Knowing is half the battle, but naturally I didn't even know that there was a battle to be had.
Shadowgate, as I said, showed me the value of point-and-click adventure games and helped me to become a big fan of them, but it wasn't the first text-driven game to ever have a positive impact me, no. That honor instead goes to Law of the West--a uniquely themed text adventure in which you play the role of a sheriff whose job is to interact with townsfolk and do so in an interrogatory fashion. I discovered it while I was sampling games from my brother's large Commodore 64 library.
Before Law of the West came into my life, I had a pretty dismissive attitude toward text-driven adventure games. I felt that they were primitive and inherently boring and that they weren't "real" games. The idea of staring at static imagery for hours on end while attempting to decipher the meaning behind cryptic text descriptions sounded about as much fun as watching grass grow. So I was apt to ignore the entire genre.
But then along came Law of the West--a strangely intriguing text adventure that somehow managed to capture my imagination and keep me coming back for more of what it offered.
You could say it was a miracle.
And it was even more of a miracle when you consider that I also had an aversion to Western-themed productions. I'd usually run screaming at the sight of a bunch of cowboys hangin' out at the ol' saloon and yakkin' about about rustin' castle, chewin' tobacky, and findin' gold in them thar hills (every time I'd wander into the room and find that mom was watching Bonanza again, I'd hightail it out of there). I just didn't find Westerns appealing in any way.
And, well, I was intrigued from the very moment the game's first action scene came into view!
But again--I wasn't sure what my conversations were meant to produce. My only guess was that Law of the West was about showing tact and trying to maintain calm and doing so in the interest of surviving the day.
I didn't know what Law of the West was about or what it wanted me to do, no, but still it managed to become one of my favorite Commodore 64 games. I returned to it regularly because I was fond of its unique gameplay-style, its realistic-looking visuals, and its silently tense atmosphere. I liked playing it, observing it, and interacting with it. I liked how it enabled me to engage with the townspeople and to draw out all different types of reactions from them.
Though, I had the most fun with Law of the West when I played it with my friends. Each time I introduced one of them to the game, I'd eagerly demonstrate for him how it played and teach him about some of its more "hilarious" aspects, like how you could antagonize characters and thus cause them to melt down, and how you could shoot characters dead before they could even take two steps onto the scene, doing which would prompt to the narrator to admonish you by saying, "Hey! Aren't you a little trigger happy?"
What made Law of the West so memorable to me, though, were its characters. I loved all of them.
One character I made sure to never compulsively blow away was the doctor. I refrained from killing him only because I knew that doing so would doom my chances of recovery if I got shot, since, you know, there'd be no doctor there to treat me. Usually I'd engage with him in a playful manner and therein continuously intimate that he was a fall-down drunk. I figured that it was OK to mess with someone who was drunk because he'd forget about it the next day. And thus it wouldn't result in his refusing to treat me!
For my friends and I, Law of the West was an enduring game. We continued to play it into our mid-teens. For all that time, it stood among our 2600, Commodore 64 and NES favorites, and often we'd cycle it into our marathon gaming sessions.
Law of the West was another of those games that lost its appeal when my high school days ended and my friends and I went our separate ways. Playing it without them just wasn't the same. It wasn't as fun or as funny. So I decided to leave the game behind. "It's better to leave such a game to memory," I thought.
I was really surprised when I learned that there was a Famicom version of Law of the West. I just never thought that a game whose subject-matter was that dark would ever make it to consoles, which were generally aimed at the younger set. But there it was with its newly adapted NES-style colors and boxy resolution.
So yeah--Law of the West had a profound impact on me. It, much like Shadowgate, did a lot for me. It helped me to think about video games in a whole new way. It taught me a lot of new words and thus helped me to become a better writer. It inspired me to create. And it provided me (and my friends) years of great entertainment.
So even though I didn't know what Law of the West was about or what it wanted me to do, I still managed to achieve a very meaningful victory.
And consequently, my world became a much better place.
