Desperados: Wanted Dead or Alive
$19.95		(Win95/98/Me/2000/XP) (Retail Packaging) (DESPINFOPR)

Publisher: Spellbound / Infogrames

Animated violence

Game: Real-Time Team-Based

Adventure/Strategy!

The Posse That Slays Together Stays Together

Play six Desperados, led by our hero, John Cooper, in the wildest and toughest strategy game of all time. Accompany Cooper and his fearless posse on their thrilling chase after the mysterious bandit leader, El Diablo.

Beautiful landscapes and an epic story help recreate the unbeatable Wild West atmosphere, making this the most challenging Real-Time, Team-Based Adventure Strategy game ever. The Wild West has never been more entertaining.

Some Mighty Fine Features:

25 action packed missions

FMV cut-scenes and dialogue-supported plot

Unique environments including ghost towns, gold mines, pueblos, swamps, camps, saloons, jails, steamboats, etc.

Exciting gunfights, bank robberies, stealth missions, traps and awesome escapes

Supreme environmental effects such as thunderstorms, sunsets, caverns, fires and waterfalls

Six tutorial missions integrated into each scenario allowing players the opportunity to test and become familiar with each character's features

Once each character has been introduced and gathered, you will have over 30 different character skills to choose from

Objective is to select the appropriate weapon of defense in order to defeat your enemy and to advance to the next level without getting caught or killed

The Story

El Paso, New Mexico. The Twinnings & Co-Railroad Company gets robbed once to often. Twinning's representative, Smith, hires John Cooper, as a means of apprehending this group of bandits and putting an end to their raids.

Cooper starts by gathering his old allies, a handful of stereotypical western characters. This team will work together at locating the bandits and claiming the reward money. They follow Smith's information, which eventually leads them to Sanchez, the leader of another gang.

Cooper and his posse overcome Sanchez, who claims not to have been involved with the train raids. Cooper decides to take advantage of the situation and attempts to make some fast cash by delivering Sanchez to the Marshall.

On their journey back to El Paso, Sanchez provides some valuable information. He informs them that a mysterious stranger named El Diablo, is attempting to unite all of New Mexico's bandits, in order to become the leader of an incredibly powerful army. Cooper also discovers that El Diablo received insider information about the trains.

		John Cooper The Leader of this gang of Desperados. Hero marksman and hired bounty hunter.		Doc McCoy Skillful at picking locks and healing the wounded members of his team.
		Kate O'Hara The game's vixen who uses her sharp gambling skills and beauty to beat the enemy.		Sanchez Former bandit who uses heavy weapons as a means of avoiding enemy attack.
		Sam Expert in explosives. His favorite toys are TNT and dynamite.		Mia Yung The young ingenue whose naive look and charm helps her to easily outsmart the villians.

Requirements:

Win95/98/Me/2000/XP: Pentium II 266 MHz or AMD K6-2 Processor, 64 MB RAM, SVGA 640 x 480 or better, 16 bit color, 4x CD-ROM or better, DirectX sound card, mouse, keyboard.

Reviews:

Just Adventure by Randy Sluganski

"Imagine famed western director John Ford (Stagecoach, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance) developing a computer game. Just as his movies were known for developing a strong microcosm of characters inside the maelstrom of the wild, wild west, so too does Desperados. Desperados is, along with Max Payne, the most fun I have had playing any game this year. I am not in particular a huge fan of Western movies or even strategy games for that matter, but that is quickly changing as many genres incorporate the better elements of adventure gaming."

"Each character also has an array of special moves or tricks that can be used to progress through a level. For those who think I am committing blasphemy by gushing so over an adventure/strategy game, there are literally dozens of situations you will encounter that are the equivalent of any puzzle in an adventure game. For example, pyromaniac Samuel Williams carries a rattlesnake around in a sack. The sack can be placed on the ground in a troublesome area, and when an opponent attempts to pass, the snake will attack and kill him. This nifty trick was working great for the most part, but occasionally a bad guy would notice the movement in the bag, shoot the reptile, and then overtake my gang. What happened was I was a victim of my own success!..."

"Desperados plays like a movie and adventure game in other ways. The missions are not helter-skelter but actually build upon each other to advance the storyline. There is ongoing chatter between the characters and enough twists and turns to fill the pages of a cheap paperback novel. Lengthy cutscenes between the missions are not just eye candy filler and always add another layer to the plot. Even the music, while not on a par with High Noon, had me humming along and is suggestive of the old matinee Westerns. The developers have done a great job of recreating a time when Westerns were the undisputed king of Hollywood."

IGN Review by Steve Butts

"Take one part The Wild Bunch, add a splash of the A-Team and pour it into a Commandos shaped Jell-O mold. The result? The Adventures of Brisco County Jr. of course. But one other likely outcome of the mixture is an incredibly fun and stylish game called Desperados. It's captivated me for two weeks now -- even causing me to skip out early on our weekly IGN yacht parties and clam dives. The game does have some significant shortcomings, particularly in terms of its interface, but with everything that the game gets right you'll find it hard to stay mad at it."

"From a standpoint of difficulty, Desperados is a little on the hard side. Although there are significant differences among the various enemies, they are all pretty sharp. And since it only takes a shot or two to take out one of your characters (which instantly ends the game, by the way), the principle of 'save early, save often' definitely applies here.

"The game gets the style almost exactly right. It's important to note here that style is not necessarily the same as authenticity. Rather this game takes a much more cinematic approach to the subject. Haciendas, bandit camps, frontier towns and numerous other environments are convincingly laid out and brought to life with lots of bystanders. Scarecrows will scatter as you crawl through a cornfield and shopkeepers will run to get the local authorities when they see a crime. There's definitely a lot of atmosphere here..."

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