If you fancy some rootin' tootin' point and shootin' over the holidays, Techland are giving away their western FPS Call Of Juarez: Gunslinger free for keepsies on Steam. The last game in the Call Of Juarez series, Gunslinger puts you in the dusty boots of a bounty hunter taking down famous outlaws in the Old West. Not the most festive game, but a very good one nonetheless.
]]>I am extremely generous to games, although mostly in my memory. My recollection of Call Of Juarez: Gunslinger is of a genre-busting, frame-breaking piece of Brechtian Estrangement. A first-person shooter that played with concepts like verfremdungseffekt, the unreliable narrator and the Rashomon effect, it was a text that... Yeah, no John's memory, it's just a super-fun shooter with some silly storytelling bits.
]]>[Warning: this article must be read entirely in a comedy cowboy voice]
Howdy pardner. Spittoon? Take it, we got a whole crate of them right here. Every god-fearing outlaw needs a good spittoon at their heels, as my grandmammy used to say. Hoo-wee, what a women. She was known to enjoy a strong snifter of list article, you know. Everyone who visited got a spittoon and a list article. And vidyagames be damned if I ain’t the same obliging sort as my grammy, yes sir. So here you go, friend. In anticipation of that there Desperados III, here are the 9 most desperate cowboys, cowgals, and cowbots in PC gaming. Yeehaw, I say, yee and haw.
]]>Red Dead Redemption 2 was made by five million people working nine day weeks, but does it have a duck that collects your discarded throwing knives? Actually, I don’t know, as it’s not on PC. But a game that does feature a magic duck, and can be played on your home computer, is the lovely Luckslinger. It’s one of eight delightful cowboy ‘em ups that you could be playing while Rockstar pretends its latest won't eventually come to PC. And the RPS Video Department has gathered them in one handy video.
]]>Before they settled into the steady rhythm of being the Dying Light studio, Polish outfit Techland found their first real footing with the Call of Juarez series, a series of spaghetti-western inspired first-person shooters. While never perfect, they filled a niche that is still woefully under-served to this day. Worryingly, the games recently disappeared from digital storefronts, due to licensing issues with then-publisher Ubisoft. Today, the three not-terrible games in the series return to Steam.
]]>The hours I've spent with XCOM 2 were enough to silence my inner-cynic for a while. It's the king of sequels. Nothing sets him off on one of his diatribes quite like a Big Publisher Bundle though. What better place is there to cast off all of those unwanted spin-offs and fifteenth entries in series that became stale years ago than a cheap compilation package? What a surprise, then, to find that Ubisoft's Humble Bundle packs in three of the company's best recent releases in the $1 or more tier. Grow Home, Call of Juarez: Gunslinger and Rayman: Origins for the price of a croissant.
]]>Have You Played? is an endless stream of game recommendations. One a day, every day of the year, perhaps for all time.
As an accomplished and habitual liar, I take pride in my art and follow a simple rule: if you're going to lie to someone, at least make it entertaining for them. So, dear video games, I'm not impressed when you set up an unreliable narrator to reveal gasp I'm dead or gasp I'm the killer or gasp something something metaphysics. Call of Juarez Gunslinger's turns me into a gunfighter blowing away a dozen outlaws in the blink of an eye with my twin revolvers. Ayup, that'll do nicely.
]]>Time is a meaningless construct. A philosophically confusing frame that demeans our very existence when we acknowledge it. Destroy your clocks and watches, they are prisons, trapping you in a mental cells! Stop being tools of the elite chronologistia, and allow yourself to be free. Let's not consider the seconds ticking off, falling like dandruff on the shoulder of life; the minutes that build up and up and up until the dam breaks and we all get covered in sticky time juice; the hours that segment our day but lazily repeat, not even having the common decency to go up to 24; the days that.. ooh, today's Wednesday! That means Call Of Juarez: Gunslinger is out! Hooray for time and dates. And hooray for acknowledging Call Of Juarez: Juarez's launch with a new trailer on that very day! There's 4 minutes of footage, which covers everything that has been said about the game and finally demonstrates the unreliable narrator with guns schtick. It is below.
]]>While it's the fourth game in the Call Of Juarez series, Gunslinger is not directly connected to its preceding brethren. A Western that tells the unreliable memories of cowboy bounty hunter Silas Greaves, through first-person shooting, for a remarkably low £12 pricetag. Should it climb atop a horse for dairy consumption, or might it be the sheriff of this here town? Here's wot I think:
]]>I am still surprised when games have their own songs. I view music like magic, but not in the Kieron way. I think you shouldn't be able to sit down and just come up with up a song based on a subject. That seems like it shouldn't work. It should be, hmm, involuntary? And if someone sits down and just thinks up a song, then it shouldn't be catchy or good. And then this bloody Gunslinger trailer comes along, with a song about Silas Greaves and his shooty ways, and is kind of catchy and good. It is confusing, and will lodge in your head like a bullet.
]]>Sometimes this is what happens when you ask a Craig to play a preview version of Call Of Juarez: Gunslinger.
*spit*
WaaaaaWaaaaaWaaaaaa Wah Wah Wahhhhhh WaaaaaWaaaaaWaaaaaa Wah Wah Wahhhhhh WaaaaaWaaaaaWaaaaaa Wah WhuWhuWahhhhh WaaaaaWaaaaaWaaaaaa Wah Waaaaaaaaah.
*clang*
]]>Extract from 'An Oral History Of The End Of The World', circa 2045. Subject: Male, 23, nameless.
Yeah, I can tell you when it all started. First there was that teaser trailer for the 'reveal' trailer. Then the trailer itself. We should have spotted the pattern right away and taken action. Two trailers in two weeks? It was obviously a beginning. If someone had deleted all the copies of Adobe Premiere from Ubisoft's computers, we might have been spared. But hindsight is a son of a bitch, and here we are. There is no world left. Every computer was clogged with self-replicating copies of Call of Juarez - Gunslinger trailers. The sound of gunshots rang out of every speaker. Children started to speak in Ye Olde Western voiceover. We couldn't Google anything. We didn't know. We. Didn't. Know. I blame Craig Pearson. If only he hadn't posted the new trailer, all of this would never have happened. I can't take it. I CAN'T LIVE LIKE THIS!
*sound of gunshot*
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