6 Shooter Showdown: Black Jack Hands-on

If Hudson Entertainment's 6 Shooter Showdown games were your sole source of knowledge about the Old West, you might wonder how the series' three major veins of activity--gambling, cheating, and shooting people with firearms--ever could have combined to generate the relatively progressive lifestyle you enjoy today. In reality, though, Hudson and developer SpiderMonk Entertainment are trying to elicit a slightly different question with their off-the-wall card games: Why have we sanitized our fun by disposing of old-timey gambling's two most enjoyable features? In an effort to refocus our attention on the matter at hand, the two companies are producing a sequel to 6 Shooter Showdown: Poker built around the casual game of blackjack. From what we could glean from a preview version of 6 Shooter Showdown: Blackjack, the dynamics of the game have necessarily changed, but the overall theme remains more or less the same. In our opinion, that's a very good thing.

6 Shooter Showdown: Blackjack revisits the Old West/Dodge City motif of the Poker game, although it's a different town this time around, and it's shown from an isometric angle rather than from first-person. As before, the goal is to work your way through various saloons and casinos by winning consistently at the two-card game of blackjack. It's not looking as though the same cheating dynamic from Poker will apply to Blackjack--but it really couldn't, because you're playing against the house in this case, and not against rascals and card sharks. There will still be a prominent place for gunplay in the new game, though, as the game is dropping the rock-paper-scissors combat approach for a more action-packed type of play. The producer told us that Blackjack would feature several shooting minigames, like blasting fluttering cards out of the air and fighting bank robbers. In fact, you'll apparently go up against a villain named Black Jack at the end of the game. It sounds like Blackjack will have a much stronger narrative thread than Poker, complete with plot twists and lots of dialogue.

If this turn toward story-driven gameplay is accompanied by a refinement of 6 Shooter Showdown's environment, it should work just fine, and that's what seems to be happening. Each of the female dealers--who apparently factor large in the game's story--has lifelike facial animations, as well as period-accurate costuming. Poker's interface is returning largely intact, although it appeared to us to be a little cleaner in its implementation in Blackjack. 6 Shooter Showdown: Blackjack will also have some connected features that Poker lacked, like an online board where you can post your bankroll and kills.

6 Shooter Showdown: Blackjack is currently in the latter stages of development and should be out around September. In the meantime, Hudson and SpiderMonk are busily dreaming up new chapters in the 6 Shooter Showdown series; there's even talk of combining the various towns together into a big online metagame. That's pure speculation right now, but we'll be working to get new details about the project in the future, so stay tuned.