do them, but in reasonable game play chunks, it doesn’t seem too monotonous,and the pacing of the story seems solid, though it is admittedly a bit slow for the first hour or so.. This isn’t a game for extended play anyway, it makes great use of the motion controls, the Motion Plus is a requirement for the game after all, but your arm can get a bit tired after a few hours, and that seems a good time to take a break from the game.

There have been a few “big” enemies, the bosses essentially, who all seem to have fairly unique attack patterns, speeds, and other things, but to be honest, they’re just more enemies, and you quickly adapt to them, making it as easy as taking out any enemy, just it takes a bit longer. What I will say is there was a Quick Time Event (QTE) driven section which was quite fun, and I hope there is another later on. more than two or three and QTEs would out-stay their welcome, but it was well done, and worked well using both regular and motion controls mixed in.

All in all, Red Steel seems to be a different beast from it’s predecessor, so much so I think Ubisoft wish this could have been the game that they released the first time round.

If I must, I shall give it a score for how far I’ve made it through so far.

Graphics: 9/10
Excellent, as I mentioned. Good looking, and has a solid fps throughout letting you see it all.

Sound: 7.5/10
Music and Effects get a 9/10, but some of the voice acting is quite cheesy, so it’s a 6/10

Concept and Presentation: 8/10
It’s not wholly original (it is a sequel, sort-of) but the setting is an interesting mix of old and new, and it never bothers explaining why, so no need to get bogged down with it all.

Gameplay: 8/10
Combat is excellent, but the story is a bit monotonous and railroaded, but well-paced for what there is, and apparently not too short either.

Overall: 8/10
Good solid fun, and a must have if your Wii hasn’t been turned on since Christmas. Red Steel 2 is better than the original in every way that I can see. Anyone agree with me? What are your thoughts on the Red Steel series.

Tryzon’s Nostalgic Gaming Trips #31
Pariah (Xbox, 2005) (Also on PC)

In my last review I said that Gun had a pretentious title, and I stand by that judgement. Even so, Pariah trumps Gun by a good distance with its religious connotations and ambiguous true meaning. Gun seems tame by comparison. But what kind of madman would rate things based on the quality of their names? You’re here to see what I think of Pariah and figure out whether it’s worth investing in. Prepare to be disappointed.

Nah, not really. On with the show!

As often happens, we’ll start with some history. Pariah was like Republic Commando, in that I heard about it for years before finally acquiring the appropriate hardware. Unlike Republic Commando, I had little interest in Pariah and so didn’t look into it. Plus the critical reception was more lukewarm and the sales were nothing extraordinary, so there wasn’t much of a buzz going around. An Xbox-oriented FPS which nobody cared about did not get me envious in the same way that Armed and Dangerous did, and only upon at last getting an Xbox last year did I start some investigations. Now that an Xbox FPS was a viable option for me, I snapped up a bargain-priced copy of Pariah, took it home, glared at the empty spot in the box where a manual once resided, and then promptly put the game in my crystal machine and prepared myself for the unknown as I had done innumerable times previously.

The plot sees you as a medic of some sort in the near future charged with transporting a lady frozen in carbonite, who carries a virus within her. When your ship is blown out of the sky, the lass scarpers, you get infected by the virus and from there must track down the thoroughly confused woman before one or both of you are killed by brutal scavengers. There’s talk of some old enemy of humanity known as the Shroud, and at times the mystery surrounding what the Hell they actually are can be interesting, but in pretty much every other conceivable respect, Pariah’s story is at best bog-standard and at worst baffling, with a seemingly deliberate lack of explanation for pretty much everything, which is all the more reason why I wish that the manual hadn’t been lost in a black hole. But really, the pointless set-up isn’t a big loss, and as I’ve said in the past, a story can sometimes distract from the most important thing, namely gameplay. Don’t make me use the TimeSplitters example. Pariah might try to trick you into thinking it’s deep, but really it’s just an FPS in sheep’s clothing. I don’t mind that, but the pretence gets you in the wrong mood for what’s essentially a brainless blaster.

Your character’s status as a medical officer oddly doesn’t prevent him from being instantly familiar with heavy weaponry, and I took to calling him “Doctor Death”. I could just imagine Bashir from Deep Space Nine going postal one day.

Anyhoo, play with the turning speed a bit and you’ll soon realise that shooting blokes is damned satisfying, and an auto-aim isn’t needed to get the right mix of accuracy, though one is available for cowards. Making things dead feels less flimsy than Halo, but less meaty than Urban Chaos: Riot Response.

