A goofy but entertaining spaghetti western featuring Lee Van Cleef as a gunslinger who inspires the town garbage collector to take up his gun and show those snooty townspeople who’s the boss. The music is pretty great, but the film is stylistically not too interesting.
I thought the original Call of Juarez was a better-than-average shooter that was bolstered by it being set in the Old West. I’m really surprised by the lack of western themed games given that for seventy-five odd years that was the go to “universe” for pulp stories and films.
Gunslinger isn’t a sequel. It does use some of the same mechanics and has one level that supposedly takes place in Juarez. Other than that, there is no connection to Billy and the Reverend from the first game. In fact, most of the story here takes place in the form of a frame story and narration in which the Gunslinger is telling tall tales of his adventures years after the fact. Although well acted, the plot is just a means of getting the player from one area to the next without any real character development. However, the story telling becomes a game play device as the narrator forgets facts and has to backtrack causing the game to reverse itself or slow down to clarify a detail.
Really this game is all about the shooting. There’s no stealth, no NPC dialogues. Just solid, fun and satisfying gun play. Even the dueling mini-game at the end of each level is a fun challenge as you try to manage your focus and hand position while waiting to draw. Adding to the fun is the the hint of Borderlands cell-shading style which complements the over-the-top Western Sukiyaki Django art direction and character design.
After having owned and loved The Pleasure Principle for years, I finally expanded my Gary Numan collection with this CD. Numan hadn’t quite fully embraced synthesizers at this point in his career (he was about 90% the way there), so the music still has a guitar-based punk rock feel on many of the songs. Some people will rejoice in this. Me? I kinda favor when things go full synth-tard.
This was a free game on Steam on the day of the sequel’s release. I grabbed it without knowing anything about the game. Apparently, the distinguishing feature of Sniper Elite V2 is its over the top x-ray view gore simulation. Make a head shot and watch as the bullet shatters bones and eyeballs. This adds absolutely nothing to the game other than a novelty cool factor and it starts to get in the way when you are trying to make successive shots quickly. Fortunately, the act of just moving through the rather straightforward, story-free levels and sniping foes from a distance was satisfying enough to keep me going once the thrill of slow motion bone fragmentation wore off.
The fourth Blackwell game continues to make improvements over its predecessors in terms of technical polish. There is also a bit more depth to the puzzles and game play. This is still no where near the brutal difficulty of an old school point-and-click game, but it’s nice to have more options in terms of combining inventory items, switching characters and querying your in-game search engine to advance the game. As usual, the story and characters are the highlight here, and the broader character arcs are starting to come to a head. There is one more game left in the series and I am anxious dig in to it soon.
What do you do when your guitarist/singer packs up and leaves town? You soldier on as an instrumental bass and drums duo! Obviously, this is a very different sounding band than before, but I do like this incarnation too. I like hearing a little more attention paid to the tricksy drumming now that the sound has been stripped down.
This and the previous Blackwell Unbound apparently were intended to be a single game with flashbacks and intertwined plot lines. Many of the same characters appear again and it’s nice to see a larger story arc developing. The quality of the game play and puzzles has improved with each game as has the voice acting and sound. In some respects the art has improved, but each game seems to be the work of a different artist(s) and there are details that I miss.
This Champaign-Urbana trio was the first band with which Nonagon ever played a show. The songs are very much in the tradition of the C-U sound of the 90s ala the Poster Children or even Hot Glue Gun. This disc is a “kung-fu concept EP” fit for any dojo.
Another day, another Blackwell game completed. These are solid point-and-click adventure games. The puzzles aren’t too hard and the stories are good. This one is a little less slick graphically than the first, but the soundtrack and mood are much more appropriate to the ghostly noir theme. On to the next…
The first four Blackwell games went on sale on Steam this week for around 50¢ each. These games have been on my radar ever since I saw this Mattchat interview with Wadjet Eye company founder Dave Gilbert. Basically, he was a hobbyist using the Adventure Game Studio to create Lucasarts style point-and-click adventures. He decided to make a go at transforming his hobby into a business and some dozen or so games later the company has survived.
The Blackwell Legacy is the first in a series of five games that have the player acting as a spiritual medium who, with the help of her deceased sidekick Joey, seeks to guide tormented ghosts into the afterlife. It’s kinda like a noir version of The Frighteners. The theme lends itself very well to episodic storytelling. Every game features a new mystery and there are larger main character story arcs to be explored across the whole series.
The game itself is not too puzzle driven. I was stumped a couple of times, but it was mostly because I didn’t fully grasp the note taking inventory mechanic. For the most part you are simply clicking through dialogue and revisiting characters as more information becomes available. I enjoyed the leisurely pace and was quite impressed with the characters and plot. It’s a short game which can be finished in one or two sittings, but it felt just about right in length to me.
Of course, this being a first outing by a new game developer, there are a few rough edges. The voice overs are a nice addition, but the acting is spotty and the sound design (by the developer’s own admission) is lacking. You gotta rock the mic with the pantyhose!
The art, however, is stunning. I love the painterly style rendered with a limited color palette. It’s not trying to be cute like most pixel-art games do these days, it’s trying to be the best possible hand-drawn art within the lo-res constraints of the authoring environment.
I’m glad I bought this package and will probably be paying full-price for future Wadjet Eye games when they come out. Can’t wait to get on to the next Blackwell adventure.
