[SSI, Apple II]
I’ve already stated it, but I have been in love with tactical games since I stumbled upon a demo of XCOM2: Terror from the Deep. Yet, in all those years, I haven’t played a Western-themed tactical game… until I started playing Hard West (2015) one month ago (late, I know) and, well, Six-Gun Shootout two weeks ago.
Six-Gun Shootout offers 10 different scenarios going from the Shoutout at OK Corral to an Indian Raid; the characters in those scenarios can be edited and so, as I like to do, I replaced the names and equipment of the default characters by the ones chosen by the commenters, and now we are going to replay the Northfield Bank Robbery of 1876 which sealed the fate of the James-Younger gang.
Here is the list of my 8 gunslingers, equipped as per their wishes – though sometimes, as in the case of Gubisson and his weak derringers, against their best interests.
And with that, we open on a crowded screen, with way too many targets for comfort.
The starting position, as historical as is it, is not ideal: my men are scattered in 3 different groups, which is a problem when I have 20 opponents to shoot down. At least, my men start with their weapons out (“ready” in game terms) while the good guys will have to pull theirs out.
Turn 1
Actions in Six-Gun Shootout work in an unusual but still simple way. Characters have an inherent movement speed and a speed when using one of the 3 categories of weapons [long weapons like rifles, short weapons like pistols and melee weapons like knives,]; a turn is divided in 5 segments that run from 5 to 1, and a character can shoot [or move] only if his weapon [or movement] speed is equal or superior to the active segment. This strongly favors fast characters: someone with a weapon speed of 5 will be able to shoot 5 times every turn, including 3 times before someone with a weapon speed of 2 can shoot. As the game starts, Sunfall and Abimelek are my only characters with 5 in weapon speed (more specifically: in the speed of the weapon they’re ready to use: pistols).
Sunfall uses the first segment to shoot the clerk immediately in front of him, wounding him in the arm and sending him to the ground in shock. Instead of shooting, Abimelek readies his repeater which offers a longer range. Two of my twenty opponents also have a weapon speed of 5 and ready their weapons, and then we move to segment 4 of the turn.
Baud shoots at the closest interloper but only grazes his arm. Ken Rutsky, however, aims for the head of the hostile in front of him and hits, killing his target instantly.
The battle continues. Ahab starts in an exposed position. Happily enough, he has 4 in movement, which means that during segment 4 he can either move twice or shoot or move once and shoot. I figure out that the best cover is to hug the wall next to the group of enemies, leaving only one enemy with a good angle. Ahab shoots him with his breachloader at short range and is lucky enough to hit the head, immediately eliminating another threat.
Meanwhile, Ken Rutsky has switched to his sawed-off shotgun (segment 4) and shoots (segment 3). Shotguns shoots 4 times in a row, and one more target falls.
That’s a good start. Alas, in the bank, neither Vauban nor Sunfall manage to neutralize anyone. Worse, at the bottom of the map, Popeye Otaku, Gubisson and Baud start completely surrounded. Popeye and Baud have enough time to go prone, which makes them harder to hit (-30%) and also allows them to hide behind obstacles: the obstacle on the left is a hitch so it won’t cover much, but the one on the right is small wall that should stop everything. Alas, Gubisson is a slow mover and so never has an opportunity to dive: he is hit first by a pistol bullet, then by several pellets of a shotgun – killing him.
Seconds later, one of the shotgun-wielding townsfolk who has somehow climbed on the hitch shoots on Popeye, immediately killing him as well. The shooter does not even lose his balance.
The disaster continues: Baud, Ahab and Ken Rutsky are charged by angry townsfolk. Ahab and Baud manage to kill one each, but a lucky bullet finds Ken Rutsky’s head and he collapses to the ground. Shortly thereafter, Baud is hit by a shotgun through an obstacle, but not before himself killing an opponent who had carelessly climbed on the wall to his right.
Meanwhile, Sunfall and Vauban shoot repeatedly at point-blank range at the bank teller, either missing or inflicting minor wounds.
