Just looking at the just posted Quicklook on the site for the new downloadable Call of Juarez game and hearing Patrick state that he was a fan of bound in blood (which wasn't too bad a game), I started to reminisce about just how great and underrated the original was. I watched a few youtube vids to get a feel for how it had aged and it's amazing how impressive this game really was - ahead of it's time in a lot of ways story and tech wise especially looking back now in a time when the shooter formula is well and truly starting to get stale and we search for more story and gameplay wrapped around it's template - reminded occasionally by such games as Bioshock Infinite that you can wrap a game around a shooter and not the other way around.

The game flipped between two completely mismatched characters, one relying on stealth and the other brawn. A design that would cause the reception of the game to be mixed by fans of only one or the other, but combined with the story adding amazing intensity. The tech was the cutting edge of graphic card abilities at the time (one of the first to use dx10) with some amazing fire and heat haze effects and some great physics. No canned reactions when you shot bad guys, hats blew off, boxes moved, environments were semi destructible, alcohol and lanterns could be picked up in the environment and thrown and shot at to ignite. AI was a priority at the time, so it was possible to sneak up on (or past) characters - before call of duty popularised the heavily scripted standard we have seen a lot of in the last 6 years.

This game had a whole chapter dedicated to learning to hunt and climbing a mountain to retrieve eagle feathers whilst being swooped on by eagles using a lasso to swing between platforms, one of the most intense and rewarding sections I have ever played in a videogame. Between that and a stealth moment in a difficult later level of the game that involved picking up an enemies dropped shotgun in the heat of the moment to blow away a final attacker midway through the act of swinging a tomahawk down on me for certain death. These are game experiences that are hard to come by in recent times but will stay with me forever.

After watching some footage of the latest addition to what has become a decidedly middling franchise, I cant help but feel that gunslingers claims to be "returning to it's roots" feel empty among it's frantic score based "dumb fun" approach. But i'll give it a spin for old times sake.