By Alec Meer on April 27th, 2011 at 6:52 pm.
Must admit, I sorta miss the time before Call of Duty came up with the bright idea of dicking around with the era it was set in, swiftly leading to every other bugger giving it a shot too. Latest on this modernisation bandwagon is Call of Juarez, a series which so far has steadily carved away its most interesting aspects in favour of chasing that tasty, tasty mainstream tail. The third game/reboot is The Cartel, set in modern-day Mexico (much to the consternation of real-life local law figures, who feel that making light of an ongoing culture of violence may not be a good idea for the impressionable youngsters of Juarez), and it seems more determined than ever to snatch the attention of whatever it is that focus groups say today’s average gamer is. After having made do with CGIy stuff until now, here’s the game in action. Subtlety? We don’t need no stinkin’ subtlety.
(Video via VG247, as theirs finished uploading before ours did. Bah/thanks.)
So there’s that, with the booms and the scowls and the nightclub massacres and the exploding cars and whatnot. Also the FBI and the LAPD have very forgiving dress codes these days, I notice.
Not sure if this is trying to be CoD or GTA or Saint’s Row or what. A little of everything I guess, but I’m confused by whether it’s tongue in cheek or deadly serious about its ludicrous Michael Bay action and comicky characterisation. We’ll find out, so we will.
Cool, its the hispanic guy from Dexter talking.
Apart from that, not much to tell. Bang shootey shootey sassy dialogue mc shootey bang. As the vid said, what could possibly go wrong?
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Oh thaaats who it is, thanks, that was bugging me.
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As often as you post about this, I will post this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o1JOFhfoAD4
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Just wow!
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(0.0)yy
Y U NO ADD DESCRIPTIVE LINK NAME?
All I get is “Not available in your country due to content mafia terrorism.”
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I thought about adding a descriptive link name but then I realized that whenever *I* see a descriptive link that goes to a youtube video, I assume it’s someone trying to trick me into watching Rick Astley. I didn’t trust you to trust me =)
It was a video of “Whiskey For My Men, Beer For My Horses” by Toby Keith and Willie Nelson.
Good song, that.
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That was awesome
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If we are going to be talking about horses then: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ljPFZrRD3J8
(the song starts about 0:30 into the video)
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Did someone say horse?
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You just reminded me of this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZRY361U3A5Y with your link. The horse related songs are unending! Amazing song as well!
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What did you expect? They are best of all the animals after all:
http://www.endlessvideo.com/watch?v=QEImD_r6D8o&start=0m0s&end=0m10s
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As a devotee of Jeff Minter, I have a dance remix of that eternally lumped on my drive for use in Space Giraffe. Alas, I could not find it online.
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http://www.qwantz.com/index.php?comic=1874
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Well, if we’re doing horse videos…
EDIT: Fair point Chris D. The above is nsfw. Nothing gross though, so don’t worry too much ^^
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noom wins.
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Agreed, I dont think anyone can top that.
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Might be worth mentioning Noom’s video is NSFW.
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Ah. Father Ted is awesome. Neil Hannon is likewise awesome. But now it’s stuck in my head … and people stared at me when, in the midst of humming, I accidentally sang “Where are you going, with your fetlocks blowing in the wind” out loud. :P
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Look at that horse
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This looks bad movie. Me sad panda.
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Even though state of the art graphics dont make a good game… This one looks very consoley. I’m kind of tired looking at the same quality console graphics every time. At least they should try different art style or something. This one looks like GTA: Mexico style, without the car stealing and sandboxing.
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Seriously? Lolwut? Oh well, I’ll move on to the next one, I guess.
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At the same time I’m interested by this and also put off, not a very good trailer then…
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That there are those that will take this seriously makes me sad. Probably because I was one of them once. And, if you play games, you probably were once too.
Anyway, seen through that adolescant cretin filter, this looks pretty good. Kind of. I reckon.
