Gun Preview

One of the big mysteries at this year's E3 was where all the assholes with blue badges came from. The next big mystery was Gun. No information was released about the game at all, except for some mock severed ears that were being passed around. Not long after, members of the press were invited to an event that would explain what Gun was all about. With our finest investigative reporting skills in hand, we all were driven out to a ranch in California.

Don't bother getting up, fella.

Whoa, boy! Whoa!

Upon first inspection, we noticed that there were scalps nailed to a few pieces of wood, cattle skulls on the table, waiters with lots of free drinks, some gallows with two men dangling in the air, prostitutes that were handing out more severed ears, and cowboys branding "GUN" into leather binders. Being from the Southwest, none of this is new for me. In fact, at first I thought they had relocated my Uncle's house using some sort of brand new teleportation technology. Then they started showing us the game, and I knew that that wasn't it.

I'm going to claim the phrase "Grand West Auto" right now. I said it first. I wrote that down only a few minutes into Gun's unveiling. Don't even think about copying me.

And with that being said, Neversoft is creating what many could call Grand West Auto. It's a free roaming action shooter set in the Wild West. You've got a really huge area with cow towns and Native American tribes, you get missions from various brothels in the area, and you ride around and kill people while on horseback. Where San Andreas was set in the West in a modern day setting, we'll get to feel what it would have been like in the eighteen hundreds, before the white man brutally raped the land and the indigenous people in submission with his guns, Calvary, the Oregon Trail, and his penis.

While the PS2 version isn't anything to write home about, the Xbox 360 version looked good though. That's where I'm going to be playing this game.

Not much was sad about the story; you play the role of Colton White, a man born with a gun in his hand, a man who has turned the frontier fighting lifestyle into an art. When it comes to riding around on a horse and shooting people, Colton is your man. Colton White is put on a great adventure when the man he thought was his father was killed. Of course, on his deathbed, the guy tells Colton that they aren't really related and to go see a prostitute in a bar. Colton goes to see said whore, only to watch another man grab her and drag her up the stairs. Colton won't stand for this, and so he decides to kill all of them. Guns blazing, he frees her!

The game itself is horribly violent. This one is really going to push the limits. They went the Deadwood route of making things very graphic. For example, after you kill an enemy, you can walk up to their fallen body and SCALP THEM. Gun will actually let you mutilate the corpse in a whole new way! And no, the game is not rated PG-13, if that's what you were wondering. It's M rated of course...

There's also some nice melee combat too, if you get too close to someone to use your Sixshooter, you can start kicking their ass without bullets. Of course, at ActionTrip, we rarely run into an event where we are too close to use *our* SixShooter (Matt "SixShooter" Leyendecker - he's one of the editors. -Ed), so this will be a new experience for us. He's one grabby son of a bitch.

And speaking of bullets, they've really done a lot for the varying weapons. All of the guns seemed very powerful. When you shot someone with the pistol, they dropped backwards fiercely like a sack of bricks, you could just blast down a hallway full of ruffians with a shotgun, and they would drop like my skinny ass in a fight. Of course, no game would be complete without a rocket launcher, but because the rocket propelled grenade wasn't around in 1883, a tribe of Indians (I'm fairly sure it was the Blackfoot Indians, although I'm part Pottawatomie so they could have done it too) invented the Dynamite Bow - a bow that shoots arrows with lit sticks of dynamite attached to the ends of them. How much would it suck to get hit with that thing?

Gun is also totting horses. And the ability to aim your gun while riding a horse. At one point I was treated to a massive battle between brutes on horseback and more brutes on horseback. Everyone was riding around shooting, and blasting away, every now and then a horse would get blown through the back of the head, and it would drop, the rider thrown through the air, if not crushed under his fallen steed. At one point the main character got off his horse, and started blasting around on foot, and after all of the bad guys had been dealt with, he got to take one of their horses. He named it Brownie and fed it a carrot. Okay, I made that last part up, that was something my sister did.

You're gonna shoot a horse?! I'm telling PETA!

One of us ain't leaving this barn alive!

I was concerned with seeing anything I might recognize, my mother is a huge fan of the Wild West stuff, and so my childhood was full of hearing tales about it. And of course, I live in New Mexico, and it's everywhere. The response to my question was that a lot of research had been done, "just the sheer number of weird things that happened in the West, after reading about it, we had to make the game." I was informed that Dodge City in the game is modeled after the real Dodge City, and that I would see some things that I would recognize. Of course, artistic license is going to be a big thing here too, and honestly, I'm glad for that, living in the West would suck.

Of course, this is a pretty neat looking game. The West really hasn't been tapped yet, except in Red Dead Revolver, and I never really heard much about that game. Well, Oregon Trail tapped into it too, and let's face it, everyone loves Oregon Trail. Not tapping the West now is sort of silly though. How many first person shooters do we have set in World War 2? How many do we have set before that? Exactly. In the words of the Doors, "The West is the Best." Let's just hope that Gun proves them right.

Here's looking forwards to Gun, it should be out just in time for Christmas.