Picked up Gun for 360 with the intention of playing along with RebelFM’s gameclub. I had already played nearly all of the other games in 1UP FM’s backlog and I enjoyed listening to their commentary, but I had never actually played along with the podcast. And I’m a little late to the party, but it gives me an additional three or four hours of shit to listen to at work, so why not?

Anyway, my initial impression was somewhere along the lines of ‘holy fuck this looks old.’ Until that moment I had never really considered myself a graphics whore for videogames. It bugged me a bit with Yakuza 2, but I’ve always played last-gen games well into the current generation without much of an issue.

It was a bit jarring to play something that was, for all intents and purposes, a dinosaur, but my shallow fears were easily alleviated by the Western aesthetic. Unless you want to count Stranger’s Wrath, I hadn’t played a Western themed game since Mad Dog McCree at my friend Tim’s house in the mid 90’s. I’ve never really been that hot for Western films; I don’t get the appeal of cowboys, I don’t some Marlboros’, I would hurt myself with spurs, and riding a horse would (did) scare the shit out of me. I had Yahoo Buckaroo and I’m sure I had a cap revolver, but I always wanted to go into outer space, not back in time to the Wild West. Still, the general aesthetic is relatively unseen in gaming, and I’m always happy to visit different worlds.

And obviously there was no better person to welcome me to such a place than Kris Kristofferson. I found Pa’s educational tutorial to feature an overt lack of practical reality, and reeked of cheese, but it was kind of endearing to be (pistol) shooting birds with my dad. It wasn’t anywhere near as cool as, say, power sliding into horses in the next tutorial some time later, but it was a decent way to get familiar with the controls. Bullet time seems like cheating and I’m still not entirely sure how the fuck ammo works (does my pistol have unlimited ammo? do I have to buy the rest? how long have I had a shotgun?), but drinking to replenish health is awesome and the mechanics feel pretty solid.

I just said it was cheating, but I’m fairly positive that bullet time, or gunslinger view or whatever, is going to be essential to surviving the game. When I had to go rescue my hooker friend I assumed it was going to be one dude up in a room, but, for reasons that still aren’t exactly clear to me, I wound up taking on a gang of roughly twenty people. Immediately after that I appeared to upset the leader’s brother and had to kill his gang of twenty arsonists. I don’t care, the combat is pretty fun, but it’s a little silly considering I haven’t even seen that many people wandering around town. You know? I mean, where the fuck are these people coming from and why isn’t there some mass graveyard for the foes I felled..

I had heard Gun was an open world game (and that seemed appealing in the context of a Western), but I’m not entirely sure that label is accurate. The paths I’ve walked have always been funneled toward a specific direction, and the extra missions (be it the Wanted stuff or Pony express) have been quite overt and not strayed outside the boundaries of town. I want there to be sprawling, wide open missions that compliment infinite expanse of the Wild West. Given I’ve only played for maybe 90 minutes, but I really hope the game opens up as it carries on.

The Western aesthetic is more or less in place. The requisite list of whores, whiskey, railroads, guns, and racist depictions of Indians Native Americans appears to be checked, but I am really anxious to see what direction the story takes. The not so holy preacher doesn’t look to be the end of the line by way of the random steamboat overthrow, so my dreams of some sort of Wild West conspiracy-conglomerate might yet be realized. Really, as long as there is some horseback riding, train take over, hostage situations, Deadwood-like swearing, dudes thrown through saloon doors, and a high-noon shootout, I should be ok. Actually, what would be great is Westworld without the murderous robots – or maybe throw them in there, I don’t know.