I reckon the graphics are a step down in fidelity from the last one, so suggesting the greater demands of an open world game. And the tone (and the protagonist’s face, which is a cross between the Red Dead dude and the Witcher dude, so please do keep the image of that coupling in your minds) feels worryingly grim. Y’know: mature.
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This kind of shit is exactly why the stigma on games is so prevalent in our culture. This game is not art, not journalism.. it’s sensationalism and pandering to the lowest common denominator. I like to think that the majority of Americans would agree, but this kind of crap keeps selling, so what do I know?
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Almost feels like saying several million cretins can’t be wrong…
But they are.
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It almost makes me want to apologize for my fellow countrymen, but then I remember I don’t know very many people here that wouldn’t find this fucked up.
On the other hand, I’m sure this will get a lot of play by the folks who are constantly crying about Mexican immigrants stealing our jobs, selling drugs to our children, using our public services, pillaging our towns, raping our women, etc.
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Well the amount of crime in the US directly due to its proximity to Mexico is spiralling out of control, even if some people would rather pretend that it’s all flowers and pinatas, because doing otherwise would make you guilty of the r word. Cross border crime is getting so bad and the Mexican government is unable to cope to such a spectacular degree that US law enforcement is working with the assumption that a significant portion of Mexico is going to turn into what is effectively a narco-state within the next ten to fifteen years. It’s so bad in fact that US special forces are quietly but frequently operating inside Mexico…
That said, this is such a serious issue that making games that trivialise it this ridiculously is somewhat inadvisable to say the least.
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Wow! I totally need a citation on that. I find it hard to believe USA law enforcement and government agencies hold such a dim view on an entire society.
Anyways, you know what would help pacify Mexico? If Americans stopped being drugs. But somehow I trust USA law enforcement knows this and are really more concerned on what’s going on inside their borders, than blaming all their problems at the Mexican people.
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US govt reports that question the integrity of a neighbouring state are never going to be approved for public release, as there would be a diplomatic shitstorm, so there are no direct citations, but just as a very measured, santised taste;
http://www.strategicstudiesinstitute.army.mil/pubs/summary.cfm?q=918
“The effects of drug use in the United States and the potential for the economic and political destabilization of Mexico make counternarcotics an immensely significant national security issue.”
http://online.wsj.com/articleSB123518102536038463.html
No one is saying that the whole of Mexico is going down, but as always, hope for the best plan for the worst.
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Why isn’t it art?
I think the setting is an interesting move – admittedly it’s no cohen brothers movie but it’s still a vaguely original slant, especially in our dry-as-fuck medium
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@ rivalin
It is going way too far to say Mexico will turn into a narco state, but if it does get to such extremes, you could always legalize drugs and penalize guns. That would fix half of our problems very nicely.
That is just wishful thinking, of course. Your bank-state would never allow the nice profit from laundering to end anytime soon.
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@ezekiel2517: I think it’s hard to argue that several Mexican border states aren’t already narco-states, given how effectively the gangs have taken over.
The gun issue is also problematic, as they can’t get the American gun dealers to stop selling weapons to the cartels.
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Why don’t we (USA) send our special forces to Detroit or New Orleans? Considering this CNN report ranks them right up there with Juarez as two of the most dangerous cities on earth.
I mean, c’mon… this is clearly another case of Mexicans getting the benefits of our social and civil services without paying a dime in taxes for them.
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so… are you guys American or just American/Mexican-crime-knowledgeable British people?
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Potentially great game.
Drug Lords selling controlled substances to the US, buying US weapons.
US citizens buying Mexican drugs and selling weapons to Mexican police.
It is a win win situation for the men in suits. Be they Mexican or American.
Business is good.
Edit: I am a european citizen who is concerned about the war on drugs, sick of the way the US forces the world through the UN to take a part in this and tired of having to buy Cannabis from the Mafia. Which I have not been doing for over a decade now. Nice growers are always threatened by criminalization.
US shit is being smeared all over the world, it is not exclusive to the English speaking nations.