That’s the end of turn 1, and I killed 5 opponents (2 by Ken Rutsky, 2 by Ahab, 1 by Baud) and lost 4 men – so now it’s 4 against 15!
Turn 2
The first half of turn 2 is Vauban and Sunfall emptying their bullets on the hapless clerk on the bank while Ahab reloads his rifle and Abimelek finally finishes off the shotgun-wielding maniac walking tightrope on the hitch.
The second half of the turn is a lot less quiet, as the townsfolk converge on the last bandits. Two of them are shot, but Abimelek and Sunfall are hit and Ahab is thrown to the ground by a bullet in the leg.
We’re now 4 against 12, but with many wounded on my side. Can I save the situation? I am not very confident.
Turn 3
Abimelek continues to fight like a devil and shoots down yet another enemy. Meanwhile, Sunfall, kneeling behind a desk, takes careful aim at a target and shoots – click. Sunfall did not feel lucky that day.
And then a townsperson eliminates Sunfall with his shotgun. Vauban could not help his buddy, from his position his only possible target was the bank teller – which he finally killed!
Shortly thereafter, Ahab is shot in the guts and dies. That’s not the worse death however: a concerned citizen moves in diagonal and then goes all stabby-stabby on Abimelek:
Turn 4
Now it’s Vauban against 10 guys. It ends as expected, by the same shotgun that killed Sunfall.
Well, that’s the bloody end of the Sunfall-Vauban gang. Eleven townsfolk died in this bloody battle, but in two hundred years the town of Northfield, Minnesota, will surely be able to generate a small tourism revenue stream from the whole affair.
Looking back, I made several prioritization mistakes, but I don’t think the scenario is balanced: there are a lot of townsfolk with shotguns and with these they only need to be lucky once.
Ratings & Review
Six-Gun Shootout by Jeffrey A. Johnson, published by Strategic Simulations, USA
First release: March 1985 on Apple II
Genre: Squad Tactics
Average duration of a scenario: 15 minutes to almost an hour, depending on the scenario
Total time played : 4 hours
Complexity: Low (1/5)
Final Rating: ☆☆
Context – In 1985, Jeffrey Johnson was already a veteran of video games. He was one of the first hires (if not the first) of Automated Simulations in 1979 and so worked on most of the DunjonQuest titles. He seems to have left Automated Simulations in 1982, just as the company started heading in a more “casual” direction after the departure of Jon Freeman – a direction Johnson contributed to with the golf game Fore!. Johnson then disappeared for a few years before proposing Six-Gun Shootout to Joel Billings in late 1984 or early 1985 – alas the latter does not have any specific recollection of that event. However, the process must have gone very well, because to quote Billings: “ Jeff Johnson, eventually went to work for SSI and married our customer support manager“. The transition from “external dev” to “SSI staffer” must have happened in 1986, as he is then credited as “Game Developer” (i.e., “Game Producer” at the time) on Rings of Zilfin and Wizard’s Crown; Billings must have been delighted to have recruited an RPG specialist at a time when the genre was booming. He seems to have stayed in SSI until 1987-1988, and disappeared from digital history in 1995 after the game Stars!.
Six-Guns Shootout was most probably loosely inspired by Gunslinger (1985), a popular game by Avalon Hill where turns of 2 seconds of “real-time” are divided in the same short 5 segments – just like in Six-Guns Shootout. The rest of the ruleset is quite different though, probably for the better given how complex Gunslinger famously is.
Six-Guns Shootout was released in March 1985 on Apple II at $39.95 and then in May 1985 on both Atari and Commodore 64. The manual (credit: Leona Billings, Joel’s mother) came with an interesting essay on the gunslingers (“The American Gladiators“) by Joel’s father Robert – Leona and Robert were divorced, but were loving parents and according to Joel early stockholders of SSI.
Traits – Every other tactical game I can think of has a long “approach” part, where you try to detect the enemy or at the very least get into range. Six-Guns Shootout puts you directly in the middle of the eponymous shootout, with most of your characters (all! in some scenarios) in range of several hostiles. Add to this the extreme lethality of combat (which I like!), and the game really feels nervous, even twitchy – this is about target prioritization, not tactical movement.
