Smokin’ Guns

A few days ago I was told of this game by a friend, who hosts a server for it. It sounded interesting so I checked it out. It wasn’t very long since it was released either, apparently on January 1.

Smokin’ Guns is a western (movie) themed FPS, “an open sourced, total conversion of id Software’s Quake III Arena”. There hasn’t been many of those, and it’s something I’ve been looking for. There are Linux and Windows binaries, apparently it can be run in Crossover on OSX.

The game has several modes, traditional deathmatch, team deathmatch, duel, bank robbery, and round teamplay. The whole game is very nice, the graphics, sound, music, and foremost, the gameplay is fun.

In Deathmatch, one runs around and shoots and hopefully kills the other players, like any other FPS. However, weapons, and items, like dynamite, boiler plate (armour) and such, is not found on the maps, it’s bought. You buy weapons and equipment with money that you pick up on the maps, down in mines, in banks, saloons, or other places. You also get money when killing other players.

There are revolvers, rifles (one that you can mount a scope on, that you also have to buy first), shotguns, a mountable gattling gun, dynamite and molotow cocktails. One can have two revolvers, in akimbo style. The limited amount of bullets in the weapons, and the limited amount of ammunition one can carry in total, makes it quite exciting when facing other players in a shootout. The reload times, and damage is said to be, and probably are, quite realistic.

Another nice thing is the people that play the game. Most seem to be very nice and fun to play with, mostly a bit older, so there isn’t much of the usual.. idiocy on the servers, like there is in many other games, atleast not when I have played.  I even got to talk to some of the developers and mapmakers, that were on their TeamSpeak server when I had a look in there. I just noticed that they have a channel on Freenode too, #smokinguns. On their site they have a forum, and development resources.

So if you feel like going around in nicely designed western maps, featuring stereotypical spaghetti western towns, mines, a big steamboat in one map, wagons, horses, saloons.. and feel like in a western movie,  download (and the source code) the game, and try it. There’s also a moving train map which I found fun, mentioning it because it’s a bit special, with different kinds of wagons, that one runs around in. The train is moving, it’s possible to fall off. I’m sure there will be more maps created, as more people notice the game, and hopefully other content, and code fixes.

See you on a server, at high noon. *tumbleweedy music*