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Full-sprint dead horses
Incredible design for an ephemeral joyride in ‘Gun’
By Sean Quast
Along the game you plow through more racial stereotypes than one can stomach, with a nice littering of the S-word (no, it’s not sarsaparilla).
Title: “Gun”
System: PS2/Xbox
Price: $49.99
I saw a little promotional material for “Gun” before it came out, and still I knew little about the game besides it was western-themed.
It seemed like it would be another failed attempt to create a cowboy game better than “Sunset Riders” of the Genesis and SNES days. Well, I was partly right.
In “Gun” you play a gun-slinging trapper named Colton White, who is out to avenge the deaths of his pa and his whore (really great premise — avenging the death of a loose woman).
Along the game you plow through more racial stereotypes than one can stomach, with a nice littering of the S-word (no, it’s not sarsaparilla). Players reach a final boss fight and game climax that is OK at best.
The game’s controls are great, though there were some difficulties when I tried to sprint my horse and aim to shoot people at the same time — this required a very unique hold on my Xbox cereal bowl controller. Response times for actions are quick.
The horses in the game were designed amazingly. Animation of the horse alone shows how much effort went into making this game look authentic. The design team even nailed depicting how a horse would die running at full sprint. I checked for a “no animals where harmed in the making of this game” in the credits but never saw one.
The best part of the game is that when low on health, you do what any cowboy or horse thief would have done back in the day: take a pull of three-X liquid in his hip flask. The game never really mentioned alcohol being in the flask at all, but calling them shots of health really doesn’t lean on the side of the moral right.
On the down side, “Gun” begins and finishes way too fast. Kind of like the Batman ride at Six Flags Great America — over and done just when you start to get excited.
The game borrows “GTA” free-roaming non-linear story mode like many games out now. Players are free to roam the map, but it is way too small. It takes about 45 seconds to get from one side of the map to the other with a good horse.
Between having small maps and a quick story, missions and side missions are extremely repetitive and often take place in the same spots. Missions are “kill a random group of baddies” and that’s it.
The best missions are “Pony Express” (deliver a message) and “Hunting” (kill a specific animal) because they involve tact and thinking to achieve them.
My biggest disappointment with the game is there is a complete lack of a pistol duel at sunset. I you want to be a good cowboy, you have to have a pistol duel somewhere in the game.
There is a quick-draw feature that slows down game time as in “Matrix,” but there is no clock-strikes-12-and-shoot feature. Real cowboys would be highly depressed.
“Gun” should be played for my favorite pastime after I beat the game for the second time: using my arrows with dynamite on them to shoot all the buffalo. Watching the buffalo crumple from the explosion makes me wonder why I am a vegetarian.
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