Super Nerd Sundays Presents: What's Wrong With Westerns?

I thumb the iron at my hip, wondering when my foe will appear. I’ll have seconds to strike then, seconds to react, to dodge out of the way. His bullets will fly quickly, obscurely, inaccurately. He’ll be lucky if even one of them connects. If he’s using a repeater he’ll have to move slowly, to pick each shot carefully. If he’s trying to snipe me he’ll have to stand all but perfectly still, and missing could be his end. So it’s my iron against his, in my head. Because we can only really trust our irons, nothing else.

This is how I play Lead and Gold. I play as a Gunslinger, because it makes sense to me. The movement, the play, the shots, the rolls. I understand what I’m supposed to do, how I can use my class to gain an advantage over others. I understand how to make the various abilities at my disposal work, and I understand what I’m supposed to be. I’m supposed to be a fierce desperado, constantly pressing my enemies, putting pressure on them. I’m a fierce, punkish fighter who does his all to make sure his enemies are keeping their heads down and focusing their attention his way. That way the Deputies and Trappers can pick their shots and the Blaster can get in close enough to break up enemy defenses

I’m well aware that most people don’t like Lead and Gold. Most people think it’s a bad game and don’t get why people keep trying to hype it. Most people think it’s sloppy, loose and unacceptably buggy. Most people don’t think it’s worth five dollars. And this seems to be the overarching opinion of the gaming community not just with regards to Lead and Gold, but to westerns in general. Red Dead Redemption went the way of Bully in terms of sales and, to some degree, acclaim, and I can’t think of another high profile game that executed on the concept of being a western well, unless you consider Call of Juarez high profile.

The best I can come up with is New Vegas, which I’d rather not mention too much in this essay (even if it did partly inspire it) which is only a western inasmuch as it plays on the western motif and draws elements of westerns into the game, mixing them with things like power armor and two headed cows and Roman legions. Even if you’ll frequently want to be using a Sequoia pistol or a Cowboy Repeater, New Vegas is not, fundamentally, a game about the lawlessness and ruthlessness of a Western. In fact, it’s more about the decay and decline of that genre, so it really doesn’t work for our purposes here.

And, let’s face it, most of the games that have components from westerns rarely feel like they’re actually western games. They feel like they’re trying to shoehorn western concepts into existing game types. Timesplitters 2 western section, for example, is just painful. It’s basically every other section of the game with the shittiest selection of guns imaginable slapped in there. And, all too often, that is all that ambitious western games are. They lack the distinct personality of westerns and aspire to the sharpness, the distinctness, of modern first person shooters. Which isn’t necessarily something you want in a western game.

See, when we think of westerns we think of the impeccable marksmanship of The Man With No Name, Blondie, or any of Clint Eastwood’s other nameless badasses, the spirit of the Good. We think of the tenacity of the downtrodden Ugly. We think of the implacability of the Bad. And we want to combine these elements into one fantastic perfect western figure. We want to be a badass, but we want to be the only badass. Westerns are all about a filmic sensibility, and any game that operates as a western has to tap into that filmic sensibility. But you can’t mix those disparate elements and still make a good, interesting game, one that holds to the style and thought governing a western. Think about how dull The Good, The Bad and the Weird would be if everyone was like the unbreakable pretty boy who, when the chips are down even a little, folds.

But it’s the rare game that’s willing to make you feel very limited, to make you feel like a single part of a larger landscape, a part of a team that has to work together to survive. But that’s exactly what westerns are all about: the posse, the motley crew gathering together for a job. Tombstone would be shit if it was just about Kurt Russell, and Doc Holiday would’ve been a lot less interesting without his relationship with Wyatt. Silverado without the gang wouldn’t have been Silverado, and the relationship between characters is what shapes Unforgiven. Westerns are, at their heart, stories about people coming together under difficult circumstances, people persevering against all odds. And games are for the most part solitary experiences, paths to self-exploration or lone exploration of a world.

The few games that break this tradition are decidedly non-western. Team based shooters, cooperative RTSes and MMOs are the only games that insist players interact with one another in order to accomplish goals, and many of these sub-genres exist mostly as optional parts of larger games. For example, Dawn of War II, which sports one of the most impressive co-operative multiplayer games in all of RTS-dom, also has a very robust single player game type that you can enjoy without ever noticing the lack of a pair of teammates. And the few shooters that do make use of the sort of co-op that a good western game would need are almost all too precise or too completely unrelated to really make good on the sloppy, uneven nature of the western. Left4Dead has its hands full simulating zom-bocalypse, and I’m hard pressed to think of symmetrical team based shooter that forces teamwork well off-hand. Maybe the venerable Counter-Strike, or the newer CS; Source, both of which have been ousted from popularity following the resurgence and domination of Call of Duty. And even if these games offered up templates for western play, could they really be that helpful given how focused on precise, modern weapons they are? Could Call of Duty or Counterstrike accurately simulate that sloppy feeling of a repeater or a revolver? Could it make that double barrel shotgun feel like more than a gimmick put in to infuriate players? Could it give you that feeling of desperation as you cower behind a stack of boxes, thinking about which way to run?

And even if the framework existed to make a solid western, even if the tech know how and the drive was there, is there a market? Could a western game get solid funding, press through the ultra-competitive world of game design and become a winning property? Probably not, given Red Dead’s relatively slight performance despite its emergence from a studio that essentially shits money, the abysmal sales attached to properties like Juarez and the struggling efforts of legitimately good and thematically solid western games like Lead and Gold.

Which brings us back to the beginning. To my love affair with Lead and Gold, with its posse enforcing game play, sloppy, at times frustrating play and tricky, purposeful shooting against durable opponents. It’s not a game for everyone, much as real westerns aren’t movies for everyone. They’re long movies, often boring and often incredibly roundabout in their storytelling. Their appeal is far from universal, and they’ve got a decidedly low-fi vibe to their production and execution. They’re not blockbusters, and what sex appeal they have isn’t very widespread. They’re never shovel ready, and neither is Lead and Gold. It’s no mistake that the game’s default menu opens with the offer of a tutorial detailing the unique asymmetry of the game, imploring players to try all of the classes, get comfortable with one of them and learn the ropes before leaping into the game itself.

But for those who are willing to brave its menus, for those who are attuned to what it’s trying to do with its sloppy aiming and fast paced chicanery, Lead and Gold has a lot to offer, just like the western genre. And while its poor representation in games isn’t really anything new (Sunset Riders, for example, wasn’t much of a western game, even if it was super, super fun) games like Lead and Gold are making our future look brighter. And if games like Lead and Gold and Red Dead can prove that games capturing the western spirit can exist and work while games like Fallout: New Vegas and Red Faction Guerilla prove that games all about big frontiers and enforcing your own law on the landscape can work too, it could be that a real western, a western that isn’t just a wonderful bite sized multiplayer game or a neat, atmospheric single player experience could be on the horizon sooner rather than later.