> Adventures in Action

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Gunslinger
Activision/ PlayStation2/ PC
Get ready for a showdown in the old west.

Let's face it, we love action. More importantly we love to watch ourselves in action, as opposed to first-person games that only allow us to watch the results of our actions. But one can only take so much action before being driven to distraction. We need adventure. We need mystery and enigmatic elemental gameplay environs that absorb us and immerse us in a world where we blow stuff up and shut things down. We need action slash adventure.

A good way to gauge the popularity of a genre is also its bane. There were only a gazillion games presented at E3 that could be harkened as 3rd-person Action/Adventures (and still a gamillion more of those genre-crossing games that also drive, or suck into 1st person mode from time to time, or make us play a game of chess before we can shoot the bastard who set up the board, or involve so many elements that you're not really playing unless you're massively online… you know).

Anyway, primary of what we saw, for better or worse, that struck us as games worth mentioning for the adventurous action aspect of it all was Gunslinger, which honestly looked as cool as a Clint Eastwood Spaghetti Western. Darkly humorous. Remorseless. Gun slinging. What's not to like?

The playable demo was hardly playable, but walking though the one level with deliberate poise and measured step, oozing that obligatory, piss ice cubes cool was exactly what makes the action/adventure such a terrific genre as opposed to just action games which are relentless but shallow, and adventure games which are deep but necessarily plodding. Action/Adventure is so much more, well, theatrical.

LucasArts once tackled this totally under-exploited film noir-cum-videogame genre with a respectable first person shooter called Outlaws, which, ultimately, failed to make any kind of lasting impression other than as a quirky take on the I-am-the-shooter concept. A good game, but not a great game.

Activision's Gunslinger is poised to take the anti-hero in the Old West to new heights, perhaps the top of 3rd-person Action/Adventure heap, not simply by making a good and novel variant-on-a-theme videogame, but by making a great one; a game that is both faithful to the subject matter and a solid, immersive interactive shooting experience in its own right.

Not that we saw enough to confirm long term consistency and playability, but the task seemed manageable considering the quality of gameplay in hand.

Character development seems to go well beyond the "hell in his eyes and fire at his thighs" archetype of Clint Eastwood Spaghetti - though the simplicity of perfectly chiseled thick skin attitude really stands out - and instead immerses the gamer in a non-linear story where the choice of character alignment greatly affects the story to be told. Shades of the kinda gentler Clint-with-no-name a la Jose Wales, Pale Rider and Unforgiven.

Apparently story development is non-linear as well - decisions made, people killed or spared, effect the path to the finish. Choose your own adventure stuff. RPG stuff, except cool.

From the outset, players must choose the life of the loner hero or the loner outlaw then either thwart a bank robbery or be the bank robber and so on. Not that you could see this dichotomy in the demo, where most eager geeks simply strolled through the town and shot everybody with uneasy ease, regardless of orientation, and then finessed the six shooter with a trademark twirl back into its cozy holster.

But the idea was there. Clint Eastwood was there in spirit. And a further RPG element within this plainly action-orientated adventure is a reward system of experience points and new or finer skills earned along the way, though there's no word about coming to terms with one's dark self and hanging up the guns in favor of pig farming. Gosh I hope it doesn't go there.

And it'll probably be a major complaint when that flip the sixer back into the holster cut scene is played out over and over and over, but, personally, I don't think I'll ever get sick of that.

-Shaun Conlin

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