Much of the bliss one feels while playing is due to the sweet selection of boomsticks available, a few of which I shall describe: the “Bulldog” machine gun is your all-purpose Jack, okay at everything but not specialised for a single job. Point at something, unleash the beast and said something dies full of holes. Simple; the confusingly-named “Frag Rifle” is actually a shotgun, and a mightily powerful one at that. For close-quarters combat there’s nothing better, and the eargasmic BOOMF sound it makes is just sensational. The best version is devastating when poking someone in the face, and it’s my favourite toy in the game, though the competition is considerable; lastly, the inevitable Sniper Rifle is pretty much as good as any other I’ve used, and delivers lead from preposterous distances into the skulls of unlucky sods, with each shot letting off what sounds awfully like a thunderclap. It feels like you’re Zeus, smiting those you deem unworthy of life. I may have dwelt too long on it, but rest assured that I love the long-range gun lots.

I see you there, laddy. Now hold still while I shoot your nipples off.

The other weapons vary in practicality and splendid-ness, but I’ll leave them for you to find out the intricacies of yourself. Except for one, I should say; the Bonesaw is just what you’d imagine and could have been a vicious last resort, but is actually useless once you find the Frag Rifle, which doesn’t take long. Halo’s melee attack function is implemented better control-wise, genuinely helpful and more gratuitously pleasurable to employ. All in all, the Bonesaw is made of fail and should hang its head in shame, especially since every single other weapon has its place and earns its keep.

Collectable green floppy disk-looking things let you upgrade most of your arsenal, with three improvements possible for each. The results are both hugely helpful and cool, such as taking the already handy Sniper Rifle and giving it thermal vision. There aren’t enough floppies to max everything out, though, so you must focus on the most crucial tools of obliteration. Frag Rifle all the way.

Weapon selection is a simple thing, but even the almighty TimeSplitters 2 doesn’t get it exactly right and neither does Pariah. The latter game relies on a spindly wheel of selection, in the style of Ratchet & Clank. This would be perfect, except it doesn’t pause the game. With so many occasions in which you’re constantly being hurt, this oversight got on my nerves but never truly detracted from the better things. Besides, you’ll only change weapons when the Frag Rifle runs dry.

Health bars are fast going out of fashion ever since Master Chief marched on stage, undeservedly so. Pariah mixes both regenerating and non-regenerating life using a very similar system to what Resistance: Fall of Man would employ; separate chunks of life can recharge when not taking damage, but depleting one will cause the next to take over as the currently used one. Lose all your chunks and you die. The thing that Pariah handles differently is regaining lost health. A gadget called the “Healing Tool” can be whipped out at a button press, and will restore one chunk per unit of ammo available for it, though the process takes a few seconds and occasional reloading is required. The mechanic as a whole works supremely well and adds a layer of strategy, since trying to heal at a bad time leaves you exposed. Chunks can disappear swiftly, so don’t get complacent.

The Healing Tool injects massive doses of Bacta right into your bloodstream, healing any wounds and curing your diabetes. Probably.

Your opponents are mostly nothing but a sea of nameless, faceless goons lining up for a serving of steaming hot death, and are even less interesting than your own character, but they certainly die well thanks to those joyous Havok physics we love so much from Destroy All Humans! Ragdoll corpses either keel over in defeat or get sent soaring by a well-placed kaboom, providing incentive to continue killing stuff. What the enemy lacks in brains, they make up for in sheer numbers and determination. So while they may sometimes walk onto landmines and less frequently just stand still until you put them out of their misery, they’re around every corner and equipped with laser-guided zooming eyeballs that, once locked onto you, will land most shots straight on your backside. The least fortunate grunts specialise in flamethrowers, which is less good for them than you might assume because they can be easily set on fire themselves, running about in a panic before blowing up and killing everything nearby. This is an extremely nice touch, and I want to have its babies. Explosive barrels and poisonous containers also mean that even the accursed shield-carrying guys can be taken down with some use of the environment.

There’s just one kind of enemy whom I loathe. Let me just say that whoever it was on the development team who put in the enemy buggies that are able to zoom in out of nowhere and kill you instantly deserves to meet a similar fate; I got my fill of suicidal jeeps in Mercenaries, thank you very much.

