The thing to understand about me is that I love Westerns. I've loved Westerns ever since I was a little baby and my father got me to stop fussing by putting on a late-night television show called John Wayne Presents. While I can't hold a candle to my father's fandom of the Duke, I have a fair stash of John Wayne DVDs on the shelf. Watching him evolve from Singing Sandy to The Shootist is a lesson for anyone who says the man can't act (though if you want to tell me he couldn't sing, I won't give you an argument – and neither would he). Rather than a lack of acting ability, It's more that the studios wouldn't let him play the roles he really wanted to play. I dare say if the old studio system had let him play more characters like Rooster Cogburn, he would have gotten more academy awards than the one he got for playing Rooster Cogburn.
It's not just John Wayne, though. I love a good horse-and-saddle opera. But my favorite movie of all time – the one I would take to a desert island with me if I could bring no other movie – is Tombstone.
Tombstone is the quintessential Western, balancing precisely on the line between truth and myth. There are lines of dialogue taken right from courtroom proceedings following the gunfight at the stable behind the OK Corral (as far as I know, it's the first movie to get that part right), while the revenge ride and the breaking of the cowboys is so much Hollywood mythologizing. You get Earp the man and Earp the legend in one film.
One of the reasons Earp remains such a powerful figure in our collective imaginations is because he is a man who became a myth. If Earp had just shot the bastards, they wouldn't have lived to lie about him. As it stands, a lot of people have spilled a lot of ink trying to debunk the “myths” of Wyatt Earp (the Kevin Costner film not being the least of such attempts), usually using the testimony of the criminals he arrested as evidence. I suspect that all the attempted clarifications and retellings contribute to the controversy surrounding Earp more than dispel it.
I've spent a lot of years looking for a good Western game (distinguished from "western" games, by studios in Europe and the Americas), but I haven't had much luck. I've thought a long time about why that is. The Western is such a staple of American cinema, you'd think that somebody in the game industry might have gotten it right, but, as with attempts to capture the "real" Wyatt Earp, no game has managed to capture the real spirit of the West, as I understand it. I've finally figured out why, and it's so simple I can't believe I missed it all these years: it's the mythology.
To my mind, the Best Westerns are hotels. No, wait. Wrong site. The best Westerns are about legends. The stories tend to be very narrow slices of the lives of the people who inhabit them, but it’s not really the story that’s the draw. It’s not the people either. It’s the legends those people create and become.
No one story is an epic by itself, but taken in a larger context the players balloon up to giants. This is why dime novels about Billy the Kid and old time serials like The Lone Ranger capture our imaginations in a way that a three-hour attempt by Kevin Costner to win another Oscar doesn't.
I'm happy to say, though, that after all those years I found my Western game: Call of Juarez: Gunslinger captures that dime-novel lightning in an old whisky bottle. It nails the feel for me in a way that previous games, even such well regarded titles as Red Dead Redemption, failed to do. If you'll bear with me, I'll unpack why as we load these special logs into my steam-powered wayback machine and hope to hit eighty-eight before we plunge into Shonash Ravine.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how you do a “deep cut.”
Rockstar deserves full marks for cramming every last bit of the Westronomicon into a single game: the sweeping vistas, the horses, the buffalo, poker, prostitutes with hearts of various precious metals, hard widows trying to get by, and the hero with the troubled past that he just can't seem to outrun – everything. And that is, ironically, the very problem I have with it. The stage is too big – so big that it makes the players look small. John Marston isn't the larger-than-life myth that I want from my Old West; he's a human being, pushed beyond all reason by circumstances of his own making. That makes for a good story (so good that Rockstar has told it in virtually every game they've ever released), but a good Western? Well, let me put it this way: When legend becomes fact, print the legend.
It's a shame, because I very much wanted to like Red Dead Redemption. I mean, I actually finished Red Dead Revolver, and that game was awful. I figured the series owed me one at that point. Nope.
Then along came the Call of Juarez series. Bound in Blood got such glowing reviews that I just had to try it. So I bought it, played it, beat it, and traded it. I had allowed my overwhelming desire for a decent Western game to make me forget that I never like games with glowing reviews. There was nothing wrong with the game, really. The story wasn't terrible, it was just ... generic. You play as two brothers looking for gold. It sounds like a good Western plot, until you stretch it out to ten hours, at which point you lose track of why, exactly, you're shooting so many people.
If you're going to make a Western, chances are you're making a shooter; unless you're some sort of lunatic making a side-scrolling brawler. The most enduring symbol of the Old West is the six shooter. Unless you were a fan of Steve McQueen, in which case your iconic weapon is the Mare's Leg. Or if you were a fan of Chuck Conners, in which case the modified 44-40 is your gun. Or, well I could talk guns all day, but the point is that if you're making a Western, somebody is probably going to be doing some shooting.
But it's not just about the mechanics. Without the mythical, larger-than-life characters that wielded them, those weapons would be so much metal and wood. John Wayne's big-lever Winchester may as well have been a sharp stick if it weren't for the Duke.
