As a PS2 owner, I'm thrilled to see top-notch, legendary FPS games like Deus Ex, Half Life, Quake and Unreal Tournament living large on Sony's big platform. Somehow, in the rush to convert winning PC titles to PS2 and develop new PS2 shooters like Red Faction and Timesplitters, the FPS fervor has even spilled over to PSone. We've got at least 2 or 3 FPS and gun games landing this Fall, which could have summed up the annual output for most of the PSone's life. (Okay, it was just the PlayStation back then.)

Somebody obviously forgot to tell Ubi Soft that cowboys are just so not P.C. anymore after the whole Indian thing. Maybe they all were going through a Gunsmoke phase when they decided to work on Gunfighter, subtitled The Legend of Jesse James. The style of game here, as gun games go, is somewhere between Point Blank and your average free-roaming FPS. No walking, exploring or jumping around here, just episodic shooting matches. The story plays out and you watch the camera slide through whatever setting you happen to be in, presumably through the eyes of Jesse James. When Jesse gets in a tight spot, he'll hunker down behind the nearest cover (notice how I slip into cowboy vernacular here), you'll get a 'Wait' signal and then carte blanche to blast away at the bad guys. The graphics are actually not half bad, and don't keep you from getting into the mood or the story. What really puts the cherry on the Old West sundae is the honky-tonk, out of tune piano jangling tunes and other period music. Gunfighter proves without a doubt that hearing is at least half of believing. Sweaty banditos groan when plugged by a well place slug, and shout at you from behind cover. It all just works together well.

I'm at least a casual historian where Jesse James is concerned, and I seem to remember he had a brother, Frank. Frank is nowhere to be found in this game, replaced apparently by the more notorious and handsome Cole Younger. In reality, Cole rode with the James Gang after serving with Jesse in the Civil War, and ended up leaving both of his brothers dead in prison after a failed bank robbery and massacre in Northfield, MN. Sure, it's more exciting to have Jesse and Cole (at least by their surnames a reasonable facsimile of the James-Younger gang) play off one another in Gunfighter, instead of making a Wild West equivalent of the beaches at Normandy. And, while a little videogame rewrite of the history books may infuriate an already livid Joe Lieberman, if we're going to be a nation of blood-hungry, nihilistic malcontents, who cares whether we know our history?

Getting into the action doesn't take long. Jesse and Cole ride into town to convince the girl Jesse loves to come with them, but strangely enough the den of iniquity she calls her 9-to-5 is crawling with desperadoes and thugs. The story eventually reveals them as henchmen of Jack Carson, a lawman who hung up his badge along with his morals, ethics and good credit rating. With Cole injured and your girl Zee in Carson's unwashed hands, you'll take up Jesse's gun and clean up the town, the hills, the train, the mine and the town again. That town is just lousy with banditos! Each stage is made up of many small scenes where you stop and blast away a few waves of bad guys before moving on. Each stage has a countdown clock that is pretty generous, but if you run out of time you'll go back to the beginning. This discourages those folks who might choose to stay under cover too long. Jesse can take 4 bullets before giving up the ghost, and you'll see 4 Aces at the bottom of the screen to represent health. Shooting a Tin of Beans can restore one Ace, and shooting a Pocket Watch adds a few ticks to the timer. Find and shoot a wanted poster, and you'll even get an extra continue. You'll want to spend the majority of your time blasting bad guys, and of course the bosses who show up now and again. The bosses are especially fun, and after you defeat a guy with a Gatling Gun, you have a chance to take over his gun and feel the power. Nice!

Besides the main Story Mode, Gunfighter offers Arcade and Sub-Games Mode. Apparently, Ubi Soft chooses to deprecate the use of 'minigame' verbage and promote the more Nietschian 'sub-games,' but what the Sub-Games Mode amounts to is a series of 'shooting gallery' minigames built on themes of the main game. You get 4 different areas in which to practice aim and speed, and a fifth for the showdown with Carson. Arcade is really just a chance to choose a chapter or stage you played in Story and practice or relive the thrill. It's a shame Ubi Soft didn't allow for some kind of 2-Player option, even if it had just been in Sub-Game Mode, because the 1-Player experience is fun but has limited replay appeal.

Making good use of cover, it's not inconceivable that a great player would blow right through without using even one continue. If Gunfighter feels a little simple, it's probably because it doesn't require the complexities of moving and shooting that some of us have mastered after hours of fragging in multiplayer online deathmatches. Folks who enjoyed the Point Blank games might see this as more high pressure, but Gunfighter enjoys a nice middle ground between static shooting gallery games and frantic deathmatch titles. Not so difficult that it won't be fun for any schmo with a GunCon, but not so easy that veteran FPS fans wouldn't sit down and enjoy themselves.

People complain about FPS engines even when graphics are beautiful, so you can imagine the scorn your average PC gamer might heap on Gunfighter for looking exactly like the PS title it is. We're all used to the limitations of the PS in drawing these kind of 3D environments, and since the game moves you automatically through areas, nobody is likely to complain about awkward controls. The only controls are your trusty trigger finger and a finger to hit the button that brings you out of cover to begin shooting. Gunfighter even includes the option to have ducking reversed, so you start exposed and have to put yourself under cover. Masochists or extremely good shots may choose this just to see how long they can survive without cover. Those Gatling Gun areas may prove difficult, though...

Calibrating the GunCon is done through a simple interface, and I found the default configuration was almost adequate. Seeing the cursor on-screen makes things easy, and not having to worry about enemies coming from anywhere but right in front of you removes a lot of the pressure when lining up shots. Every time you duck under cover, you'll reload your six-gun. This works well, but requires more of a break in the action than the 'shooting offscreen' method we're used to from other light-gun titles. Once you're used to ducking and coming back up, it's really no big deal.

PS2: I noticed some welcome smoothing in areas after I chose the 'smooth' options for the PS driver on my PS2. Load times aren't much of a problem, but things did feel generally faster moving between areas with the 'fast' option selected.

This is light entertainment, but a well done piece of work. There just aren't enough cowboy games, if you ask me. Cowboys made lots of people in Hollywood very rich, so why shouldn't videogame folks cash in? There could be much worse gaming experiences out there than to sit down and play through Jesse's adventures. Any PSone owners with a GunCon should definitely pick up a copy, and if you've been aching for some good old-fashioned six-gun action, it's all here. Tom Clancy has nothing on Jesse! And, Snake may be sneaky, but sneaking suits don't do much against liquored up cattlemen and Mexicans with blood on their mind and lead in their hand. No fancy tricks here, just frontier justice at its finest.