Published by: Activision
Developed by: Neversoft Entertainment
Genre: Third-Person Shooter
Release Date:
US: November 8, 2005

ESRB Content Descriptors: Blood and Gore, Intense Violence, Sexual Themes, Strong Language, Use of Alcohol

Quote :

"Gun: Hands-on We take the old Smith and Wesson out for a trial run in Neversoft's version of the Old West. by Douglass C. Perry October 20, 2005 - After several healthy eyes-on previews, we finally got a chance to try out Neversoft's first non-Tony Hawk game in seven years. Gun, the simply named Western third-person shooter, is that endeavor, and it's a giant one for the Southern California developer. In development on five systems -- Xbox, Xbox 360, PS2, PC, and GameCube, this action-driven, open design game does something Neversoft has been working toward with Tony Hawk's Underground series -- a strong narrative. Working with Randall Jahnson, whose lengthy movie writing experience comprises works such as Sunset Strip, Mask of Zorro, the Doors, and Dude, Neversoft has created a story that it hopes will surprise and entertain gamers, while also keeping them riveted on gameplay. The story starts off simply enough. You play Colton White, a 1880s game hunter living in Montana, working with your father, voice acted by Kris Kristofferson. After hunting down fowl, wolves, deer, and even a bear, the two of you bring the day's bounty to a steamboat where your father engages in a rather mysterious business transaction behind closed doors. It turns out he's hiding something more valuable than just hides, and you learn this right when the steam boat is attacked. Learning to use the basic shooting controls, the Bullet-time-like QuickDraw mode, and a very effective melee attack with a knife, your father pushes you off the boat right before it blows up. His last words? "I'm not your father." Three days later, you awake on the shoal of the lake, a sheepish-looking old man preparing to grab the medallion bestowed by your father right before dying in the steam boat explosion. After a short conversation, you must get to Dodge City to meet a prostitute named Jenny. From there, well, Dodge City is the entrance to the rest of the game. That's the premise, the story set-up, and the place in which gamers all start their non-linear adventure. We got to play the game from its very beginning, which means we watched the movie-like credits, the dramatic opening, and the general presentation. While the general interface, cutscenes, and some of the other presentation aspects of Gun are very basic, the intro sequences are presented in grand style. The intro looks and feels a lot like famous TV and movie Westerns, with constantly switching cameras focusing on the beauty of the raw wilderness to you, your guns, and horse riding. No really, it's cool, I swear! We played the first four levels of Gun, traversing all of the introductory sections, heading into Dodge City, and engaging ourselves in a satisfying covered wagon protection level. Being a third-person shooter, Gun does a couple of things well. It's not terribly awkward to control. Meaning, the camera is not tied tightly to the back of Colton. It swings from side to side, finding the best and most cinematic angle, but it's also manually controllable, so you can adjust and correct it whenever you feel the need. You'll handle a healthy arsenal of weapons, from a huge-barreled handgun to a long-necked rifle, a default knife, and a range of addition weaponry, from set turrets, cannons, dynamite sticks, bows and arrows, and even dynamite-laden arrows. You'll also learn to ride a horse, steer and manipulate the camera while on a horse, and shoot and utilize the animal to sprint, jump, and attack. From a visual standpoint, Neversoft reaches beyond the simplicity of Tony Hawk's basic art style. These characters show off heavily textured faces and elaborate outfits. They deliver basic levels of emotion, most of it coming from the excellent voice acting, and less with the characters' relatively unemotional faces, which move with basic panning eyes and respectable lip-syncing