For some reason, while horror games have taken off like a shot, the computer industry hasn't taken much of a liking to games with a Western motif. It's not that these games don't do as well as any other, but there's so blasted few of them, and designers apparently think it's necessary to combine the Western style with another genre for it to succeed. Consider the case of Freddy Pharkas, Frontier Pharmacist (comedy/western) and Alone in the Dark III (horror/western). Cyberflix's latest product, Dust: A Tale of the Wired West, is closer to a straightforward Western story than any game I've seen before, but it's still a far cry from a John Ford movie.
The player takes the role of The Stranger, who wanders into the seedy desert town of Diamondback, New Mexico. This is a burg plagued with troubles. Most everyone lives in fear of rough-and-tumble gunfighters coming into town and shooting the place up. The sheriff was shot dead the same day you arrived. Better get used to it, though, because you're stuck here for three days until the next stage arrives. Meanwhile, you haven't got a gun, decent boots, a place to sleep, or a name. Better get busy, cowpoke!
During your three days trapped in Diamondback, there are certain objectives you have to achieve (like getting a gun!), but beyond that, the action is pretty much up to you. At any point you get tired of seeking out sleeping quarters on the night of your arrival, you can head into the Hard Drive Saloon (Get it? Hard Drive? Get it?) and play blackjack, poker or drop your cash a dollar at a time into the one-armed bandit. (I recommend the poker table. Your opponents are, for the most part, drunk and inbred, with poker faces that read like cheap romance novels.) And during the day, before the saloon opens, you can while away a few spare minutes playing checkers with the owner of the grocery store.
Of course, if you were tempted to spend all your time in Diamondback playing these games, Dust itself would have to be pretty boring. Thankfully, this is not the case. Cyberflix has broken the curse of its two previous less-than-inspiring games, Lunicus and Jump Raven. You wander the 3-D streets of Diamondback in first-person perspective, looking for people to talk to and items to pick up. (Diamondback is apparently not very concerned about thieves. You can follow the time-tested adventure game tradition of keeping just about anything you can pick up, without fear of anyone looking for their missing property.)
When you encounter a character on the street, you click on their 3-D figure and enter a conversation with a 2-D close-up. The characters are digitized actors, but instead of using digitized video throughout, the designers chose to piece frames together into a jerky and strange animation. The last time I saw this technique used was in Sierra's Inca II, and I actually kind of like it. It takes so much less space than digitized video and it adds an extra element of humor, like watching a badly dubbed foreign film.
This is not a terribly complicated game. If you're looking for tough puzzles, they ain't here. But not everyone is an expert adventure player. If you find yourself stuck in your progress, there's Help in the game. Help is an oriental gentleman who runs the Curiosity Shop near the entrance to town. Your first encounter with Help is, sad to say, rigged. In order to get past a mean dog, you need a bone that lies just outside of the gate. The thing is, that bone doesn't exist until Help points it out to you! While this sort of manipulation gets on my nerves a little, the main point was to introduce the player to Help so you know what to do when you really need it (help, that is). Making the on-line help feature a character was one of my favorite elements in Sanctuary Woods' Buried in Time, and it works almost as well in Dust.
If there was any negative factor about Dust, it was the sound quality. While I understand the problem of space constraints and applaud almost any technique to keep a game down to one CD, the sound was often distractingly bad. The speech was recorded at too low a sampling rate to be comfortable, and you can really get tired of the same 16 bars of barroom piano played over and over and OVER while you're trying to concentrate on a poker hand.
But overall, Dust is a very pleasant, and often very funny, play. While it probably won't be considered a classic, for an adventure fan with a taste for the silly it's definitely worth the money. Saddle up, buckaroos!
P.S. To really get into the proper mood, you need to watch Support Your Local Sheriff or the recent Maverick movie before putting the disc in the drive. From what I can gather, The Stranger is definitely played by James Garner.
