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Life & Arts

Weak 'Samurai' not all it's cut out to be

by DEREK LANPHIER
The Daily Cougar

If you're a fan of totally ridiculous video games, you're in for a treat. If you've ever wanted to cut speeding bullets in half with a samurai sword, this is a game for you. Or if you just like cheap and silly games, Samurai Western is for you. The latest creation by Atlus, the creators of the marginally successful Way of the Samurai, the game has taken the samurai out of the East and dropped him in the Wild West.

Assuming the role of Gojiro Kiryu, players travel to the land of cowboys in order to "bring back justice to the Old West," or so says the back of the box. After that, there isn't much of a plot worth summarizing here. If you want a deep story line, don't play this game.

Game play is pretty simple: It's cowboys and Indians, with samurais instead of Indians. Your character runs frantically around on the screen while you press buttons at random to kill things. You can use your enemies as human shields and dodge and deflect bullets back into the enemies. Various styles of graphic stabbing is included.

And you better be good at the random button-pressing because a quarter of the time, the camera won't be centered on you. It gets stuck in the geometry of the game and can cause you to die because you can't see who is attacking you.

The artificial intelligence is pretty much nonexistent. Bad guys just shoot, shoot some more and eventually get stabbed by you. Bosses aren't any better, as they have simple patterns that take all of 30 seconds to figure out.

The game is pretty much all about stabbing and not getting shot. It's repetitive, but if you're a sucker for those button-mashing action games, that's not so bad.

Graphics are give-and-take. On one hand, the animation can be pretty sweet. The combos your character can pull off are full of eye candy -- that is, when the camera allows you to see it. Unfortunately, the muddy textures detract from the sweet animations. 

The sound is pretty good. The music is catchy with its combination of Eastern, Western and techno music. Voice acting isn't too bad, either, and the dialogue is humorous. The melodrama is entertaining in this game, as all the characters are totally over the top, but the script is poor. It's easy to tell the voice actors were begging for more to work with.

One interesting feature is that after the first level, the samurai meets up with a good cowboy, and if you have an extra controller, a friend can join in as him and shoot bad guys while you stab them. The camera only follows the samurai, even in two-player mode, so usually the first player is dragging the second player all around the level.

It would be unfair to say Samurai Western is a bad game; it definitely has its moments, both good and bad, but it really only appeals to the hardcore action gamers, old Japanese movie enthusiasts or people with a forgiving sense of humor. 

Samurai Western

Rated: M for Mature
Atlus
Verdict: Yee-Huh?

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