Red Dead Revolver is a first-person shooter set in the Wild West.

Rawhide cowboys
XBox

Red Dead Revolver
www.rockstargames.com
Publisher: www.take2games.com

If there is one genre that has been sorely missing from gaming, it has to be the Western.

Despite a plethora of great (and not-so-great) movies, books and television series with strong characters and atmospheric locations, no-one really got down to perfecting it in a virtual world.

Rockstar Games’ latest shooter, Red Dead Revolver, lets players do just that.

It is a first-person shooter set in the bad ol’ days of bandits, bank robberies and highwaymen.

Players take on the role of an aggrieved bounty hunter who is thirsting for revenge after seeing his mother and father gunned down as a small child. Red is not only the quickest gun in the West, he is also the most driven, wandering the prairies searching for a man with one arm – the same man who ended his father’s dreams all those years before.

But enough of the story, let’s get on to the cool bit.

For the life of me I couldn’t figure out how a game developer would come up with an interface that would allow a reasonably accurate representation of a quick-draw and still make it playable.

Rockstar have certainly achieved with a different take on the now-famous bullet-time system from the Max Payne games.
Essentially, players draw their weapon and time slows for a couple of seconds.

In that period they must guide a very sluggish cursor over the target and pull the trigger over vital areas.

The slow-mo sequence finishes when time runs out (depending on the skill of the opposition) or six shots are fired.
The game then jumps back to real-time and Red releases his salvo.

Get a couple of vital hits in and you survive; miss or just wing your target and Red becomes vulture feed.

The game isn’t all sauntering into town and blowing away bad guys – there’s also (in the tradition of all great Westerns) a train carriage-top shoot-out, a horseback chase and even stagecoach takedowns.

Players can also experience frontier life as an Annie Oakley-style cattle-rancher, a ferocious Indian scout or an enterprising British settler – characters out of every Western you have seen.

In multiplayer, Red Dead Revolver can be enjoyed as a cooperative or individual death match but without doubt the best fun is the Dead-Eye games where players pit their gunslingin’ skills against one another in quickdraw contests.

Coupled with great music, fantastic visuals and an intuitive control system, Red Dead Revolver is a refreshing gaming experience that has set a great benchmark for the Western genre.

Be warned though, it is pretty graphic and the MA15+ rating is well-deserved.

PS 2

V8 Supercars 2
www.codemasters.com
Publisher: Atari

With this year’s big race just a couple of months away the arguments over manufacturer superiority are already flying thick and fast among avid racing fans.

That’s where V8 Supercars 2 is great. The ability to thrash a mate in a few hot laps around Bathurst (or any other Aussie track for that matter) and prove beyond doubt the superiority of one make over another is something that can be appreciated by all ... well, most of us anyway.

V8 Supercars 2 follows from the success of its predecessor in adding the uniquely Aussie racing formula to the virtual world.

You could be forgiven for thinking that the game was purely about the Australian V8 championship given the high level of marketing enjoyed by the game since its release. In fact, the game includes 15 different motorsports from the horribly nimble Formula Ford through to Rally and Super Trucks ... in fact the only thing really missing is go-karts and motorbikes.

The single-player campaign pits a player through 30 Global Championships starting in street-legal convertibles and progressing in difficulty until they have to tame the Aussie V8 beast.

Online play for V8 Supercars 2 also has a uniquely Aussie flavour.

Coupled with Live’s Voice Chat feature I found it more intense than most other online games I’ve played.

Unfortunately, the pressure is on to perform and the slightest Russel Ingall-style infraction will get you black flagged (booted from the game) quite quickly. The key is to practise before venturing online.

V8 Supercars 2 is also available for PC.