Fairly unusually, much of Pariah is set outside, but the level design is still generally sound. It funnels you from one shootout to the next, and I have no problem with this approach whatsoever. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with linearity, and it’s much better than letting you get lost as so often happened to me in more ambitious games, principally Half-Life, which I swear is one part adventure, two parts maze. Checkpoints are frequent, which is good for the game because otherwise I would have had to forcefully remove its innards in a fit of rage. Checkpoints and I have a history of falling-outs.

Pariah and vehicles don’t really get on, and this is likely the game’s biggest failing. You see, there are two sections in which you must drive something about. One is passable, the other is not. The controls are awkward and your fellow drivers can easily outmanoeuvre you, so this attempt at stealing Halo’s Warthog and Scorpion bits messes it up impressively well. Even Future Perfect does it better, and I hate Future Perfect’s Haloified elements; they’re just not ‘Splitters, damn it!

Gah! Vehicle segment! Head for the hills!

Less pitiful than the driving is a single on-rails shooting part, and one scene on a train where you have to hop in and out of a turret to attack dropships and troops. These parts are much more fun, better put together and were good ideas, unlike those other sections that we don’t talk about. Branching off a bit, for whatever reason I’ve always liked train levels. Maybe it began with Future Perfect? Pariah’s try is a game highlight, though I must admit that Uncharted 2’s is probably superior, annoying boss fight at the end and all. Then again, does Uncharted have the Frag Rifle? No. No, it doesn’t.

Though the story is forgettable and regrettable, Pariah’s presentation is good enough to immerse oneself in. I already mentioned that some of the sound effects are divine, and they’re good enough to warrant the full headphones treatment. I speak from first-hand experience. The music drifts between average to quite good and occasionally hovers near the excellent mark; it’s a mix of Halo-sounding (surprise, surprise) pounding rhythms and some stuff that sounds a little like God of War, both of which are damn good things to copy, if one must copy something. It’s not a patch on TimeSplitters, but precious little is.
Still talking presentation, some of the scenes are quite epic, including that train mission and another chapter where you have to shoot down missiles being fired by a nearby ship before abandoning your scuppered vessel to board the opposing one and kick the crew overboard. It’s got some style, see?
Other than the cars, the biggest blemish on this game’s face would be the uncommon but undeniable technical hitches. Less pressing is the odd dropped frame during heavy shooting, as it’s nothing major. More worrying is the knowledge that I found a problematic bug which leaves you stuck crouching. Reloading a checkpoint didn’t help and I’m still not sure how it happened in the first place. At least it went away minutes later, with as little warning as it had come. Spooky, but a mark against the game.

A quick search reveals that I have mentioned Halo no fewer than five times in this review before that one just there, and seemingly always while either suggesting or outright saying that Pariah “borrowed” some ideas from said legendary series. Fair enough, everyone does it, but some discipline is still called for. Labelling Pariah a Halo clone is harsh, but if that’s what it is, then it does the job far more competently and subtly than Unreal II: The Awakening, which is a decent but hugely blatant copycat, and it only highlights this fact by being totally unlike every other Unreal title made previously.

In terms of shooting and general gameplay style, the similarities between Doctor Death’s game and Master Chief’s are minimal, for the reasons I outlined way up above. It’s just the odd little detail and nicked mechanic that give the games any resemblance, along with the whole idea of near-future space marines. The two really have nothing substantial that makes them similar, but it’s hard to deny that Pariah would have been a different game had Halo never existed.

Cry some more! HAHAHAHAHA!

The more I played Pariah, the more its little niggling flaws ceased to bother me, and I got to a point where I was revelling in the thrill of the kill. At one point I actually said to myself during a particularly tense exchange of hot shrapnel, “come on then, who wants some?” No joke; I was having a pleasant enough experience to say something daft like that. The game is simply great fun and unexpectedly engrossing once it finds its feet, and I like it more than a bit. True, the plot goes nowhere (I have never been more confused by an ending cinematic in my life), there’s hardly an original bone in its body and it’s just too short, but when you’re tearing into an unfortunate passer-by so that he may join his comrades on the cold, hard floor of the speeding locomotive, you’ll be too preoccupied by the awesomeness to give a smeg. Pariah is positive proof that innovation need not be present to make a great game, though it helps.

Besides, it gets even better with a mate by your side. Load up a story level and press start on a second controller to begin the co-op mode, strangely hard to find though it is. Games with no cleverness to ‘em are made to be played as a duo, and it’s this option that will give Pariah most longevity, which is made more apparent when you consider that you should play it with every single person you know. Two Doctor Deaths can team up to create an unstoppable force of destruction! Yes!

