There are men who fear legends
But a man legends fear
He’s a four holstered reaper
Crying bullets, for tears
When a drought comes in justice
Bullets make good rain
When the heartache has dried up
Only time heals the pain
There’s a time for grievin’, and a time to just pray
There’s a time for forgivin’, but it’s not for today
You can hide sins from the gavel you can drown them in rum
When Silas Greaves find you, there’s nowhere to run
And time goes too slowly for the gunslinger’s eye
Till he’s buried his promise there’s no time to cry
There’s a time for greavin’, and a time to just pray
When Silas Greaves finds you it’s the time you must pay
Hello and welcome to my next LP. Today we’re starting Call of Juarez Gunslinger. The Call of Juarez series is a bunch of FPSes taking place in and around the old west, and at least one of them is so awful it basically killed the series. None of them matter with regards to Gunslinger, it may as well be it’s own stand alone title. It has one very super minor connection to then first Call of Juarez but it doesn’t actually matter so who cares. So, what is Gunslinger? It’s the story of Silas Greaves, a bounty hunter who’s come to this local pub for a drink. The patrons, specifically a young kid named Dwight, seems super interested in hearing a bunch of his cool and awesome stories about how he’s killed many people. So hey, it’s time to sit and listen to the tales of an old man. But of course, the question is…are the stories true or not? It’s a really fascinating framing story, and this game does a lot with it.
So, thread rules. Don’t spoil stuff, please. This game’s story is Actually Good so that matters. Please don’t spoil some of the mechanical stuff as well, it’s more fun for people to see it fresh. I’ve beat the game before, but some people watching may not of so don’t ruin the experience for them. That being said, DO feel free to spoil how the real world people good ole Greaves interacts with have their lives go. One of the features of this LP is that I’m going to be giving little snippets of information about said people, and in fact one of the collectables in game gives historical information as well, so that’s something we can all enjoy.
Since this is my first LP here at the LP Zone, I’m gonna go over some of the more specific Zodi based stuff. Updates are Monday and Friday mornings for my time zone (that’s mountain time if curious). I typically don’t keep a big old list of every single update in the OP, though I’ll add a spot for the video playlist if you guys think it’ll be a good idea. I’m still getting used to the standards you’re probably used to! I also put the video length underneath each video so that you know if it’s gonna take you an hour to watch it, a small thing that I think is quite helpful for people strapped for time. My videos are subtitled instead of voiced, so sorry folks but you don’t get to hear this girl talk about video games. It’s something I’m working towards, but I’m just not in a good situation for audio recordings and the like. So, without further adieu, let’s begin Call of Juarez Gunslinger.
Zodi Plays: Call of Juarez Gunslinger [1] The Shootout At Stinking Spring
Video Length: 16:12
NOTE: This and video 2 are going to have some…graphical issues. No one noticed until today so I’m sorry for that. Talk about a good first impression…I am again really sorry for this, it makes both me and the game look bad. I’m guessing it’s something to do with my video processing, I’ve never put something into 60 frames per second before…blagh.
We begin this episode setting up the framing story. Silas Greaves steps into a bar run by ole Ben, and patroned by a few interesting fellows. An older man named Steve, a middle aged man and eternal skeptic named Jack, a show girl named Molly, and a little kid named Dwight. After some prodding, they get Silas to tell them some stories, specifically from the start of his career. And so begins our story, Silas riding with Billy the Kid at the climactic moment in history where Billy was finally caught.
So, gameplay wise the game…is an FPS. It’s a pretty good one, though it suffers from the problem of “are you using iron sights? Good you can actually hit things”. It really wants you to iron sight your guns, and that’s kind of a thing. You start with a revolver, basically just ye olde pistol from any old FPS…though it only holds six shots because…I mean it’s a revolver. Later on we get a ranger, which is like the classic revolver type weapon you’d get in regular FPSes, and the differentiation between the two is actually kinda weird when you think about it. But eh, it works. The final gun we get this episode is the rifle. It’s basically just a sniper rifle, going off classic FPS stuff, but no scope because this is the wild west, son.
Anway, let’s talk about the first “thing” that makes this game stand out a bit, mechanically. We have a little gauge of concentration and if we activate it, time slows, enemies get outlined in red, and we can quickly dispatch all our foes. It’s a pretty cool mechanic. The other thing that sort of sets the game apart is the Sense of Death. Basically, in certain cutscenes (and in regular gun fights if we just get shot to pieces) time slows and we can dodge a bullet that is certainly going to cause us big problems. It’s pretty cool.