So you'd figure that I would have switched off the Commodore 64's disk drive the moment Law of the West's enthusiastically Western title screen came into view. That's not what happened, though. Rather, the game's title screen was able to capture my interest. And it did so because it had pleasing imagery and a welcoming vibe. I was taken with its unusual straw-colored designs, its charming depiction of a revolver laying next to a Wanted poster, and its delightfully cheerful, spirited Old West-style musical theme (I couldn't help but sway in rhythm as I listened to it). Looking at and listening to this title screen put me in a good mood.
I'd never liked Westerns, sure, but at the same time, I hadn't yet come across a bad Commodore 64 game, so disliking a game's theme didn't seem like a good enough reason to outright dismiss a game.
So I decided to give Law of the West a shot.
I was intrigued because Law of the West's visuals and style of gameplay were unlike any other I'd ever seen. It was, from what I could tell, some type of dialogue-based game, and its environments, strangely, were designed to be viewed from a third-person perspective. Also, its visuals had a curiously austere tone and form to them, and they were blunt in their message that Law of the West's was far from the Happy Town. "This isn't like the joyful and fantastical worlds you've visited in other games, no," it told me in a matter-of-fact way. "This one is based in cold, hard reality."
And its gameplay wasn't wholly text-based, I learned. There was an action element to it: At any point, you could pull out your revolver, move it in any direction (and all the while enjoy the sheriff's hilariously unnatural arm movements), and target specific objects with a crosshair. "Cool!" I thought.
Law of the West's visual and gameplay style were so strangely different from the norm, and for that reason alone, I felt, it needed to be thoroughly investigated!
Still, I had no idea where this game was going to take me.
My lesson started when a rugged-, scary-looking gunslinger strolled out from the saloon and spoke to me in a rather-confrontational manner. Naturally I acted impulsively and thus ignored the dialogue option and immediately pulled out my revolver.
Though, when it became apparent to me that threatening the ornery cowpoke with my gun (and my suggestive arm movements) wasn't inciting the expected response, I calmed down and put my gun back in my holster. Moments later, I realized that the screen's bottom portion was displaying text--specifically four selectable lines of dialogue. Each allowed me to adopt a certain demeanor and drive the conversation in a certain direction. I didn't know why I needed to do either of these things, no, but still I found the entire process to be very compelling.
A system that allowed you to strike up organic-sounding conversations with NPC characters was weirdly unique and super-interesting, and I was eager to find out what you could do with it. "Talking to these people will probably be more interesting than menacing them with my firearm-waving skills," I thought.
But again--I wasn't sure what my conversations were meant to produce. My only guess was that Law of the West was about showing tact and trying to maintain calm and doing so in the interest of surviving the day.
So naturally I spent the entirety of that first session attempting to trigger nasty responses and bait the townspeople into gunfights.
"Well, that was just topflight idiocy and a complete waste of time," you say while sighing.
And you're right to think as much. But I didn't know what else to do. I had no idea what my goal was, or if there actually was a goal, and none of my conversations were leading to anything. So I said "Screw it!" and decided to do what I always did in these situations: create my own fun! And that entailed being belligerent and trying to goad each townsperson into doing something stupid!
It might not have been what I was supposed to be doing, no, but it was apparently working because I was surviving long enough to reach the "Congratulations" screen, on which a final score was displayed. The problem was that I didn't know what all of the screen's other symbols represented or if they were signifying success or failure. And I was never going to know because we didn't have manuals for any our Commodore 64 games (my brother, as I've mentioned many times in the past, would immediately throw away boxes and manuals), and games from this era rarely explained their rules and systems in-game.
I didn't know what Law of the West was about or what it wanted me to do, no, but still it managed to become one of my favorite Commodore 64 games. I returned to it regularly because I was fond of its unique gameplay-style, its realistic-looking visuals, and its silently tense atmosphere. I liked playing it, observing it, and interacting with it. I liked how it enabled me to engage with the townspeople and to draw out all different types of reactions from them.