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@MrEvilGuy: I’m an American.
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Halle Berry?
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Definitely seems to be what they are channelling.
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“I’m sorry for the cock block”.
Seriously? Although it did get me laughing.
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Up until that point I was almost coming around to it in a “yeah, but maybe it’s fun pulpy crap” kind of way, but then I lost all sympathy again.
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I present to you my feelings on this trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IUH3JQjcweM
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Mine: http://www.endlessvideo.com/watch?v=6HFPa-M6Ssk&start=0m15s&end=0m40s
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If you’re curious as to whats actually going on in Mexico with the drug civil war you can do a lot worse than reading Pancho Montana’s coverage. http://exiledonline.com/?s=Pancho%20Montana
Not that thats particularly game related but I feel the need to offer a reality based alternative to the rubbish that trailer spews.
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I was going to post the Exile’s Mexican Drug War coverage as well. It’s a almost all a damn good read and would make a really nice game, but to do it right you kind of need to have entirely Mexican player characters.
Lots of room with for interesting characters there as well. Clean and Dirty Federales. Mexican Special Forces who know people who defected to Los Zetas.
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It looks I’m watching an advert for a Steven Seagal movie. Pretty terrible.
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Bad analogy. Steven Seagal rules.
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I don’t know what this is, but I know what it isn’t. It isn’t Call of Juarez.
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Yup. 0 interest in … whatever this is.
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They should have called it just “The Cartel” without tarnishing the nice “Call of Juarez” name.
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Well that was rubbish.
Someone was scared away from the Wild West by Red Dead Redemption methinks. To be fair, the only thing iteresting about CoJ was its setting, having removed that, it will all the more obviously be a fairly competent but uninspiring manshoot. Just now with the added baggage of the usual video game tropes of trying to be ‘mature’ meaning stupidty, swears, sensationalism and retarded dialogue.
Can’t wait. Honest.
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Wha-.. wha… How the hell…. why?
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I like (see: hate) how games are now getting around their awful dialogue writers by simply making it look like they’re doing it on purpose.
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That is one of the worst Texan accents I’ve heard in quite some time.
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Yeah, he’d be laughed out of the state in a New York minute!
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Oh, and now it’s completely uninteresting. I mean, the whole wild west aspect was sort of the point of the first two games- horses, six shooters and general badassness. It didn’t reinvent the wheel, it just stuck to it’s guns. The modern twist thing is like pandering to other audiences who would be much happier playing COD. What’s the point?
Dammit, I want Reverend Ray back in all his revolver wielding, Bible verse spouting crazy glory.
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I agree. CoJ (in particular the first game) was beautiful and evocative – as if all my childhood cowboys and indians games had been realised. This is…well, this just isn’t.
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The FBI, the LAPD and the DEA is going to save Americans from Mexico at the sound of hip-hop. Instant hit on any American trailer park.
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They seem to have taken everything I liked about the first game and got rid of it.
It’s like Prey 2 all over again
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Pretty sure Prey 2′s gonna kick major arse tho
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Prey 2 could be a perfectly competent game. So could this.
My problem with them is that while they may be perfectly good games, they’re terrible sequels. Crysis 2 sorta kinda does this too. It’s a perfectly fine shooter, better than fine really. But it might as well have been Crysis 1 for all it had to do with the actual original.
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Isn’t that better than the alternative? I think this game looks like crap … but lets assume for a minute that it’s an amazing video game. Why do we really need a direct sequel to the world and characters in Call of Juarez? Isn’t it better for a game to be a good game with a good story than to continue pandering to a single fanbase first and innovate second?
The name brings buying power through brand recognition. It also cements the trademark precedent for greater control of a franchise instead of a single game. entity. There are lots of reasons to make a “sequel” that have nothing to do with linear narrative. Some of them are more silly than others.
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They missed a trick here, should have riffed off Breaking Bad and used Space Chem mini-games for lethal application of SCIENCE.