techniques. While the Old Western outfits are the genuine article, and the character motion capture delivers glimpse of real human motion, the animation in this preview build wasn't as convincing. The animation appeared stiff and old fashioned. With games reaching the levels of animation set up by Prince of Persia and games of that caliber, titles like Gun make us feel a little spoiled in comparison. That said, Gun laid down some great gun fights for us. After saving your father from a giant 10-foot bear, and saving Jenny from a nasty bar gunfight, you realize that basic gun play is decent fun, but QuickDraw aiming is a core and necessary gameplay element that's worth using as often as possible. Your QuickDraw meter is built up by shooting enemies, and once full and engaged, it slowly deletes. It's quickly filled and drained, a way to encourage constant action and shooting. That's easy to do, given the enormous number of levels, side missions, and situations thrown your way. The game moves with quick but rough animations, is loose in motion, and feels arcade-like in its gunfighting style, all while maintaining a basic 30 FPS on all systems. The basic controls aren't as precise as I'd like them to be, though I don't know how much the final version will change the general loose movement of your character's gunhand. But the rather wily controls did make QuickDraw a lot more attractive and necessary. For any type of precise shots, QuickDraw is your "weapon" of choice. You can tag enemies with total precision shots and they react in slow motion with a healthy amount of blood and pain flashing across their faces. Once past the intro levels, you'll experience a wide-open, people-filled Dodge City, which serves as a main hub with missions segmenting from it like branches. Once in the city, story-based missions and side missions blend easily into one another. Side missions can be nabbed by simply walking up to a wanted poster and accepting a bounty offer. You can walk around the dusty open streets of Dodge and talk to almost anyone, and little pointer icons hint at where to get other missions, whether that's from the sheriff's office, the bar, or by speaking with Jenny. Using a smartly organized design structure, players can take on side missions for fun and/or profit. While story-missions obviously push forward the narrative, and the side missions don't, the secondary missions are important in their own right. They build up various strengths, which range from horse, health, gun handling, quickdraw, to melee. Sometimes it's necessary to stray from the main story to build up these characteristics to progress. And more to the point, building these up is great fun, while providing a healthy variety of gameplay to boot. In these missions, you'll mine for gold, fish, hunt wolves, bears, bison, coyotes, and rams, defend Indians, attack Indians, defend stagecoaches, or even shopkeep. If you want, you can play Texas Hold-'Em in the saloon. Not sure what you can get from that, except for cash, but it's fun in any case. Our preview time maxxed out at about 45 minutes, and having spoken with Activision about the game's length, we barely scratched the surface of its depth. You'll find yourself straying far from Dodge, engaging in other city's mayoral duties, getting involved in massive, obpen-field horse battles, fighting off hordes of angry Indian enemies who shoot arrows with annoyingly good aim, and wandering from side to side, faction to faction, all for money, but more importantly, the valuable knowledge your father has hid from everyone. Who do you trust? Where should you go? The open city structure enables you to play the story in your own way, even if it's linear and non-branching. You can stay strictly with the story missions, are dive into the wealth of side-missions and open-city festivities. Returning to the game's strong narrative, Neversoft tells us the story is filled with plot twists, surprises, and engaging turns of fate. If the time we put in the game was merely a small dent, then we're bent on making like miners, and digging in for gold."