I didn't need to know what Law of the West was about to have fun with it. Rather, I saw its world as a playground in which I could say or do whatever I wanted. I could make friends with everyone, if I so pleased, or I could repeatedly instigate violent confrontations and blow everyone away! Or if I wanted, I could befriend some of the townspeople, and menace the rest of them. Really, the possibilities were endless!
That was the type of freedom Law of the West offered me. And I was always happy to take advantage of its offer.
At the same time, though, I was genuinely interested in getting a sense of what the game's true goal was. The best way to do that, I thought, was to experiment with the dialogue system and try to get characters to spill details about the game's plot.
Now, I knew that certain characters could be coaxed into divulging information about planned robberies that they'd heard about (or heard rumors about) and that uncovering such information would trigger scenes in which I was forced to confront bandits while they were in the act, but my sense was that engaging in such an activity was the opposite of what I was meant to do. It was a potential fail state. Because the goal, I came to think, was to keep the peace and do so by avoiding confrontation, killing as few people as possible, and simply surviving.
So that's what I did whenever I was serious about "beating" Law of the West. I played it the way I thought it should be played.
Though, I had the most fun with Law of the West when I played it with my friends. Each time I introduced one of them to the game, I'd eagerly demonstrate for him how it played and teach him about some of its more "hilarious" aspects, like how you could antagonize characters and thus cause them to melt down, and how you could shoot characters dead before they could even take two steps onto the scene, doing which would prompt to the narrator to admonish you by saying, "Hey! Aren't you a little trigger happy?"
And I was happy that all of this nonsense made them laugh and resultantly embrace the game.
Anytime we'd play Law of the West together, we'd laugh uncontrollably at its silliness. Because it was a really funny game (it helped that the game's writers had a great sense of humor and included so many bitingly sarcastic lines). We thought it was especially funny how the characters that were sauntering in the distance--leisurely walking about or strolling along in the their stagecoaches--would quickly and fearfully vamoose the instant we drew our gun. I'd like to say that they were acting presumptively, but I can't do so because they were right to fear us; we were, after all, always trying to find ways to kill the game's background characters (to no avail, since such characters were immune to bullet fire).
I've never actually seen or touched a real gun, by the way, so don't be alarmed.
What made Law of the West so memorable to me, though, were its characters. I loved all of them.
My favorite of the bunch was Willie, a nasty little kid who liked to taunt me with his knowledge of a "secret." He was interesting to me because he reminded me of some of the kids I knew--obnoxious kids who acted just like him. So his being there gave me the opportunity to treat him like a stand-in for those kids and thus react to his annoying actions by throwing repeated insults at him!
And I was rather shocked by the response he'd give whenever I'd choose to insult him. He'd say, "Up yours, sheriff!" The first time he said, I was kinda stunned because I'd never seen that type of language used in a video game. "Kids aren't supposed to say things like that!" I immediately thought to myself. "Adults might use that kind of vulgarity, yeah, but 6-year-olds certainly don't!" (Oh, I'd learn soon enough that a lot of them liked to say things that were much, much worse.)
Up until that point, the closest thing I'd seen to vulgarity in a video game was Q*bert's suggestive word-bubbled alt-character string, which would display whenever he collided with an enemy. And even that type of expression was pretty shocking to me.
Usually I'd be so bothered by Willie's vulgar comment--and his rotten attitude in general--that I'd shoot him out of spite. Because that, obviously, was the rational thing to do.
Conversely, I'd always try to make nice with Miss Rose ("Jezebel," as the sheriff would often refer to her), who didn't seem to like me very much. She was always reacting disdainfully to my comments and rejecting my pleas. All I wanted to do, really, was befriend her, but she just wouldn't let me! (I was missing some key context, of course. Miss Rose, I realized years later, was a "lady of the night," and what she was actually rejecting was my solicitation.)
I was always sure to be immediately complimentary to the intimidating-sounding Mexicali Kid, who would start every conversation by saying, "Eg, gringo, I hear you got a fast draw!" I tried to be nice to him because (a) I didn't have a fast draw and (b) I was sure that attempting to engage with him in an inquiring fashion would get me killed.