I can recommend this wonderfully shallow title to anyone who doesn’t mind a shooter which would likely have trouble with apostrophes if it somehow became a living creature. I’m not sure what I mean by that, either. It now sits comfortably beside Halo and a few others as one of my favourite Xbox games to date, and I’ve played a few. People who insist that their games come with intelligent foreshadowing and believable characterisation should steer well clear, since Pariah will bring those types nothing but pain. For everyone else, it’s a delectable treat, if not a genre-defining classic. What is, other than TimeSplitters 2? But only Pariah comes packaged with the Frag Rifle…

I proposed to the Frag Rifle at one point. Now we live together in a Cottage in the Highlands. Sometimes Sean Connery stops by for tea.

P.S. Supposedly Pariah is 360-compatible, though I can’t confirm this personally. If it’s true, then everybody can get in on the happiness!

P.P.S. Why is it that so many Xbox games don’t let you set crouching to toggle? This isn’t an irritant unique to Pariah by any means, though it does commit the same crime. For a system whose standard controller has only two shoulder buttons, the common insistence on holding down the left stick to crouch and then keep holding it down while moving around is maddening. Mostly early games are to blame, but Pariah came out in 2005 and hadn’t learnt its lesson by then. Sigh.

Tryzon’s Nostalgic Gaming Trips #30
Gun (PS2, 2005) (Also on GameCube, PC, PSP, Xbox, Xbox 360)

Why is it that such a rich setting as the Wild West is so criminally underused in videogames, particularly during the last decade? That’s not to say that hardly any recent games use the theme, since titles like Red Dead Revolver, Dead Man’s Hand and even the more exaggerated Darkwatch are all fine examples of how it can be done well. Still, after that there aren’t too many others, and Lucky Luke might be cheating since it didn’t start as a gaming franchise.

Something else that’s tragically uncommon is games made by Neversoft that aren’t relating to skateboarding or plastic instruments. Not that either of those things are bad, but now that predictably awful motion-sensing versions of Tony Hawk’s have started coming out, it’s hard to deny that the series which made its developer famous is also cursing it to a soulless existence. This is a particular shame considering that the 2000 Spider-Man game for PS1, Dreamcast and numerous others is a quality action-adventurer that holds up somewhat a decade on, even if the Neversoft-free sequel is admittedly better.

Gun is possibly my favourite Neversoft game to date, and yet more evidence that the developer has the know-how to make high quality titles on the rare occasion that they stop spit-polishing Tony Hawk’s shoes. Once again I want to make it clear that I enjoy the original Tony Hawk’s games as much as any other average bloke, but I’m also bright enough to know that, much like Dynasty Warriors, there’s been a baffling lack of evolution over the course of countless games, and unless something is done what hardcore fans are left might move on. I’m getting carried away talking about Neversoft here, but in a minute you’ll see why I want them to consider branching out more, as I demonstrate how compelling the way of the gun can be.

Dances Without Reason chose a bad time to break out his latest groove.

Gun’s opening depicts a man of the cloth being ambushed and slaughtered by Native Americans, and though one’s initial reaction might be to raise an eyebrow, it soon becomes clear that very nearly everyone in the West is a backstabbing traitor, regardless of race, gender or wealth. You play as Cole, a regular guy who spends his days selling pelts for cash with his dear ol’ Pa, whose patient tones and general air of a grizzled veteran suggest that he doesn’t live too long. This prediction proves to be accurate when a shifty priest (why always priests?) has the steamboat you’re on destroyed for reasons initially unknown. You survive, but your dad doesn’t, though he at least has time to reveal an Earth-shattering secret and outline your quest before being spectacularly kerploded.

Thus starts a journey for revenge and answers, as you ride across an open-ended world relying on a quick trigger finger and suspicious locals to piece together a plan of action, and a plot to uncover a bottomless fortune. The plot bumps shoulders with cliché here and there, but for the most part what you get is a well-done story with plenty of respect for the cowboy genre’s conventions. And this is nothing like Lucky Luke, oh no; Gun’s world is one of heavy violence, corruption and trickery. Though impossibly cool, it all starts to get a bit surreal before long when nearly every friendly person you meet either turns evil, dies or both, but it’s all awfully intriguing and would be worth putting up with some dodgy gameplay to experience. Fortunately, Gun delivers in that respect as well.

It seems at first that nobody likes you, and the few who do quickly pop their clogs. Just typical.

