It amazes me that a game like this even exists but honestly I could say the same about many games. But as notorious this game is, it was actually fascinating reading into the backstory of this game.

This game was cancelled before it even released. It was one of six games featured in Penn & Teller's Smoke and Mirrors for the Sega CD.

Basically, they are two of the greatest entertainers of their time. They mix magic and comedy and perform it live, they're funny, they defy physics, they take jabs at bullshit, etc. They have been doing it for at least 40 years. The idea of a video game based off of them in the 90s was something that only they could have come up with.

The main reason why the game never released was because the company behind it filed for bankruptcy and shut down. But eventually it made its way onto the internet and has become a cult classic.

I also like the Full Motion Video sequences of Penn & Teller themselves.

One of my favorite Penn & Teller moments is where the two appeared on Hollywood Squares with motherfucking Gilbert Gottfried, the voice behind Iago from Disney's Aladdin, yeah no joke. And it was a really funny episode that featured a whopping 9 consecutive wrong answers.

It is a very funny watch. It's some of the dumbest shit I've ever seen in a game show.

https://youtu.be/iFMaPUtCi9o

But Desert Bus is a whole different story. This game is just asinine. But the worst offender is that everything in this game is deliberate. Penn & Teller made this game to take a jab at all the people who bitched about the controversy of violence in video games.

They decided "let's just make a game that is stupidly like reality and make doing the laborious busywork of real life into a video game." Now all we need is a video game where you can fucking do your taxes, but that might already exist.

The whole game is where you drive a bus. You drive, and drive, and drive, and drive..

Ocassionally you'll see a sign on the side of the road but that's pretty much it. There are no passengers on the bus to interact with, there are no other vehicles, there's no radio so you can listen to some music, and the road never turns. You can also push the B button to hear the sound of the bus door opens. That's.. something I guess.

Let's do some calculations. This bus is going from Tuscan, Arizona to Las Vegas, Nevada. And it doesn't go any faster than 45 MPH. Tuscan to Las Vegas is around 360 miles. 45 MPH for 360 miles equates to about 8 hours of driving.

This game is 8 hours long?? Jesus fucking Christ. Well maybe once this 8 hour journey is over maybe we can get some insane payoff for doing it.

.....

Wait, what's that? Nothing happens?
You mean we are stuck driving the bus infinitely with nothing happening throughout and with no reward afterwards?

Well actually something does happen after 8 hours of driving. You wanna know?

You get a point.

Yep. That's it. A singular, fucking point.

Supposedly Penn & Teller were going to have a contest where you sent them your high score, and whoever got the highest score would win a trip on an actual bus ride with the two masterminds themselves from Tuscan to Las Vegas, with a show there and whatnot. Which sounds awesome right? But that never happened sadly.

You can't pause the game by the way. The Start Button just blows the horn. And this is also intentional.
Also, if you stop moving the D-Pad, the bus will automatically veer off to the side of the road and get stuck in the sand. Then you have to wait for a tow truck to show up and tow the bus. All. The Way. Back.

So does that mean if you have been driving for 6 hours, you have to wait 6 hours for the game to start over? What the fuck.

Or you could just, you know, reset the game...

You just have to keep driving!! Jesus Christ, I wonder how many people have pissed themselves while playing this. You can't take bathroom breaks, you can't stop to grab food, you have to keep driving this damn bus. Imagine the amount of sensory deprivation from players sitting in front of the screen driving this shit for hours upon hours.

The fact that a game like this was cancelled and yet it made its way onto the internet and people have played it and even adapted it into an Atari 2600 game and even made a remake of it on Steam really speaks volumes of just how insufferable the experience is.

The people who played this fuckfest want you to suffer with them.

I can't imagine anyone playing this for more than 20 or 30 minutes. The farthest I've ever got was an hour, and that was for a livestream. And yet that hour felt like the longest hour of my entire life. You think you're playing the game for shits and giggles but then it turns into a horrific sensory deprivation induced nightmare. I see nothing but road and sand in my fucking dreams.

I mean you know it's bad when I got really bad car sickness after playing this game. I actually suffer from car sickness in real life. So imagine that. I get car sick just from playing this game.

This game is simply a health hazard, both physically and mentally.

Please send help.