After shooting out way to the old abandoned farm house Billy’s held up in, we get a little shooting gallery segment that’s pretty neat, then get told to get the horses so we can escape this near onslaught of baddies. We do so, and end up in the one final thing that makes this game stand out from other FPSes, beyond it’s story and the two previously mentioned things. Gun duels. We meet the sheriff that will eventually capture (and kill) Billy the Kid, Pat Garrett. Duels are interesting, though in this one we only care about focusing on the target. In regular duels you need to pay attention to both your focus, and the speed of your hand. It’s pretty complicated, an elaborate juggling of mechanics, and to top it all off if you draw first you get less points to level yourself up because it’s not honourable. Which makes a degree of sense, considering that it shows you’re skilled enough to get drawn on, and still win. In that sense the level up system and the kind of ridiculous skills you can unlock make sense, since this is a story Silas is telling to people. They’re more likely to believe his impressive skills if he actually tells the story well enough to support it. It’s neat. But yes, we shoot Pat Garrett dead. Except, no we don’t.
Turns out that was just a lie from the Dime Novel that Dwight had. Silly kid. Naw…history isn’t so dramatic. We get popped in the face and sent to jail along with Billy and the rest. So it goes. I hope you enjoyed, and I’ll see you all next time for chapter 2 of Silas Greave’s story.
Hey it’s time for a history lesson! Specifically, we’re going to be talking about Pat Garrett, the sheriff that captured Billy the Kid, and would later go on to kill him.
That’s basically it. I looked up a lot of info on this guy, and the way the game treats him as this big shot cool guy that everyone hated, it seems…pretty unjustified. Pat Garrett was a sheriff that did his job. He might of killed a man once over some goat farming but that’s a murder that never got solved. But that’s basically it. His entire life was seemingly devoted to hunting down Billy, and in the end he did catch him…only for Billy to make one of the most famous jailbreaks in history. He went after, and one day he found him. Garrett was knocking on doors asking if Billy was in town, and Billy answered with a “Who is it? Who is it?” in Spanish. Garrett recognized the voice and shoot him dead through the door. Later he’d go on to have a book on Billy’s life ghost written for him and apparently it was a pretty shitty book. The last thing people know about Garrett is…he may of gotten killed in a conspiracy by some land barons to get access to the land he owned. Huh. What a way to go.
And since we have the time since…let’s be fair, there isn’t much to talk about with Garrett, let’s take a look at our good friend Billy.
Much like what the game says, Billy the Kid (born Henry McCarty, known mostly as William H. Bonney) was a participant in New Mexico’s “Lincoln County War”, which was basically just a giant turf war between gangs and the people caught in the middle. Billy joined the side of the so called Regulators, and after the five day siege of the Battle of Lincoln, the Regulators where scattered. This lead to Pat Garrett being appointed sheriff, and thus the hunting of Billy and the other surviving Regulators. The war didn’t do anything other than further destabilize the area, and Billy continued on with his outlaw-ering after the dust had settled. It was finally at the siege of Stinking Springs that he was caught, though Billy made a rather daring escape that extended his life by a year. He asked to use the latrine and on the way TO it, he slipped his cuffs and beat Jim Bell, one of the deputies of Lincoln, with the chain. He managed to take his gun, and shot Jim Bell dead. With the ankle cuffs still on he then proceeded to get back into the sheriff’s office, stealing the shotgun of the other deputy, Bob Ollinger, and shoot him to death with it. More of good ole Bob next time, funnily enough. After dealing with the two deputies, Billy axed his ankle cuffs off, found a horse, and ran off into the sunset. Legend says he was singing as he left.
Also, here is ShneekeyTheLost’s massive list of cool and interesting information on the guns and other assorted weaponry of the Wild West.
[details=Summary]> Okay, having gone back and watched the actual first episode, color me actually impressed.
The revolver, actually specifically the Colt .45 ‘Peacemaker’, was an iconic revolver because it was a very reliable piece that rarely broke down, maintenance was easy, speed-loaders made reloading very rapid for those skilled in the usage, very portable, and very good accuracy for a handgun.
This particular revolver was made specifically for the Civil War, as a primary sidearm, where it proved highly effective. But in 1894, when Colt came out with a .38 revolver that was double-action (no need to *pull the hammer back manually), the army switched to that, and thousands of .45 chambered Colt revolvers were sold to the civilian market. Which is why this particular revolver became so famous. There were lots of them, and it was a damn good gun.
And, for once, either by sheer accident or someone actually doing the research, 1910 is the perfect time to introduce a hero using said revolver, because that was the height of its usage in the ‘wild west’.