With a name as pretentious as Gun, you’d expect that firearms of sort variety play a significant part, and you’d be right; I spent 80% of my time using nothing other than my trusty revolver, and its implementation is nothing short of marvellous. It’s a good all-rounder, with some decent stopping power and a fast fire rate. It’s also the only weapon with infinite ammo, so you’re never left defenceless.

Great as the six-shooter is, some situations simply require more bang, and it’s at times like these that your secondary weapons come into the proceedings. The shotgun does what you’d imagine, the rifle is slow-firing but deadly and the sniper is for long-range battling. The bow never becomes particularly helpful until you find the dynamite arrows, at which point it takes on the role of a rocket launcher basically, and that’s fine by me.

The shooting doesn’t rely on a finicky GTA-style auto-aim, but rather something more reminiscent of the free-aim found in most of Pandemic’s games or Saints Row. Though this isn’t the best example of such a mechanic, it works mostly without problem and again reinforces that Rockstar would do well to finally give up and embrace the idea. You can run around while shooting, crouch behind things, take a human hostage or hop pointlessly, but what the game could really use is a dive move like the one found in Max Payne. Not for slow-motion, but merely to provide a means of dodging fire. The lack of this ability means that running in circles is the only option when the scenery is inadequate for hiding behind, and as such things don’t flow quite as smoothly as something like The Punisher. Wow, that makes…four different game series mentioned in one paragraph, and several more if you count the best Pandemic games. Regardless, Gun does feel like its own game during a shootout, even if some tweaks might have made it better. It’s quick, visceral and never tedious.

But by a good stretch what proves most memorable about Gun’s shooting is the glorious amount of pain you can inflict upon your adversaries. For a game with a mostly down-to-Earth style, the action can seem strangely arcadey in places, and the way that one man with a pistol can topple a large scheme is particularly odd. But you won’t care about this from the moment you first blow a man’s leg off to the last time you kill another git with a single bullet to the brain and hear the sweet sound of lead on bone, followed by a heavy thunk as he hits the floor. Corpses can be mutilated further, with the option of removing every visible extremity proving highly enjoyable, in an “I shouldn’t be allowed to do this” kind of way. Not even Manhunt’s enemies scream so much when killed. Don’t even get me started on the carelessly placed TNT barrels that litter the landscape.

This image is representative of how useless the bow is for much of the game.

One cannot talk about the violence without mentioning the scalping knife, which is rivalled only by Urban Chaos: Riot Response’s fire-starting taser for the title of “Most Unnecessarily OTT Tool of Death in a Game. Ever.” Here’s how it works: you spend some cash on buying the knife, and from then on anyone too wounded to fight but not quite dead can have their scalp forcibly removed, accompanied by all the screeching and subsequent death that you’d imagine. There is no purpose to this other than an extreme dose of Schadenfreude, and in fact it actually costs money to acquire the knife, which is a slight detriment. For these reasons, I love the scalping knife, and am well aware of how sick a person I must be as a result. Only one scene made me cringe in the whole game, and let’s just say that it involved some very unprofessional dentistry. *shudder*

A nifty feature is the quick-draw, wherein for a limited time you can go into first-person slow-mo and score accurate hits with your revolver until the power bar runs out. It fills up again after a few good kills, and works as a nice “get out of jail free” card during a sticky situation. Not much more can be said about it, except that it’s both entertaining and handy without being overkill. You can even shoot arrows in mid-flight! Genius!

A few GTA comparisons have been made so far, and as per that series you’re given a means of getting around at speed, namely horses. Simply wander up to one and you can hop up with a mere button press if you’re in its general vicinity. No mess, no fuss, no frantic attempts at standing in just the right spot while an angry mountain lumbers towards you, as the horse-mounting works in Shadow of the Colossus. Of course, you never grow attached to any of the disposable steeds in the same manner as you do Agro, but in terms of mere convenience Gun is the clear victor. Anyway, once on a nag you can trot, gallop or canter, though going at top speed for too long will kill the poor beast. Best of all, firefights with opposing riders are frequent and great, and you can either be nice and just shoot the real enemy or pop a cap in their innocent mare’s behind. I always try to do the former, mainly because I get my kicks from abusing humans, but also since a spare ride is always handy.

There’ll be no tears shed over the many dead horses; they’re the only way to travel. Literally.

