Gun

Pull the trigger on Quickdraw while your horse is at full gallop and the world slows to a crawl, the reticle drifts, and you can put three rounds into three riders before the saddle settles. That one move carried most of Neversoft's 2005 western. The studio had spent years on Tony Hawk, and the fingerprints show: a combo-friendly rhythm, a scoring sensibility applied to gunfights, and a control scheme that rewards you for keeping momentum rather than crouching behind cover.

Colton White's revenge story is the spine, and it is short — most players see the end in six or seven hours. What it lacks in length it makes up for in cast. Thomas Jane plays Colton, with Kris Kristofferson, Ron Perlman, Lance Henriksen and Brad Dourif filling out a frontier full of men who sound like they have already decided how this ends. The dialogue is pulpier than the performances deserve, but the voice work keeps a fairly standard tale of massacre and buried gold from collapsing into parody.

The open country between Dodge City and the mountains is sparse by modern standards and that is partly the point. You ride, you get ambushed, you take a bounty contract or run a Pony Express delivery against the clock, you sit down to a hand of poker. Side work is light but varied enough to justify the detours, and the world is small enough to cross without the journey becoming an errand. Hunting is here too, and skinning animals for upgrades felt novel at the time in a way it no longer does.

It looks its age. Textures are muddy, the draw distance betrays the hardware, and the horse handles like a vehicle with bad suspension rather than an animal. The shooting, though, holds up better than almost anything else from the period, because Quickdraw gives every encounter a release valve and because the weapon feedback has real weight — the shotgun in particular lands like a dropped anvil.

It arrived two years before the genre's bigger western statements and reads now as the rough sketch that proved the territory was worth settling. Short, violent, occasionally beautiful when the sun goes down over the plains, and entirely unembarrassed about being a B-picture with a very good gun in its hand.