American Laser Games takes you back in time to the old west where you find out that you are the last Bounty Hunter around. There are four outlaws that are wanted Dead or Alive: Nasty Dan, El Loco, Handsome Harry, and The Cactus Kid. You will go after each outlaw individually with your six-shooter and sometimes a shotgun. You must remain alert at all times in order to survive. Every once in a while you will experience a fast draw between you and Wes Flowers, a renowned world champion in this field. He is out to protect the four outlaws that you are after, so be weary of him. During a draw, you gun will remain empty until the signal is given. You then must reload and shoot quickly, otherwise you will be shot!
The game's graphics which are in standard VGA are quite good and were filmed with the assistance of Old Tucson Studios in an Old Tucson setting. This same location was used in a few famous movies such as Tombstone, Geronimo, Rio Bravo, Lighting Jack and Posse, providing a real old western town setting.
The sound for the game is also good as long as you have a 100% compatible Sound Blaster card. No support is given for other cards, so a person may end up without any sound at all. Since there is no text in the game, the sound is important so that a person can hear what is being said. The dialogs are quite funny to listen to and as long as you are a good shooter, you shouldn't get bored of hearing them too soon. Otherwise, you can simply shoot the screen when a dialog you have heard before starts and you will move on to the next screen.
Gameplay is accomplished with the mouse or the GAMEGUN. We don't have a GAMEGUN here, so I was unable to test the game with it. But I do have a mouse! The mouse moves a pointer on the screen which is your sight on the gun. You aim with it and fire using the left mouse button. To reload your gun (after six shots you must reload) to simply bring the pointer down to the bottom right hand corner of the video screen. The pointer will show as a gun pointing down, and you click the right mouse button to reload the gun. In that same corner is shown the number of bullets left in your gun and the number of lives out of three that are left. The bottom center of the screen has your score, while the left corner is where you select the main menu. The main menu allows you to start a new game, load a game, continue the present game, save the current game, and select the number of players (one or two). Note that a two player game can only be played using two GAMEGUNs.
I found the game to be quite fun, but one almost has to know where to shoot in advance. After playing for awhile, you begin to know where to expect outlaws to show up. Shooting a little to the left or right of an outlaw seems to count as hitting them, so a little error is ok. Other scenes required the shot to be sent just before you even see the outlaw, which I thought was a little unfair, but then, maybe my video card is a little slow.
The game installs quite easily and takes up only 240 Kb of hard drive space.
386 DX-33 MHz or higher, 486 DX-33 or higher recommended
Memory - 565Kb free,
MS-DOS 5.0 or later,
Hard drive required,
Double speed CD-ROM drive or faster,
256-color VGA video graphic card (for VGA version),
Microsoft mouse and 100% compatibles, or PC GAMEGUN.
Creative Labs Sound Blaster and 100% compatibles.
American Laser Games,
4801 Lincoln Rd. NE,
Albuquerque, NM 87109
Technical Support: 1-800-863-4263
Information & Orders: 1-800-880-1718
Overall: 83%
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