Some light RPG elements mean that an upgrade for your favourite weapon is never far away, and choosing between reload speed and capacity is accursedly tricky. Your best bet is to level up the revolver the most, since you’ll use it for nearly everything anyway, much like the Blades of Chaos in God of War. The cash for such luxuries mainly comes from finishing the side-missions, which range from the deputy or bounty hunter jobs to…er…herding cattle. Not too difficult a choice, really; who doesn’t love rounding up animals? There’s no depth to the extra bits, but they’re essential for completing the higher difficulties and diverting enough, although the story is definitely the main attraction, and during said story you occasionally get a better revolver, shotgun or whatever that replaces the original, though any upgrades you’ve purchased still apply.

I like the health system that Gun uses; you have a bottle of whiskey that can be sipped from so many times to top up your life until it runs out. Refills can be found here and there and bigger bottles can be purchased, and in the end it works better than a magically regenerating bar would have.

Presentation-wise the game is nigh-on free of blemishes: a stirring score kicks in during skirmishes, but otherwise there’s often a long stretch of silence, and the sounds of hooves clacking and the winding whooshing create an atmosphere not dissimilar to Shadow of the Colossus; Though the music is marvellous and perfect for the setting, I don’t think it ever quite gets as good as TimeSplitters 2’s Wild West level theme, which is absolutely perfect; the characters are believable and either great to hate or charming to chat with. Plus most folk can actually defend themselves, so escort missions aren’t quite so horribly conceived as in most games; I said before that the conventions of the Western genre are treated as holy, and this is completely true. Train-robbing, crooked major-outing, gold-hoarding, bandit-wrangling and more all feature, and any even mild fan of cowboys will get their fill; finally, the gritty feel and ever-present eruptions of claret are just a whole new level of awesome, and the bar is set for whatever future Wild West games come along in terms of authenticity while not sacrificing fun. As a bonus, I swear that one of the voices sounds suspiciously like Crypto from Destroy All Humans!, which would make for some nice trivia if it’s true. For one last note, the in-game representation of Hoodoo Brown is pure style, and the source of one of the most simultaneously funny and cool moments I’ve ever seen in a game. Try and spot it. Go on, I dare you.

Where would the Wild West be without bar room brawls?

I did find that the boss fights aren’t too inspired, if not truly broken. They just rely on shooting and hoping for the best, though the very last one is a notch above that, even if it is by far the hardest as well.

The one major issue that folks always seem to bring up when discussing Gun is its length, since it’s rather short. Nothing shocking, but a bit below average, certainly if you stick to the essential levels. A notable flaw and one worthy of a finger-wagging, but much like Area 51 what you get is damned entertaining and more than a bit replayable. In particular, masochists will love the intimidatingly titled “Insane mode”, and though I’m not man enough to attempt it, I can confirm beyond doubt that the endgame will be absolute Hell on that difficulty. Even without resorting to such extremes, I was truly satisfied just replaying on Medium (which is just a nice challenge without getting crazy) for the sake of this review, and aim to give Hard a go in time.

Slight lack of polish in places aside, if it’s a Western shooter you be wantin’, then Gun is pretty much as good as it gets. Darkwatch is a very close second, but loses points for being more fantasy-based, and Red Dead Revolver is just a poor man’s Gun, though I admire its focus on the cheesier side of the Wild West, and am curious about the upcoming sequel. Darkwatch may have the more awesomely original concept (vampire cowboys!), but Gun has more style in general.

I shall end today’s presentation with a plea to Neversoft, in the astronomically unlikely event that someone even vaguely involved with the company is reading this: you people are evidently more than capable of producing non-Tony Hawk’s games to a high standard, and the recent Tony Hawk: Ride debacle shows that the series has some good-sized chinks in its armour. Skate has become to Tony Hawk’s what the original Call of Duty was to Medal of Honor; a much more confidently made game that highlights how badly the older franchise needs either a reboot or total abandonment. Gun 2 has been rumoured for years now, and such a game would make me very happy. You’re already a minor joke due to your focus on one song over the years, and the sooner you turn yourself around, the better. Just some friendly advice courtesy of a fan who wants only the best for your soul.

Neversoft, I’ve got my eye on you. See what I did there?

P.S. If you’re trying to pick between the Xbox and 360 version, remember that the only difference is graphical, which isn’t worth a very considerable price increase. I say go 6th gen, but obviously any version of Gun is equally explosive. Well, except the crippled PSP one. One stick just doesn’t cut it for nine out of ten of third-person shooters.

P.P.S. All the Indians running about with their battle cries and talk of respecting the Earth reminded me so very much of Avatar. Can’t imagine why…*nudge, nudge*