The Game: Get out there and draw! Your cowboy faces off against another player, or the computer, in a fight to see who can draw their gun the fastest – and who can run away the fastest! (Magnavox, 1979)
Memories: This strange, slow-moving slice of the wild west seems eerily similar, in a few respects, to War Of Nerves. Take away the robot armies, add a couple of six-shooters, and you’ve got Showdown in 2100 A.D. (a title derived from Magnavox’s attempt to make the gunfighting game family-friendly by explaining that the combatants are, in fact, robots – welcome to Westworld!). It’s also the Odyssey2 edition of the classic arcade shootout game, Gun Fight.
Two really amusing elements never fail to make me chuckle when thinking about Showdown.
- Bullets move really slow. Or maybe the “robots” move really fast. Whichever it is, it’s not impossible to avoid getting splattered by your opponent.
Bullets don’t kill robots. Robots kill robots. Well, not really – if your gunfighter is hit, he seems to spin around instead of falling down or doing anything else that one might associate with being a recipient of gunfire.
I’m not even going to mention the teeny tiny trees you’re supposed to hide behind…