The rifle, judging from the fact that it is loaded from a ‘trapdoor’ instead of the stock, is probably either a Henry or the Winchester Model 1873. My bet’s on the latter, personally. This was the ‘rifle that won the west’, as it is touted, and one of the better repeaters out there. The Spencer packed a bigger punch and was ridiculously over-engineered for reliability, the Winchester had a higher rate of fire. Historically, it fired .44-40 rounds, rather than the .45 the Colt Revolver used, meaning ammo was not interchangeable between these two weapons. Having said that, these days, you can find replicas that do fire the .45.
And again, a very popular rifle in this time period. Oh, and don’t worry Zodi, there actually was a sighted version of the Model 1873 designed for sharpshooting. No scope, of course, but the ring sight was the best there was to offer in the Wild West era.
Of course, it could also be a Winchester Model 1876, which was chambered for .45 (albeit the .45-75 or .45-60) which also had a storied past, being issued to the Texas Rangers, and being the personal choice of the ever popular Theodore Roosevelt.
I also notice that in the window you were leaning out of, there was a double-barreled shotgun, which was quite a popular close-quarters weapon of choice.
The ‘ranger revolver’ is probably supposed to be a Colt Walker, the most powerful blackpowder repeating revolver ever made. Created by the combination of Texas Ranger Captain Walker (And yes, Chuck Norris stole the name from him when he did ‘Walker, Texas Ranger’, being one of the most famous Rangers in history, short of the ‘lone ranger’) and Samuel Colt (creator of aforementioned Peacemaker). While it used a slightly smaller .44 caliber round, the extended 9" barrel and better rifling gave it a previously unheard of 100’ range for a revolver. The gun used the very powerful .44-45 round, and was strong enough to take down a rider’s horse at close range. Later models reduced the barrel length down to a more reasonable 7.5" and reduced the amount of powder per cartridge due to a persistent problem with the cylinders rupturing due to poor metallurgy of the day. Then again, Colt told Walker that he shouldn’t put more than 50 grain of gunpowder in it, and Walker insisted on 60 grain, which was cut back to 50 when the Dragoon model came out.
It was known for accuracy and stopping power, albeit slower rate of fire than the Peacemaker. It also became an iconic representative of ‘no such thing as too much gun’ sort of weapon.
Now then, this shotgun was a little bit harder to identify, but since it called itself a ‘Whitney’, I’m betting it’s based on the Remington-Whitmore 1875 Double-Barreled Shotgun. Now, to give you an idea of the stopping power of this weapon, let’s say it’s loaded with double-ought buck. That means it is spraying out 18 pellets each as big as a .38 round. There’s a reason shotguns like this are occasionally known as ‘Hallsweepers’. Mind you, there’s a LOT of exaggeration about the size of the spread of a shotgun and the maximum range thereof, although the barrel length has a great deal to do with that. But this game seems to actually be fairly accurate that the spread is roughly the size of a soccer ball.
With two independent triggers, you could fire left or right barrel or both simultaneously, if you want. The break-forward breech-loading action was revolutionary for the day, and really helped shotguns come into their own in the Wild West.
Now, looking at the barrel length, it’s pretty clear that this shotgun is designed as what is now called a ‘Coach Gun’. You know the term ‘riding shotgun’? Yea, this is the gun that literally coined that phrase, although it didn’t turn up until about a decade after the setting we are in. Also known as a ‘Messenger Shotgun’, this is a general class of shotguns with a shorter 18"-24" barrel, typically double-barrel breech-loader, designed to be very handy on the tight quarters of the seat next to the driver. When you are bouncing around at a gallop trying to get away from the bad guys, loading’s a pure bi… er… pain in the neck, so you had to have something you could load quickly and easily, and a longer barrel would get in the way.
This was a HIGHLY effective weapon for what it was intended for: close-quarters mayhem. Mind you, the lack of range of a shotgun is something of a Hollywood myth, as is the size of the spread of a shotgun, but this is a weapon which could put down damn near anything from point-blank to around fifty to seventy five yards. The common tactic was to shoot at the horse, this gun was quite strong enough to cripple or kill a horse, regardless of where on the horse you hit it. This would cause the horse to tumble, taking the rider with it, and causing an obstacle for the guy behind HIM trying to get into said coach to deal with.
In the modern day, we have largely moved to pump-action and semi-auto shotguns which can accept magazines, but this is another iconic ‘Wild West’ weapon that I am glad made an appearance. If you claim that the Winchester '73 was the ‘gun that won the west’, this was the one that tied the west together by protecting the stagecoaches delivering mail (hence ‘messenger gun’) and other goods (see also: Wells Fargo).
