Gun

GameCube, Gun (2005) game

The word I most associate with this game is 'disconnect.' It promises to be a lively, cowboy sim and ends up making you feel rather at arm's length as experiences go. Maybe cowboy 'sim' is pushing it a bit, it's really a story set in the Old West with a bit of an open world to explore, but the story is by far the main motivator, even though it's a bit hit and miss (more miss - and if it was taking part in a duel at high noon I wouldn't fancy its chances!). The game could have been so much more than it was, they'd created a good, solid base upon which to play, with a vast landscape for GameCube at the time, only rivalled by the huge 'Zelda: Twilight Princess' overworld in scope and scale, but as in so many cases (of the time), it was relatively empty as a play environment. It featured a fair few animals like buffalo, horses, birds… but where were deadly snakes or the opportunity to fish in the lake? You never feel at risk from wildlife and you never feel at risk from humans because you have nothing to lose. How involving it would have been if you'd had the option to really make your way in the world, your money actually being part of an economy so that you could buy and own a horse or take on a patch of land and build up your own ranch. If this was pillaged by raiders you'd feel so much more investment, even taking a regular job as a ranch hand on someone else's land could have been engrossing, but instead you're given the choice to take on side missions which you dutifully do, and then you're cut loose.

I can't deny that riding the trails and exploring the varied locales are interesting, but only to a point. They seem vast and epic when you don't know your way around, but you eventually get to know the layout and it holds few surprises. The fact that you can't take on your own smallholding is only one part of the disconnect: you don't own a horse, your ticket to fast travel between empty stretches of desert or hill, you just take any one that happen to be wandering around, whether wild or in the towns, no one seems to mind. This has the effect that you don't have a bond with your animal. You don't save for it, buy it, or name it. Lots of them die under you, but who cares, at most it's a minor annoyance that you have to run around until you stumble upon the next fully saddled, waiting equine. Unlike 'Zelda,' there's no way to call your horse if you get separated, or if one dies, so you find yourself stuck out in the wilderness with only your legs to get you anywhere. Even though there are plenty of the beasts around, it's still annoying to trudge around looking for one.

Your money has very little meaning, as evidenced by the Poker missions. I've never played Poker, I don't know how to, yet the game gave me no instructions, even in the instruction booklet, on how to play, and I still somehow managed to win all those missions (and a satisfying feeling it was, too - once I got into the rhythm of it, it was quite fun as a diversion, in spite of it being more of a gut instinct or blind chance rather than any skill or understanding). But you don't keep your winnings, you get a small payout for completing the mission, and that's all. But then there's not that much to spend your cash on anyway… Ammo, horses, health… it's all out there to be picked up, and it's only the few items that shopkeepers have in each town (or the Indian hunter in the wild), that give you reason to have money at all. Once you've bought everything, that's it. It's a small game in that respect, your actions without any real consequence. That goes for the relative ease of the game (it took only a few weeks to finish, with a few hours a week) - if you die, you simply restart the mission or even continue on from the point you got to in a mission.

I'm not saying I wanted it rock hard and unforgiving, but that there was jeopardy and loss to be avoided. You don't lose money in Poker, progress for dying, or anything else, you're encouraged to just hurry on with the next part of the game rather than revelling in a cowboy role and having an impact on your environment. Not to say I didn't enjoy some of the missions: the hunting quests where you had to seek out a rare animal, get close enough without spooking it, and take it down, could have been a bigger part of the game in itself and was another satisfying part to complete. And there are some nice moments, such as attacking the fort or driving cattle to Dodge in the dawn, but most of the time you're just running to places, then shooting, and you don't get an attachment to anything or anyone. Even your weapons are merely okay, easy to flip between, but tools and equipment should have created more connection with the land than they did - case in point being the shovel you buy to 'mine' gold, the extent of which means standing next to it and pressing a button.