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Holy shit, that would be amazing.
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On a fundamental level a gritty modern day western could work, especially one channelling the sort of machismo nature of gangs and organised crime as referenced in TV shows like Breaking Bad, Southand and Justified to a less extent (all excellent shows BTW) , but unfortunately this looks like a lot of one dimensional bad B movie swinging dick.
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at the beginning of the trailer i somehow allowed myself to believe it was going to be a cross between no country for old men and stalker or fallout 3 or something, or just no country for old men in game form (with a little more action, i imagined).
now i’m unbelievably disappointed
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Oh my God, the Mexican AND American accents are so atrocious. It’s like a parody of itself.
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That’s what I was theenking too!
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I was about to point out that the cartels try at all costs to avoid pissing off the US authorities for obvious reasons, but then the trailer got sillier and sillier so I gave up.
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This trailer lost me after the calm scene at the beginning with the nice vistas. As soon as the action starts it just gets meh…..
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Call of Juarez? Really?
…
Outlaws 2 please. Thanks.
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The protagonist seems to be a modern-day Ray – just infinitely less likable.
This isn’t looking good imo. I wouldn’t play the CoJ titles if they weren’t wild west. They weren’t bad shooters, but they weren’t exceptional either (Meaning: Much of their appeal was the setting).
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I’d say the only appeal was the setting. There wasn’t much to recommend otherwise, since everything was so linear, and the plot was just a series of Western tropes strung together. Still, I would have bought a third Juarez based in the Wild West, just to experience that setting again. I won’t be buying this one. If they do what they did with the last Juarez and just jam all the border cliche’s together as a plot, it’s going to be extra double bad.
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I dunno, part of the appeal was that it was a series of western tropes, western games weren’t exactly thick on the ground afterall. Still aren’t.
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Pity about losing the western setting, we don’t have enough games there, but I’m digging what I see (for some mindless leisure, meaning when it’s dirt cheap), as someone said before, mostly because of the setting. Can we have some machetes too? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hIxcVzwLR1k
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Wicked beans! Reminds me of that awesome 50 Cent game…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=496-HyZi0oI
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As soon as i heard this was a modern drug cartel game, i knew it’d be utter crap, and this video just about confirms it.
Which is a shame, the first Call of Juarez was on to something, the second was utterly generic, and this looks worse again.
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Uhm…no way, I got eventually bored of all the 3D GTA’s, so…no, this seems like more of the same, I’ll pass
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The only remarkable and truly excellent thing about this game was using BRMC’s Beat The Devil’s Tattoo in the first trailer. I suspect everything else will be bland and unoriginal.
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Too bad they didn’t go full out with the Cartel aspect and let you be a full-on drug cartel enforcer and kill lots of innocent people and military and law enforcement. Make Boxer Enriquez the main character; sell a hundred thousand copies for every media outlet they outrage.
Still buying it – Call of Juarez 2 had surprisingly fun multiplayer.
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Wasn’t Call of Juarez about like… cowboys fighting Vampires at one point?
Or am I thinking of a different series entirely?
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There was a PS2 game called Darkwatch which was about cowboys fighting vampires, but as I haven’t played either of them I can’t really say for sure.
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Making a western game you can only expect to ever see passive success. If they wanted to make another Juarez (the last one was great) so soon and see success they needed to do something like this. Also just because it’s modern doesn’t mean it can’t be western. Ever seen No Country for Old Men?
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I heard Rockstar or some company with a name like that had a pretty successful Western game last year. Red Rover Redemption or something along those lines, but it was only on Nintendos and laserdisk players.
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Wasn’t it Red Roger’s Redemption? Pretty sure my friend had it for his Mega Drive.
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I’ll wait for Call Of Juarez: Ancient Rome.
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“your soul belongs to Satan”…
…lolwot?
