The Town With No Name
for Amiga (CDTV)

town_with_no_name_box.jpg
Mr Creosote:
Company: Delta 4 Interactive / On-line
Year: 1992
Genre: Adventure, Action
Theme: Cartoon & Comic / Humour / Western
Language: English
Licence: Commercial
Views: 13731
Review by Mr Creosote (2009-03-15)
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A train stopping at the Town With No Name... and a Man With No Name getting off. Almost instantly, he's greeted by gunfire, which he returns in kind. Oops... turns out the man he just shot was the little brother of famed gangster Evil Eb who now sends his goons to avenge him.

The Town With No Name (or just Town With No Name, as the game is called on the box) comes from the same people who brought us the instant classic (careful: sarcasm!) Psycho Killer. This game is another attempt to actually use the features of the CDTV, and gameplay-wise, it's actually fairly close to that earlier game: You look at animations and listen, pick one option out of a few given ones every now and then and from time to time quickly click on a specific spot on the screen, for example to shoot a bad guy or to catch the glass the saloon's bartender has pushed along the counter towards you.

town_with_no_name03.png
Arriving in town... always ready to draw.

However, don't stop reading yet. The Town With No Name works a lot better than the horrible Psycho Killer. The main reason is that the player isn't forced to watch washed-out photos and videos made with bad home equipment, but instead, we get to see a polygonic (i.e. computer-generated) small western town with cartoony characters (sort of) populating it. This mix of styles works quite well, and it fits very well with the humourous overall tone of the game.

In addition, the interactions of the player which have a time limit (i.e. the duels) aren't nearly as bad as the random encounters with the killer, so it's not nearly as frustrating. You're usually warned of an upcoming critical sequence well in advance, so you have time to prepare.

In the end, though, The Town With No Name is still not a huge hit, either. It's certainly entertaining and I'm recommending it to everyone. But you have to know in advance, that after half an hour or so you'll be pretty much through with it. There doesn't seem to be a real goal other than to kill off the members of Evil Eb's gang one by one. Most of the places you can go to in town are more of less useless most of the time. And there aren't even that many. So you'll have seen everything pretty quickly. Quite good as an 'interactive western cartoon', though.

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