1/10

imagine if super metroid was actually good.







and samus was a bug

Raphaël Colantonio’s decision to leave Arkane stemmed from wanting to get away from the bloated-ness and inefficiency of AAA game development – he often used the example of how chairs would take 2 days to model during the making of Prey 2017, while during the days of Arx Fatalis it was closer to 2 hours. So how’s his first experiment in scaling down to the indie realm gone? Pretty well, all things considered. I’ve felt for a long time now that Colantonio is one of the best game directors currently working and I’m happy to say that Weird West is another solid attestation to that, with the caveat that it takes a good while before it clicks.

For anyone who’s familiar with immersive sims, the most immediately offputting part about Weird West is its camera perspective. I almost fell prey to this myself, but once you become more comfortable with the game, you’ll start to realise that all the juicy emergent goodness that makes this design philosophy (or, if you dare, this genre) tick is still there, even if you’re not witnessing it from the same point of view as your character. More than once, I set off an unintended chain reaction of events via independent but interlinking gameplay systems that ended up revealing a new path through an area or which allowed me to complete a quest in a roundabout, unscripted way, and these sorts of organic, player-directed experiences are what Looking Glass Studios ultimately predicated the term upon in 1997. Where so many games popularly touted as living up to the definition just don’t, Weird West surely does.

Environmental interactivity arguably doesn’t quite approach the craziness of Prey 2017, but Weird West’s integration of status effects into its physics engine gives it a leg of its own to stand on. I’m a huge fan of how soaked containers dynamically fill up with water for loads of reasons, but special mention also goes to the sheer amount of stuff you can set on fire, because there’s nothing quite like accidentally burning down an entire farmstead or patch of forest in the process of fending off an ambush. I like how these properties are applied to character abilities too because of the room for experimentation it allows, especially when you combine several at once. I particularly enjoy secreting poison pools as the Pigman and then setting them alight with explosive shotgun shells to make a porky mini-nuke on demand, but the beauty of games like this is that I'll probably look back on a current favourite tactic like that and eventually think of it as rudimentary compared to what's possible when you dig deeper into its systems.

Weird West’s story is more interesting than it’s being given credit for on here, but I don’t blame anyone for tapping out before it gets to the point where you can say that. I get the need to ease people into an unorthodox setting with a vanilla premise, but Jane Bell’s narrative hook goes beyond vanilla and pivots itself on something that you as a player have no reason to care about. Jane might be fussing about where her husband is, but I’m not. Who is he to me? It runs the risk of driving a wedge between the player and their character, but the other four protagonists (especially the one immediately after Jane) more than make up for this in terms of intrigue and how elegantly they fill the “blank slate player avatar” role, albeit not quite as perfectly as Morgan Yu.

In terms of niggles, the movement comes to mind. Dishonored 1 and Prey 2017 have some of the most liberating, intrinsically satisfying movement in the medium – you explore every nook and cranny of Dunwall and Talos I not because you're told to, but because it feels so good to do it that you naturally want to. Despite the impressive size of its world, I never felt that same enticement in Weird West because its movement options are so paltry in comparison. And how’s about those character portraits not matching their models? Like, at all? I’m willing to chalk this up to a case of “small indie company please understand,” because I can’t imagine anyone actively wanted lean, bearded, grizzled veteran gunslingers to share the same in-game appearance as (oddly abundant) overweight, alcoholic Asian women. It’s true that this camera angle allows for some mental abstraction on the player’s part – Fallout 1&2, both big influences on Weird West, use one animation for loads of different stuff – but past a certain point, I feel like I’m being asked to deny what’s in front of my eyes. Or even what’s happening around me, sometimes, considering how often my companions would try attacking invincible children or be rendered immobile by an ankle-high step, the deadliest of all the west’s creatures.

In the grand scheme of things, though, issues like these are probably worth looking past. Immersive sims have been around for longer than I’ve been alive, and in that time, there's not been nearly as many breakout hits or unambiguous commercial successes as you'd assume from the notoriety of examples like Deus Ex or System Shock; we’re pretty fortunate to still be getting any new spins on the formula at all. And as a new spin on the formula, Weird West’s definitely an impressive first showing for WolfEye, but also one with more than a few holdovers of the days when its staff were still under the watchful eye of Bethesda’s investors – hopefully their newfound freedom permits them to become a bit bolder and weirder from here on out.