I'm not saying it had to be a simulation so that you needed to work and pay your way (or steal and cheat, as you decide), but if you could have owned property, traded in horses or furs, and had more interaction with people other than just the few that have a pointer over their head it would have made for a far more immersive experience. Much of the time you're following your way to the next 'X' on the radar, so gameplay isn't as varied as you'd first expect and you learn the best thing to do is complete as many side quests as possible (hunting down wanted men, cattle drives, rescuing hostages, etc), to get cash, upgrade and buy out the shopkeepers in each area, then bash on with the story. There's little joy in experimenting or exploring, except for the initial journeying where this large world opens up for you - you soon discover it doesn't have that much within it. Gold to mine, rare animals to hunt and some pretty landscape and that's it. It's fair enough that it's an early example of the sandbox genre, but it's as if they put all their effort into creating this living, breathing, varied landscape, then decided to simply run a story through it rather than giving the player the freedom to truly experience life as a cowboy in the Old West. So much work must have gone into creating the world without making sure the gameplay lived up to it.

The disconnect is stronger because of the lack of investment: the character and his unknown origins are what drives the story, which is largely forgettable (I literally couldn't follow it from session of play to session of play because it didn't engage me), but although you have the illusion of a vast landscape to explore, you're fenced in by it being mostly empty with so little interaction (night and day only play a part in story or side quest, there's no in-game time passing). I like to get 100% on games if I can, but I was in half a mind to give it up once Magruder had been defeated (I liked that he's left to nature to be destroyed rather than your character doing all the things he'd like to), with the Poker and hunting missions still to do. But they were easier than I thought, and as I'd done all the rest, and I was glad I still had the option to continue in that world rather than the game coming to a stone dead end once the baddie had been beaten, I carried on, and in one evening polished it off - the only thing left to finish was getting one last gold rock out of forty-four, but as that didn't count towards the percentage rating and I wasn't going to spend hours trawling well-trodden paths for one solitary item, I left it with conscience clear and a certain amount of satisfaction in the completion.

As a whole, the game left me with a relatively good impression, if expectations are low (it is a console game, after all, and not designed for simulation purposes), but the tone and style of the game brought it down to 'average' for me. I've never been that big on third-person games (where you see the character in front of you), and often felt that the style would have suited a first-person much better. 'Hitman 2' was the same, in that controls are somewhat fiddly, you don't have the complete freedom of abandon to dash and jump as you would in a platform game, or the precision and reaction power you have in first person - sometimes you have to switch weapons quickly and efficiently or look around without the aid of a first person view, making it occasionally awkward. When this came out, few games on Nintendo systems were rated '18' ('Perfect Dark' being one notable example), and usually it's just an excuse for a lack of imagination (not in 'PD's case), with excessive violence/gore and bad language/innuendo there to remind you this is supposed to be an 'adult' experience instead of the required deep gameplay or mature reasoning, so it ends up feeling more juvenile than adult. It didn't put me off playing, but blasting people's heads off was unnecessary and one more thing to mark it down for. Adult intelligence should have been aimed at, rather than it merely being unsuitable for children.

Coming to it ten years after its release, when sandbox games are common, I'm sure it wouldn't stand out in the market today, and arriving late to the party as it did, at the tail end of the 'Cube generation, it may have slipped through the cracks. It had a lot of potential, and it is fascinating from a historical perspective to see how games of that time developed (I didn't play it back then), and it has plenty of nice little touches (such as being able to leap off your horse mid-gallop), but it doesn't really seem to know what it wants to be: a straight up narrative-driven FPS, an explorathon in the 'Zelda' mode, or something else - freedom or barriers, detail or simplicity… One thing I can say is the music is stirring and evocative, the main theme setting your journeying off in great style. With a little more thought and ingenuity, a decision to make it either more guided spectacle or go the other direction and be more fluid and open, and content suitable for a wider audience, this could have been something really special. As it is, for all its graphical excellence (people look almost real, the terrain is pretty realistic), and aural appeal, I'd rather watch a real Western.

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