On the topic of horses: I certainly agree with you that it is absolutely silly that he wouldn’t grab a horse to get out of there, however there IS actually some logic behind this.
First off, a guy on a horse is actually a surprisingly easy target to hit, and all you need to do is hit the horse and you are in for a bad tumble that could very well kill, or at least cripple, a man. Also, horse-stealing was Serious Business back then. In fact, to this day, in the state of Texas, it is customary at Western Riding events to have a noose looped over the front of each stall, because the law was: If a man tries to steal your horse, you are within your rights to hang him from the nearest tree’. This is because leaving a man stranded with no means of transportation was considered to be essentially a slow and torturous death sentence, considering how few and far between fresh water sources were.
Fun fact: this is actually where Texas laws concerning car theft and even auto repossession are based on.
Another note about the shotgun:
Unlike the Colt .45 ‘Peacemaker’ or the Winchester '73 repeating rifle, it wasn’t the particular model that was so famous, it was the class of weapon. There were many different types of shotguns all built to roughly the same design: a shotgun that was mobile and could quickly and easily be fired from a bouncing stagecoach seat while perched precariously less than two feet from the pounding hooves of the horses pulling said stagecoach.
Unlike the '73, which was a precision instrument that required a high degree of quality control, a shotgun is far more simple, but by no means ‘elegant’, weapon. It is a smoothbore weapon, meaning no rifling in the barrel, which made it FAR easier to produce en masse, with far looser quality control checks. Because let’s face it, your target is going to probably be close enough that you can smell his halitosis. At that range, picking off dimes at extreme range is unnecessary. You just need to put a cloud of buckshot where the bad guy is going to be in a moment. Which means there were a whole LOT of people making them, and a whole LOT of people buying them. And they were much less expensive than the '73 or the Colt .45 was.
The Coach Gun in general, however, was an iconic weapon of the era, to the point that if you look at the Wells Fargo logo, you can still see the driver, and the fellow next to him with this shotgun, as a mark of pride at their ability to run loads of gold through some of the most lawless treks of land to carve a name for themselves in the financial industry which stands firm even to this day.
The Apache having a gun, rather than a bow and arrow, is quite accurate by this time, they had largely converted from archery to the repeating rifle. In fact, they also preferred the Winchesters, and the famous Geronimo himself was found with a Winchester 1876 in his hand. Also used by Teddy Roosevelt, it was the .45 cal rifle of choice for many. I suppose this one used a '73 like you did for the ammo to be interchangeable, which is easy enough to assume, given the apache itself literally fell out of nowhere.
And now, the Gatling Gun.
Now, a fellah like that actually owning a Gatling Gun stretches believability to the point of incredulity. Unlike the '73 and the Colt .45, which were being surplussed out to the civilian market in job lots after the Civil War was over, these babies were still strictly military hardware at this point. It would be the equivalent of someone in the modern day owning an M2 .50 cal heavy machine gun. But, considering the sort of story we’re listening to, I’m willing to hand-wave that little point in favor of Rule of Cool.
The next point is that this is really a crew-served weapon, meaning you need more than one person to operate it effectively. You’ve got one on the crank, one doing the reloads, and one communicating with your forward observers to aim the damn thing. However, for purposes of this story, let’s go ahead and assume that the delays are because he is reloading himself.
Now, the Gatling Gun fired all up 45-70 Gov’t rounds, much like the Winchester '76 did. Hand cranked, so it technically wasn’t a fully-automatic machine gun, this was the next-best thing, and it tore chunks out of formations which were the norm at the time, as armies still went to Napoleonic tactics clear up to WW I, where the machine gun put a definitive end to massed infantry formations in a very bloody manner.
While good at putting lots of lead downrange, accuracy against individual targets sucked, especially not without a forward observer working with you. And with all that cover? It was as good a place as the hero could find to take on a weapon like that. It was used effectively in the Civil War at the Siege of St. Petersburg, and were also mounted on naval ships, but it really wasn’t used all that much by the American military until after the Civil War was over and the concept was proved to them.
Famously, General Custer explicitly did NOT take his Gatling Guns with him as they would ‘slow him down’ (they could be hitched to a horse to have roughly the same speed as a stagecoach, so I don’t know why he thought they would slow him down all that much, but the man was never known for rationality) to his now infamous Last Stand at Little Bighorn. Had he done so, it might’ve turned out a bit differently, or at least made them pay more for it.