That's the problem with Bound in Blood, or Red Dead Revolver, or Redemption or any other Western shooter trying to tell a single story. Most classic Westerns tell one story that culminates in a big, old-fashioned slobberknocker of a gunfight – a pitched battle between the white hats and the black hats. As often as not, it ends with a mano a mano duel between two skilled gunslingers. Most of what leads up to that big shootout is a lot of talking, maybe a few light action sequences, perhaps a tavern brawl, and most definitely a song or two.
Unfortunately, all that dramatic preamble is boring as hell in a game where the core mechanic is pulling the right trigger to kill things. The constant waves of cannon fodder make sense in a military shooter, where you expect to find a bunch of people wearing the same clothes who want to kill you. I can even excuse the body counts in games with dumb, summer action-movie plots, because dumb, summer action movies are always heavier on action set pieces than on story.
In a Western, though? Sorry. Not buying it. The myth doesn't hold up when the story forces the hero to be a psychopath. Even the most notorious outlaws didn't burn every town they walked through to the ground. As with Wyatt Earp, if you kill everybody in town, who's left to tell the legend? There's a fine line between famous and infamous.
In both of my cherry-picked examples we see the Western reduced to mere gameplay mechanics. It's all action, no dramatic tension. The stakes are never properly set; you're just moving from one pitched battle to another. In the movies or in real life, surviving a gunfight was a big deal in a time when cutting-edge medical technology meant a saw and a bottle of liquor. Gunslingers like Billy the Kid and Wild Bill Hickok were legends because they were rare. In the game, they become mundane. The gunfight behind the OK Corral was only the second time Wyatt Earp had been in a gunfight as a lawman. The Lincoln County War, which put Billy the Kid on the map of our collective imaginations, played out over years. For the McCalls, it's just some stuff that happened on Tuesday.
Which brings me to Call of Juarez: Gunslinger. The story of Gunslinger is the story of a mythical bounty hunter, and as such it captures the real spirit of the American Western better than any game that came before it. There are plenty of gunfights in Gunslinger – the name itself tells it best – but they don't cause the same problem for Gunslinger that they create in Redemption and Bound in Blood. Each level is the "good parts" version of a discrete story. It takes all the preamble, setup, and justification for your presence and explains it via a few lines of dialogue at the beginning. You are then plunged into the climactic gunfight at the end of the movie, with minimum fuss. Instead of cutting a swath of wanton destruction across the Old West in the space of a few days, you are reliving the hazily remembered battles from over the course of a lifetime. It's like playing a series of dime novels, or a whole season of Gunsmoke, and it's a brilliant way to capture the spirit of the classic Western genre in a video game.
Each set-piece thus feels special, because the writers don't have to explain why you're escaping from prison one minute then saving a ranch from bandits the next. Each duel becomes epic again, because you know there won't be another one a block and a half away in any direction. Each story rolls into the next, and you watch the legend of one man grow and morph before your eyes. Are the stories true? That question is beside the point, which Gunslinger does a great job of discussing: They're myths! They change as they're told, morphing and warping around the nougat of truth at the center like a Snickers bar in your left pocket in July.
It's weird to realize that what I've been wanting from a good Western game is not one good Western, but several. Maybe that makes me greedy. Maybe it just means that I'd rather have a few short but tight experiences than one sprawling, flabby one.
Whatever the reason, I'm happy to be reminded of why I love Westerns so much.
Comments
Excellent article on a very different topic than you see most of the time.
How did I live before digital distribution of old, cheap games?
MilkmanDanimal wrote:You did live before digital distribution of old, cheap games. Now you just play games.
So much truth! I love Gunslinger!
Loved this! Your huckleberry, forever!
Excellent article! I loved Redemption, but it does have its flaws. I passed on the Juarez games because they looked too shooty. Apparently I need to give Gunslinger, at least, another chance.
I don't care what you do on the weekend, but I don't think it qualifies as a movie for this thread even if you film your escapades. -Garion333
Well, you just convinced me to play Gunslinger. Some of my fondest memories are of watching Westerns with my dad and grandpa.
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The way the backgrounds and environments morph and change as the narrative goes on in Gunslinger is amazing. It's one of the best examples of active narration I've seen in any game.
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Yeah, CoJ: Gunsligner is a game everyone should try, IMO, for the reasons mentioned. It made my personal GOTY list for 2013. (Top 5 IIRC)
I loved RDR despite its flaws - it's still one of my all-time favorite games - but I shouldn't be surprised that a guy who actually liked Duke Nukem Forever has an opinion that varies from mine.
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I played through Gunslinger three times at least. The only thing I really wish that game had was online multiplayer, and only because I loved the look and feel of that game so much that I wanted to play it with my friends.
Hey Doubting, have you seen this? It's on sale:
Hard West
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I have seen it, but I am terrible at that kind of turn-based gameplay. I keep thinking I'll like one, then get halfway through the game and realize I'm not having any fun.
Looks interesting, though. I'm a fan of the classic tradition of mixing sci-fi/fantasy with westerns.
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I've played through gunslinger a couple times. It is a lot of fun. I love watching a movie with a game embedded in it. Good article.
Good article!
I just love the way Gunslinger explains video game tropes as the product of an unreliable narrator. I'd like to finish some day...
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