10/21/2005 1:32:25 PM

10/21/2005 1:33:42 PM

You doing any competitions to give away free merchandise?

10/21/2005 1:35:30 PM

Since Activision is coming out w/ like 6 different games, I need to know the dates of all these competitions and such so I can try to get em all.

10/21/2005 1:36:46 PM

For this game Im thinknig of doing a Texas hold Em tournament and just have 15 or so TVs running demos of the game around the room (Prolly having it at UT since no one else seems interested in doing anything)

This'll prolly place place the first week of december

Winner gets game and whatever else UT gives out for prizes, and then through surveys of the game and random giveaways ill prolly give away 10-15 copies in total

10/21/2005 2:01:41 PM

HOLY SHIT

OREGON TRAIL

10/21/2005 2:21:13 PM

Nice, sounds like a good tournament.

10/21/2005 2:21:35 PM

That game looks pretty cool.

Thanks for the shirts

10/21/2005 3:11:40 PM

hova, you're my hero

10/21/2005 3:26:45 PM

10/21/2005 3:40:48 PM

this game is racist

10/21/2005 5:21:05 PM

I thought this game would be a spinoff of the series.

10/21/2005 5:32:47 PM

Quote :

"Gun: Dodge City What happens when you reach the bright lights of Dodge City? Opportunities await. by Douglass C. Perry November 2, 2005 - You've read the previews, all 19 of them, and you pretty much decided on a few things. One of them might be buying Neversoft's Gun, which hits Xbox, PlayStation 2, GameCube, and PC next week, following with the Xbox 360 version the following week. We've got the final game and while we cannot pass a final judgment on the review code yet, there are many parts that have piqued our interests. A linear game with open structure elements, Gun leads players through the Wild West of the 1800s, following a mysterious token that's fallen into the hands of lead character Colton White. After breezing through the tutorials, which teaches players to handle a horse, gun sling and quick draw, along with slashing a knife with enemies in up-close battles, players head off to Dodge City, the portal city from which most activities take place throughout the rest of the story. The city if open for business day or night, and you happen to arrive when townspeople are moseying around, the bar is open, prostitutes are making money, and the poker tables are hot. A nest of missions avail themselves with arrow indicating type and location, and these range from quick, little side missions such as playing a hand of 21 or finding a low-down varmint whose wanted by the law. We tried both. Hunting down the outlaw was easy. We figured it was so easy because it was so early. Completing this little side mission required following a map to the X on the screen and then winning a simple shootout with a drunk cowboy. When I finished blasting bullets through his head and he lay in a bloody heap on the floor, I collected my bounty automatically through the menu screens, which conveyed my newly upgrade points in the shooting category. Bloodless, filled with adrenaline, and satisfied with my kill and corresponding bounty, I then walked over to the poker table and played a few hands of Texas Hold 'Em. I won three out of three, pocketed some cash and strolled over to the bar, where an unnaturally giant triangle indicated I should speak with the barkeep. Gamers can play poker at any time in the bars that offer it, as long money is in hand. It's considered a side mission, and most appear free to enter. Win money and use it for items. What kinds of items? Well, when you walk outside and head toward the shop keep, he'll tell you a new shipment of goods has just come in. The first shipment of items includes pickaxes, extra health slots, shotgun speed loaders, cylinder boring kits, and pistol speed loaders with prices of $10-$25. Much like my desire to cause havoc and raise a fuss for the fun of it, I went into town and just started shooting the hell out of the townsfolk. Why not? You can, right? In real life I'm a mild-mannered videogame editor, but in videogames? I'm a low-down, rootin-tootin' sonuvabitch, and I wanted to pick a fight. You can shoot anybody, and if you feel like getting up close and personal, you can knife them, or grab them and use their body as a human shield. The town's patience is measured with a meter, and once you've killed a person or two -- I admit, I killed my own horse to see if I could, and man! Did he take a lot of shots! -- the meter runs over, and every ordinary person flees into nearby builds, houses, and saloons. Within seconds, a posse of men runs from behind a building to shoot you down. At this point, it's you versus as many as 10 guys all armed with revolvers, shotguns, and Schofields, and they'll surround you and slowly close in for the kill. The fighting ends, naturally, when somebody dies. I won, which left a field of dead corpses across the main road. I played it again and died just to see what would happen, and when you do, I started back at the saloon with the town patience set back to normal. Fun! That pretty much wrapped up my first hour of gaming in Gun. I learned to ride a horse, shoot men dead, playa little poker, and cause a riot. Phew! What a day! While the graphics aren't the most spectacular on Earth, the game and the story are totally compelling. I was easily amused by the wealth of action, side missions, and cool stuff I could simply play with, so you'll be hearing from me more on this one. Oh yes, indeed."

11/3/2005 1:42:58 PM

http://xbox.ign.com/articles/665/665526p1.html

8 from IGN

11/8/2005 11:39:22 PM

How does this game compare to Red Dead Revolver? I loved that game, and would like to get a *cough cough* free copy of this game

11/9/2005 2:43:49 PM

^ I concur

11/9/2005 7:08:39 PM

Gamespot gave it a 7.4

http://www.gamespot.com/pc/action/gun/review.html

Quote :

"Despite a great presentation that'll likely give a very positive first impression, Gun ultimately offers too little content for it to be a truly satisfying game. Most all of the right ingredients are here in some quantity. But the hastily delivered storyline (which, fittingly, concludes with an incredibly abrupt ending) and the lack of any real depth to the gameworld make Gun much better suited for some quick, fleeting thrills instead of for the long haul."

11/9/2005 7:41:55 PM

i like murdering injuns

and dogs

and pigs

and horses

11/13/2005 7:33:04 PM

BTTT where in the hell is a bow so i can shoot grey wolf

11/15/2005 3:45:28 PM

shit i killed him with a gun

i had a bow though

i can't remember off-hand where i got it

you get to hunt a white buffalo after that

11/15/2005 4:01:45 PM