Then there was the cantankerous Belle, who kept calling me a "tinhorn sheriff" (which was probably a nasty insult, I thought). Whenever I'd try to reason with her and explain to her that her accusations were unfounded, she'd get mad and shoot me!
Women. Am I right?
One character I made sure to never compulsively blow away was the doctor. I refrained from killing him only because I knew that doing so would doom my chances of recovery if I got shot, since, you know, there'd be no doctor there to treat me. Usually I'd engage with him in a playful manner and therein continuously intimate that he was a fall-down drunk. I figured that it was OK to mess with someone who was drunk because he'd forget about it the next day. And thus it wouldn't result in his refusing to treat me!
In our copy of the game, the deputy character, sadly, was a glitched-out mess--nothing more than a walking cluster of constantly deforming pixels. Conversing with a sentient pixel-cluster felt weird to me, and I didn't want to do it, so I established a personal rule (for video games in general): By all rights, a glitched-out character or any such abomination must be shot, blown up or stomped on sight. So whenever it was time to converse with the deputy (or the pixelated horror that claimed to be the deputy), I'd pull out my gun, position the crosshair at the stage's entry point, and open fire the moment the pixel blob appeared.
Really, I saw it as a mercy killing. (I didn't exchange more than two lines of dialogue with this character until years later, when I played Law of the West on an emulator. That was the first time I ever saw what the deputy actually looked like.)
I was so enamored with Law of the West and the ideas that it explored that I felt inspired to create a real-world version of it--a "home adaptation." And my friend Dominick and I would frequently play the Law of the West home game in my den.
Its rules were similar to the video game's: One of us would play the role of sheriff and would thus arm himself with my toy rifle (mine was the type that made a loud "ping" sound when its trigger was pulled) and remain seated on the front part of the room's sectional sofa. The other would play the roles of the interrogable characters--be they characters from the game, random celebrities, or spontaneously created characters. And successfully surviving any such encounter would earn the sheriff a "prize" (one of the toys from my large cardboard toy box, which was placed right next to our 1979-era big-screen TV).
But my home version had more of a twitch factor to it. You had to stay alert because violence could erupt at any time--even before a single question was asked. Though, still, the sheriff was bound by certain rules. He could only fire if the subject became aggressive, lest he'd receive a failing grade for that round. So he had to be sure not to overreact to a "fake-out," which was any action in which the subject would start to lunge forward but then immediately pull back. If you pulled the trigger when there was no actual provocation, you'd fail the round and miss out on getting a prize.
If Dominick and I got together today, I'm sure that we'd agree that the funniest part was our inclusion of Deja Vu's mugger--a marginal character who we ironically emblematized and frequently incorporated into our outside-world projects and silly activities.
Most notably, the mugger was a recurring character in our live-action home version. And because we liked him so much, we even gave him a special attribute: If he lunged forward while bellowing "Give me allllll your money!", he'd gain the ability to steal one of the sheriff's prizes! And like it was in Deja Vu, his act of thievery could only be thwarted with a quick jab rather than a rifle shot, which, comparably, took too much time to execute. If the jab connected in time--if it struck him before he could grab a prize--he'd be forced to flee, and he'd necessarily have to holler "I'llllll be baaaaaack!" while exiting.
And naturally we saw to it that the mugger appeared several times per game.
At some point, the mugger gained another special ability: shapeshifting. He could assume the form of any other character and do so with the intention of lulling you to sleep and setting you up for a surprise lunge. And because he was exempt from the rules that governed scene progression, he was able to reveal himself and subsequently lunge forward at any time--during his entrance, in the middle of a dialogue exchange, or while he was exiting. So in our version of the game, you had to stay alert at all times.
Unfortunately for the mugger, though, his character was eventually forced into retirement. This happened because he was supplanted by one of our newly created characters: Dink, who was an amalgamation of the hooded thieves from Golden Axe, that very same mugger (who thus became redundant), and current New York mayor David Dinkins (if you want to know the specifics of how Dink came to be, please read my Golden Axe piece).
