Hi folks, Vance here. Our newest assimilee, Mike Gallagher, is kicking off our Call of Juarez Appreciation Week a bit late thanks to our time at Anime Expo. Unfortunately, he still seems kind of addled from all the E. I’ll be supplying commentary and clarifications in Microsoft’s soothing green text.

Let me just say, before I begin the review, Clint Eastwood is the fucking man! Not for any of that “Are you feeling lucky, Punk? Make my day” Western nonsense, but for Gran Torino. That movie had more balls than a bull and wasn’t afraid to whip them out with extreme prejudice. Walt Kowalski (the lead played by Clint Eastwood) is a racist fueled by pure, unbridled hate. The perfect outlaw. GamesRadar squeals out “Bored with the FPS? Depressed that none of the recent Western games have been “Clint Eastwood” class (I’m guessing they don’t mean his Gran Torino work)? Call Call of Juarez. You’ll be riding off heroically into the sunset before you know it.” I have a feeling GamesRadar is a big fan of the song Man-eater by eighties uber band, Hall and Oats…

Okay, Mike has started out in rather alarming fashion. First, Call of Juarez is barely even mentioned until the end of the paragraph, and certainly no details have been given. In the meantime, he’s gushing about a completely unrelated Clint Eastwood film and, in pure Freud-o-vision, touching on his love of men whipping out their balls at random. Mike pioneered the “monkey brain”, wherein the merry japester inverts his nutsack and squeezes lightly to give the impression of a small, firm brain.

With that said, Call of Juarez is an Xbox360/PC (sorry PS3 owners (you lucky assholes)) Western-themed FPS, brought to the huddled masses by the company that gave you Rayman… then, raped you with as many “Imagine” games as they could, Ubisoft. Strangely enough, Ubisoft removed the option to beat or shoot corpses, animals and innocent people… weird place to draw the line, considering one of the supporting characters is a saloon whore named Suzy and one of the main characters refers to himself as “God’s Wrath” while he quotes psalms and pistol whips bandits.

Probably the only fact in Mike’s entire tirade against sentient thought. A casual glance reveals no less than twenty-one titles in the Imagine line of DS games.

The rest of the paragraph is just inane shit nobody cares about. If you’re shooting corpses, you’re probably done with gaming and ready to graduate to the next level; Actual murder.

In CoJ, you take control of Rev. Ray McCall; a man of god that doesn’t mind shooting himself some “varmits” in concentration mode/bullet time and William “Billy” Candle; a pussy. Rev. Ray mistakes Billy as the murderer of his brother and his brother’s wife, which are also Billy’s parents, and decides to arm himself one last time for some Joe Don Baker justice. Billy, a young Mexican vagrant, is used to a life on the run due to the fact that everyone hates him because he’s a wetback. The plot… think Final Justice meets Wild Wild West minus Joe Don Bakers famous “cholesterol” and Selma Hayeks ass crack. Much to my surprise, the voice acting wasn’t nearly as bad as say, Gunfighter, (another Ubisoft gem that I’m sure my Uwe Boll-loving boss will give us some rich insight on) and will have you shouting in a wild west accent “Juarez you son’bitch!, Rev. Ray, you shoot that damn fish in that G.D. barrel!” and my personal favorite “Think ya’ can take me? Go ‘head on… it’s y’er move”.

What the FUCK? There was no ACTUAL REVIEW HERE. I think my writing sucks, but Gallagher takes Gerstmann and all the great failures of the gaming press and makes them look like an army of Hemingways, complete with shooting themselves in the knees while hunting sharks with a tommy gun.

So here it is. The shooter segments are acceptable, but unspectacular. They belong in a 1998 game. The “stealth” segments are so loosely designed into the existing shooter engine that they drag the whole thing down into a gated community called hell. The game is not worth your time, my time, Mike’s time, or even Gamespot’s time. And I usually wish the worst shit possible on that last one. End of fucking story.

And again, Mike fixates on dudes. When he mentions a women, even a damn sexy one like Selma Hayek, he concentrates on the part she shares in common with dudes.

Also, Uwe Boll may make godawful films, but he’s my hero for attempting to fix everything that was wrong with Lowtax’s face, at speed.

Some people reviewed this game quite well. DO NOT BE FOOLED.

Mikey G. =

Vance =

Here’s a small window into my life, I forced a friend of mine to download the COJ demo on his Xbox360 recently so I could stand on a crate just out of reach of an enemy that only had a melee weapon and bad A.I. at his disposal while I read the bible to him for about 28 minutes… that friend doesn’t return my calls anymore.

I don’t think I should, either.