Hot Mods 03/04: Wild West Mods

03 Apr 2009 at 11:09:32 by Spanner Spencer

The Western isn’t so much a genre, as a concept. Forging new frontiers is, as Captain Kirk so boldly put it, is what the Western is all about.

And this is a powerful inspiration for video games, every bit as much as it has been for movies, TV series and even inventors. Whenever someone attempts to break new ground, push old boundaries or create new worlds, they’re participating in the long tradition of the Western.

When you look at the Western (dare I say it, the final frontier) in this way, it’s comparisons to the rogue mod programmer, blazing a trail in the barren code outside the vast territories of the commercial software houses, are easy to see. Modding is the Western frontier of the gaming industry, and a huge number of pioneers are setting up camp to pan for digital gold in its creeks and harsh wildernesses.

Of course, the Western’s still a concept synonymous with cowboys, pioneers and fortune seekers, and you don’t have to look far in the modding world to find plasma grenades being substituted for a trusty Colt six shooter or a bottle of Kentucky red eye with a flaming rag jammed in the neck.

So that’s what we decide to look at this week. To see the Western brought to life in every conceivable sense of the term.

Shotgun Sunrise

http://www.moddb.com/mods/shotgun-sunrise



There’s an area of dark fantasy fiction that pines for the Western way of life – the post apocalyptic wasteland. This wonderful (though depressing, admittedly) scenario is regularly prophesised to harken the return of the Western gunslinger, only he’ll be carrying a battered and rusted new form of high technology on his hip.

Half-Life 2 multiplayer mod Shotgun Sunrise flirts, in a most sublimely indelicate manner, with the idea of the post apocalyptic Western, in which a handful of cowboys attempt to save the remainder of humanity from the desert of the undead.

Circling the city in a beat up old truck are eight cowboys (or Rescuers), who must rush bravely into the town to restock on firepower and booze. The place is crawling with radioactive flesh eaters, of course, and your ramshackle old war horse of a truck is liable to break down the moment you try to set off again, forcing you and your comrades to fight their way across town and get to the ‘Shotgun Electrocombobulatory Power Facilitron’ to fix up the motor.

Rife with salacious humour and tonnes of manic action, Shotgun Sunrise is a firm favourite among mod gamers, and will undoubtedly appeal to anyone who laughed at that bit in Pulp Fiction when John Travolta accidentally blew that kid’s head off. Like me.

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