Though, honestly, Dink and the mugger were altogether similar. The only difference (if you could call it that) was that Dink demanded that you surrender your magic rather than your money.
I just thought you'd like to know all of this.
I didn't see Law of the West again until the early 2000s, when I got big into emulation. And it was great to be able to rediscover and play one of my old favorites. I had a good time revisiting it and seeing its writing in a new light and in the proper context.
And I finally figured out a few things.
In the earlier days, my final determination was that the game's true goal was to interrogate every subject and thus solicit information about the Daltan gang's plans to rob banks. And all you had to do to earn big points, I thought, was foil all of the gang's robbery attempts. Though, it turned out that there really wasn't a "true goal" or a "correct" way to play Law of the West and that there were many other things you could do to earn big points--things like currying favor with women and persuading lawbreakers to surrender their weapons. It was up to you to decide what was most important.
So, actually, my younger self wasn't wrong in thinking that Law of the West's world was a playground in which you were free to do whatever you desired. That's how the game's designers wanted me to feel about their game!
I was really surprised when I learned that there was a Famicom version of Law of the West. I just never thought that a game whose subject-matter was that dark would ever make it to consoles, which were generally aimed at the younger set. But there it was with its newly adapted NES-style colors and boxy resolution.
It's just a shame that the circumstances behind my discovering it were so terrible. It was featured in a GoNintendo video, and the guys who were playing it didn't understand what it was. So, naturally, they spent the entire video cutting it up and treating it as though it was a piece of trash that they found laying on the highway. And that just ruined my entire mood. (It always rubs me the wrong way when people my age dig up old classics and do so only with the intention of mocking them. It's just a dopey practice.)
Though, their idiocy didn't discourage me from seeking the game out and downloading it. I was still very much interested in personally assessing it--in finding out how it played and how it felt.
And, well, it's an OK version of Law of the West. It takes some liberties with the original's formula and adds in some unique elements, like bandits who appear randomly during scenes (you earn bonus points when you take them out) and bonus-points symbols that are hidden within doors, windows and such (you can uncover the symbols by shooting said objects). And all of that is fine; it adds a bit of depth to the game.
Though, sadly, this version just doesn't look or sound as good as the original. Its colors are too brightly toned, and that works to rob it of the cold, austere atmosphere that defined the original. Its textures tend to lack shading (most of them are completely featureless). And its music is too fast-tempoed and too upbeat-sounding. So it winds up lacking the original's visual and aural charm.
So let's just say that it's a curiously interesting version of the game but far from a definitive version.
Why it was released only in Japan, I'm not sure (its being a Japanese-only release is weird because the original game never made it to Japan). The game's developer probably couldn't find an American publisher that was interested in financing and distributing a port of an old computer game.
Oh well.
So yeah--Law of the West had a profound impact on me. It, much like Shadowgate, did a lot for me. It helped me to think about video games in a whole new way. It taught me a lot of new words and thus helped me to become a better writer. It inspired me to create. And it provided me (and my friends) years of great entertainment.
So as you can see, Law of the West contributed greatly to my evolution as an enthusiast and as a person. It opened my mind to new possibilities. Were it not for Law of the West and its influence, I probably would have been inclined to outright dismiss games like Shadowgate. And if that had been how things turned out, it would have been an absolute tragedy.
Will I ever play Law of the West seriously again? Probably not. I just don't have the desire to. Though, I'm not going to toss it away either, no. Rather, I'm going to continue to do what I've been doing since the early 2000s: revisiting it every five or six years and doing so for the purpose of taking a trip down memory lane--spending some time with an old favorite while taking the opportunity to remember all of the fun interactions it produced and all of the wacky hijinks it inspired (including, of course, our creation of a "home" version).
So even though I didn't know what Law of the West was about or what it wanted me to do, I still managed to achieve a very meaningful victory.
No comments:
Post a Comment