The nervousness of the game is further enhanced by the very small time-frame represented by a “segment”: one shot, one change of posture (eg from prone to kneeling), two movements in clear terrain or one movement and clear terrain and one shot – it’s impossible to shoot and retreat in the same segment, so it’s rare not to have a target at any given moment. In theory, you could use the cover system to hide behind an obstacle only your weapon can penetrate, but while Six-Guns Shootout has a semi-complicated system of weapon penetration, only 7 obstacles are either penetrated by all weapons, or none so it’s rarely decisive.
So that’s on the pro side: the game is fast. However, I would not call it a great game. First, Six-Guns Shootout is technically a game from 1982 or 1983: no scroll, no sound and very basic graphics, without the endearing look of say Rebelstar Raiders. I am also rattled, for a game trying to be realistic, by how characters can stand (or go prone) on certain obstacles like cacti or hitches.
But more importantly, I am not enamored with the ruleset. The segment system is great to convey the chaos of those gunfights, but in any segment you will have (at best) the choice between shooting and moving – and so of course in many cases you are going to shoot. Even if you could find a cover instead, you’ll have to reveal yourself to shoot in the future anyway. This turns battles into very static affairs, and a large part of what make tactical games “fun” is removed: no scouting, no real support between characters, no tactical retreat, no chance to regroup and try a different approach.
The system still holds decently for the small battles (typically the Gunfight at the OK Corral), less so in mass combat, particularly given how cramped the one-screen battlefield is.
Speaking of battlefield, the game comes with 10 scenarios playable as both sides – this is generous for the era – but sadly unlike Galactic Gladiators there is no real campaign and no scenario editor; your only way to change a map is to use the “dynamite” (one per faction in each scenario) to fully remove a tile in the middle of the shootout. The only thing you can do is edit any character of any scenario (but not add or remove them), and there is even in the manual a chapter to play a “campaign mode” in which you manually add (or remove if badly wounded) stats to your characters over several battles. Still, I did not see the point of having a character fight the Dalton and then replacing Blondie in The Good The Bad and The Ugly.
The combination of high randomness in combat and lack of real campaign left me singularly uninterested in the fate of my characters: if they die, it would largely have been a matter of luck, not tactics – and just for one scenario anyway, so why stress about what I do?
Did I make interesting decisions? Yes: “Should I shoot the guy with the shotgun who will shoot me in two segments, or the one with the pistol that will shoot me this segment? Running away? Not an option in this game!
Final rating: ☆☆. Six-Guns Shootout has a fairly original ruleset, the gameplay is raw, almost arcade fun, but it has little staying power.
Ranking at the time of review: 38/182
Reception
Six-Gun Shootout received a good number of reviews, but surprisingly most refused to take a stance: Antic, Commodore Power Play, Compute! Gazette or even the Atari Computer Enthusiast simply described the game; they welcomed the original theme and genre, but I surmise did not really like the game itself. The only contemporary American review with a real opinion on the game is from Johnny Wilson in a Micro-Review in Computer Gaming World (September 1985). Wilson compares Six-Gun Shootout to Galactic Gladiators, and just like me regrets the lack of scenario building in Six-Gun Shootout, but otherwise he finds it the better game: “Six-Gun Shootout is a relatively simple, fast-moving and enjoyable game”. However, years later in 1990 and quite surprisingly, wargame-specialist Evan Brooks gave the game 4 stars, commenting:
A Western simulation, owing more to Hollywood than history, it is an easy-to-learn game and one which is still fun to play. Do not expect to learn any historical insights into the Old West. Just sit back and go along for the ride.
In France, Six-Gun Shootout received two reviews: one in Tilt (December 1986) in which they give the game a mediocre rating (“an interesting software that not everyone will like“) and one in Jeux & Stratégie (October 1985) which gave the game 4 stars (“not a classical wargame, but in any case a good game“).
Six-Gun Shootout sold 7000 copies, which was average for SSI’s wargames but way below the average SSI RPG release: Phantasie, released the same month, would sell almost 55 000 copies.
Next entry: back to Panzers!