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Doesn’t look very interesting to me, but I’m always amused by the arbitrary determination of what games are worthless silly nonsense and which are silly nonsense but also great fun. Bulletstorm doesn’t exactly carry the medium forward into a mature and thoughtful future, and yet journalists praise it. Call of Juarez looks equally silly, and suddenly it’s everything that’s wrong with the medium. Strange inconsistencies. (Oh but yeah Bulletstorm is aware of how shitty it is, right, so that’s okay right?)
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I think taking itself seriously makes a world of difference…If Techland keeps a straight face while pushing this, it’ll be pretty damn worrying.
I think CoJ fans just aren’t part of the target demographic this time around…They’re likely to be shooting for a whole new audience or whatever, and are just using the (somewhat) recognizable CoJ name.
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The reason this game gets bad comments is because of it’s poor portrayal of stereotypes, be they cultural, movie tropes or game mechanics. Bulletstorm kind of has it’s own voice within all of the above. That’s the difference. The Cartel seems to be pulping it up, just because they don’t know anything better to do.
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There’s a lot of arbitrary liking and disliking, that’s what taste is about. To me, Bulletstorm is looks better because it knows it’s silly and instead of being ashamed of it, it waves it all over the place. Also, it has satisfactory shooting and pretty colours to excite my prefrontal cortex. This one looks more like the “so bad it’s good” type, although it could be just plain bad.
Also, aren’t all modern CoD’s also an stereotypefest? What’s wrong with some games having stereotypes, not every one of them has to be a The Void or Portal or Witcher.
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Maybe Call of Juarez doesn’t have enough dick jokes. Throw in some more dick jokes, Techland, then it will be okay.
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Well crafted dick jokes are, I believe, the key.
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wait… so it’s an fps now?
Not sure if I’d play this game, but a movie based off this game would probably actually work.
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CoJ games have always been FPS’…
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And most likely cater to the same audience as well.
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I’m glad they’re staying true to the original Call of Juarez games with the ????? and the ?????
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I would play any game with Marc Alaimo in it. Reverend Ray was definitely the key feature of the two otherwise ‘OK’ shooters. His absence here puts it firmly in the do not care category.
Hmm. I wonder if he does audio books.
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Couldn’t take more than 30 seconds of this trailer, it looks pretty terrible.
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This would have been much better if they had made the main character a disgruntled and old-fashioned sheriff in some backwater town who refuses to give way when the cartels move in. Could still modernise it by giving him a modern revolver, shotgun and a rusty pickup truck.
I’d like to see more games which take the action movie route limit their story-lines to a time-frame of about 24-48 hours as it validates the constant action more – fighting for survival and all that.
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“the impressionable youngsters of Juarez”
LOL
So when little Machete and his friends take a break from their daily lives in the war zone, they play -this is not a game- Call of Juarez.
Which gives law abiding citizens who never smoked marijuana brutal nightmares.
How impressionable can you be in a city where 3000 people were killed recently in the war on drugs?
This is stupid. The war on drugs that is waged by the US is as inhumane as the whole prohibition.
They destroy a drug cartell in South America and -surprise- a new cartell takes over. A little closer to the US border. Distance does not matter in fact the US is the biggest and (at least until now) most powerful drug consuming nation. It would import drugs from Alpha Centauri if necessary.
Let us pray that the suits responsible for this atrocity get what they deserve one day.
Drug laws kill more people than the drugs.
Legalize drugs period
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Good Bye Gamefranchaise with an somewhat unique personality to itself.
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im not saying this game shouldnt be released, but i think its on really, really bad taste and timing. Its as if you guys made a 9 11 flash game of catching old women with spiked beds a week later.
Thinks are STILL pretty bad in juarez. It always pays to be informed
http://www.blogdelnarco.com/
this is actual news that never get aired on juarez, guess why.
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Juarez is at the border with New Mexico, what’s an LAPD cop doing there ?
Anyways, I’ll keep an eye on this one because I love the setting (present days N. America urban & rural). Iif it’s an open game I’ll probably buy it, if it’s a corridor FPS then nevermind.
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