Dusty Pixels: A Look at Gaming in the Wild West

In the not-so-long history of gaming designers have come to rely on many of the same settings and archetypes as their counterparts in Hollywood. Science fiction is ever popular and it seems that for every movie set in a gritty urban environment there’s at least one game that follows suit. Wartime epics are rampant on both sides of the entertainment divide, from medieval fantasy, to the overwrought World Wars era, all the way up to modern urban skirmishes in the Middle East. But there’s one genre that’s slowly fallen out of favor among moviemakers and gamemakers alike; the western. It’s not completely dead, however, and just as Hollywood revisits the Wild West from time to time with films like 3:10 to Yuma and even No Country for Old Men, so do game developers.

Ubisoft is keeping the west alive with Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood, a prequel to the original game that uses our high tech console hardware to render some of the grittiest old west visuals we’ve seen yet. And Rockstar Games is finally heading back out west (and I don’t mean to San Andreas) with the recently announced sequel, Red Dead Redemption, set for release by year’s end. I loved Red Dead Revolver and think it’s one of the finest examples of Wild West gaming but with the sequel still a ways out it’s not quite time to revisit it. So I thought I’d pack up my mule and ride dead west across a crimson soaked sunset to take you on a tour of some of gaming’s most notable western themed offerings.

Hitch up your horse and check out my extensive report at NfamousGamers.