One era that game companies always seem to want to go back to is the Western. Perhaps it's memories on the part of 40-something programmers or suits of watching John Wayne movies, or reading dime novels, or playing cowboys and indians, perhaps it's the feeling that there are "wondeful stories to tell", the same sort of stories that for a long while kept hollywood studios spinning out cowboy movie after cowboy movie after cowboy movie.

Perhaps, too, it's the feeling that the scenery is "right" for it somehow - after all, it's very easy to skin in a pair of six-shooters or a shotgun into existing FPS engines, replace the scenery of a post-apocalyptic world with a western saloon, and allow the player to blast everything in sight.

Sadly, so far we're lacking in these titles. For all that it was enjoyable, Darkwatch didn't really give players an "old west" feel to it, and the horseback sequences were plain wrong. Activision were promising to rectify this with Gun, which was supposed to be relatively period authentic, good storyline, and the "feel" of a western.

What they delivered was a badly constructed mess that couldn't decide what it wanted to be.