1) Quake
2a) Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness (human campaign)
3) Blood
4a) Mechwarrior 2 Pentium Edition: Jade Falcon Campaign
4b) Mechwarrior 2 Pentium Edition: Wolf Clan Campain
5) Shadow Warrior
6) Mechwarrior 2: Ghost Bear's Legacy
7) Doom 2
8) Lego Island
2b) Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness (orc campaign)
9) Road Rash
10) Toy Story Animated Storybook
11) Half Life: Opposing Force
12) Mechwarrior 2: Mercenaries
13) Quake II
14) A.D.A.M. The Inside Story
15) Commander Keen Episode One: Marooned on Mars
16) Commander Keen Episode Two: The Earth Explodes!
17)
(too new; don’t discuss on the retro forum until 2029)18) Star Wars Episode One: Racer
19) Lego Rock Raiders
20) Gunman ChroniclesI have to give Gunman Chronicles two scores. One is the “imagine I’m in elementary school and in the late 90’s or very early 2000’s” score of 4/5. Taken in this light, Gunman Chronicles is full of action, interesting set pieces, cool combat, and good graphics. I recommend it to people who loved Half Life and want more of that.
The other one is the “it’s 2020 and I have a whole bucketful of 90’s PC games and my personal tastes as a 30 year old” score, which would be 3/5. While I enjoyed GC more than Unreal’s byzantine puzzles or Quake II’s humorless monotony, GC isn’t as technically polished as other Half Life expansions. Also, while GC pitches itself as a western/cowboy game, I suspect it was originally intended as a more conventional sci-fi game and they later painted cowboy hats and union military uniforms onto the NPCs. I’ll elaborate below.
I’m no connoisseur of the Western or cowboy genre, but here’s a list of what comes to mind when I think about media cut from that cloth:
-steam trains
-bank robberies
-southern belles
-Native Americans
-wanted posters
-gold mines
-untamed wilderness
-six shooters
-The Civil War
-cattle ranches
-defenseless townspeople fighting evil industrialists or bandits
Gunman Chronicles pitches itself as a futuristic cowboy themed FPS under the pretense that cowboy hats and catci make it different from the competition. Yet, the game’s second stage takes place in a cold, sterile science lab where evil scientists are genetically modifying aliens to create bio weapons. Later, the bio weapons escape and you must fight them. Here’s a list of games this reminds me of:
Half Life (1998)
Metroid Prime (2002)
Far Cry (2004)
Gears of War II (2008)
The science lab is run by a malevolent AI. When the bio weapons run amok, you must declare a truce with the AI for both of you to survive. Here’s a list of games this reminds me of:
System Shock II (1999)
Portal (2007)
While it may seem unfair to compare Gunman Chronicles to games that hadn’t come out yet, my point is more to illustrate that GC is full of science fiction tropes, not western ones. It stands to reason that even these later games were appropriating ideas from even earlier media, such 2001 a Space Odyssey, a 1968 film, popularizing the concept of an AI gone rogue; or Alien, a 1979 film, popularizing the concept of an evil corporation genetically modifying an alien being to turn it into a living weapon.
I take issue with Gunman Chronicles’s conceit that it is different from the competition because it is a “western”. GC has no western themes, only cosmetic trappings. It isn’t drawing form any western ideas and reconstituting those with a fresh twist to reinvigorate the Western genre or the PC FPS genre. While it was a fun game, I found this aspect personally disappointing. I would have liked a science fiction FPS with gold mines, sheriffs, saloons, duels, tumbleweeds, train robberies, and so forth. Instead I just got a bunch of science fiction cliches I’ve seen a hundred times before, everyone just happens to speak with a southern drawl and wear cowboy hats.
To address Gunman Chronicles’s technical problems: this game is ambitious and full of content. But it often strains under its own weight. Here is a list of janky parts in Gunman Chronicles:
- One time my character failed to induce a loading trigger. I walked up to a tunnel ending in a white void, scratched my head in bewilderment, did a 180 then came back again. For some reason it loaded the second time.
- Another time my radio buddy (the evil AI mentioned earlier) told me, “There’s a tank up ahead. None of your weapons can destroy it. You must find another way to kill it.” There was a nearby gun turret available to me. I aimed the turret at the tank and fired at it, but no matter how many rounds I landed, it just had no effect. Finally I just ran past the tank, hiding behind the scenery to avoid getting shot. The tank landed several parting shots, reducing my health to 5%, but I strafed and danced around it and made it to the next loading zone. Something tells me I wasn’t supposed to beat it that way.
- There was one boss I’m at a loss to describe except as a pregnant tentacle dragon. It sat unmoving at the end of the room, spawning monsters which would shoot projectiles at me. I danced around avoiding its minions and unloaded every clip of every weapon into its hide. But even after I had 0 ammo left, this wasn’t enough to kill it. Finally in desperation I ran to the monster’s side where there was just enough room for me to squeeze next to it. I equipped my knife, then took a rubber band from my kitchen drawer and fastened it around my mouse’s left button. Then I got up and made a cup of coffee and drank it while my Gunman stabbed the pregnant tentacle dragon for 2 minutes. The monster finally died and I resumed playing.
I found some aspects of combat to be unsatisfying and annoying:
- In every PC FPS game I have played since Doom (1993), the number keys select your weapon. Yet in Gunman Chronicles, I kept having this problem where I’d select the shotgun with the 3 key, click my mouse to fire, nothing would happen, then a monster would eat my face off. I later realized that in Gunman Chronicles, weapon selection works like this:
3 key - click left mouse button to confirm - click left mouse button to fire
But in literally every other FPS weapon selection works like this:
3 key - click left mouse button to fire
This is such a boneheaded decision. It took me a long time to get used to this.
- Gunman Chronicles features one particular enemy, an alien which fires piranha plant thingies into the air. These pirahnha plant thingies track you like heat seeking missiles. While playing, my instincts told me I should be able to lock my crosshairs onto these piranha plant thingies in mid air and intercept them. Yet I couldn’t. Shooting them had no effect at all. This was so unsatisfying. Another annoyance would occur when I killed this enemy, causing them to unleash a barrage of flying piranha plant thingies in all directions. These would usually lock onto me and even follow me around corners, chomping away my health points. This, too, was so unsatisfying. It felt like I was being punished for defeating an enemy. Little design choices like this made Gunman Chronicles irritating to play.
- The large robot enemies in Gunman Chronicles are more or less hitscanners. They fire a particle beam which locks onto you with perfect accuracy. The only way to deal with this is to hide around a corner until the beam dissipates. This “duck and cover” combat style just wasn’t fun to me. I don’t like waiting for a cycle to reach the right point in video games. If I could outrun this enemy’s shots by strafing or somehow deflecting them with the right timing it would be more fun.
- The human enemies in Gunman Chronicles do not respond to gunfire until their health reaches zero. In 007 Goldeneye, I liked how I could interrupt an enemy leveling his rifle at me by shooting first, buying me precious time. In Soldier of Fortune, enemies react to gunfire with overwraught, dramatic death animations. One shotgun blast makes their limbs fly off! But the enemies in GC just kept shooting at me, even if I landed a shotgun blast to their face. I dislike this. It made my weapons feel impotent.
I recommend Gunman Chronicles if you like these things:
- Half Life expansions
- late 90’s FPS games
- hard-to-find video games that aren’t available on modern digital distribution storefronts