Okay, let’s talk about the category of weapons generally known as a ‘sawed off shotgun’. Now they fall under the category of SBS (Short Barreled Shotguns) and are illegal to own in most jurisdictions, because they’re too easy to conceal and too lethal in close quarters. And to understand why, we need to get into just a little bit of science. Not much, I promise, and this is the fun ‘blow things up’ kind of science, not the boring ‘yadda yadda yadda’ kind.
Now, first off, the barrel of a gun is really important in several ways, especially back then. You see, the bullet takes off because you’ve got gunpowder, which burns hot and fast, compressed behind the lead slug. So, as the burning exothermic reaction causes expansion, that expansion is what pushes the bullet forward. Now, in a rifle, this is important, because this is also what causes it to engage the rifling grooves around the barrel, but even in a smoothbore, the longer the barrel, the more of the powder burns, and the more power you get at the end of the muzzle, and the more accurate it is going to be. Particularly with a shotgun, a longer barrel means you have less spread.
With a sawed-off shotgun, you’ve got more spread, and slightly less power. However, make no mistake, anyone trying to use one as a pistol is going to end up with a broken wrist or arm, because no man born on earth is going to be able to handle the recoil from that bad boy without a second hand and some kind of brace. Having said that, you can conceal one quite readily under that duster, making it a surprise weapon. I notice that they are using a double-barreled sawed off shotgun, which I suppose is not entirely out of the question, but unusual.
Basically, this thing is designed for Close Quarters Combat, with an optimal range out to about twenty five or thirty five yards tops. It is slow, clumsy, break-action, and hard to aim when compared to something like a Peacemaker, but there is absolutely zero chance that anyone hit by one in center of mass is ever going to get up again, particularly in THAT day and age with the medical assistance available to them.
The ‘pistol grip’ sawed off shotgun does exist, but they’re significantly harder to handle the recoil with, and far less common because they’d need to be made custom. A classic ‘sawed off shotgun’ is just that: a shotgun that had six inches to a foot of the barrel literally sawed off, which means it’s still got its stock and grip.
tl;dr version: The way he used that weapon was completely impossible by modern physics. You don’t use a SBS like you do a handgun, unless you’re built even bigger than Arnold Schwarzenegger. Yes, they exist, yes they were relatively common in that day and age, but they were never used as pistols by any stretch of the imagination. They were used much the same way a rifle or regular shotgun was used, just in tighter quarters and more easily concealed. This is the least realistic weapon our hero uses, by a good margin.
TNT, or Trinitrotoluene, is a relatively new substance for the era our intrepid hero is adventuring in. It was designed primarily as a means of blasting through rock for putting the railroads through mountains and such.
Using it as a weapon, as depicted? EXTREMELY unwise. Not only do you have things like ‘minimum safe distance’ to worry about, fumbling around with a lighter and a highly explosive substance in the middle of a firefight (good luck with that), and other practical matters like that… you also have to worry about shrapnel, ESPECIALLY in a lumber mill. TNT goes off, turns the dude it is sitting under into Chunky Salsa, and turns the lumber around it into projectiles. You know what you call a foot long splinter being hurled at 60MPH? Unpleasant to be hit by. And that kind of stuff would be flying all OVER the place.
You could use it as an ambush. Plant some TNT under a bridge, and setting it off as the bad guys ride on it? Perfectly fine. But tossing it as a grenade-like weapon? Never.
Now let’s talk about shooting it out of the air. In a word: Nope.
You see, funny thing about TNT, it’s surprisingly stable stuff. The fuse is actually not what sets the stuff off, by the way. You can actually burn a stick of dynamite and not go off, by weight, it’s mostly sawdust. The trick is that the fuse leads to a gunpowder charge, which then sets off the TNT, otherwise it won’t have enough gumption to go off.
So shooting it out of the air? Other than the practical impossibility of hitting a target that small moving that rapidly through the air, shooting the damn thing won’t really do much to it, unless it hits the powder charge in which case you’ve got even odds of it actually being disarmed because the powder charge no longer has sufficient pressure to detonate.
The other ‘fun’ problem with TNT is ‘sweating’. Basically, you’ve got a variant of Nitroglycerin mixed in sawdust there. You remember that stuff? VERY sensitive contact explosive? Yea, when it sits for too long, the stuff can ‘sweat’ out to the surface, making for an EXTREMELY unstable boom just waiting to happen. Even something as innocuous as a thrown pebble could set off the whole supply with devastating results. So, say, you’ve got a pack of TNT in your saddle pouch for a few months, and it starts sweating… the next time you spur your horse into moving, the jostling could easily set the damn stuff off. Game over. [/details]