Cowboy Shootout - Top 85 Games for the BBC Micro (78)

We've reached game #78 and this time it's "Cowboy Shootout" from Program Power (Micro Power?) an original Beeb game inspired by Midway's 1977 arcade cabinet "Boot Hill". A smashing game combining some good graphics with pretty decent music and sound effects, and exciting gameplay too. Enjoy!

[andrewkearsley]

Thank you so much for posting this video! I was just looking through BBC games and I was trying to remember it's name. I guessed right as I knew Cowboy & Shootout was in it's title but couldn't remember if there was more in it. The sounds are flooding all sorts of memories from over 3 decades ago! Like you, the death march is likely where I first heard it too and I had no idea it was famous too! This was a classic.

[falksi]

This was silly-addictive. A great drop on to play

[wembully]

We bought this game when we bought our beeb from MicroPower's shop. As it was the only game I had apart from the Welcome tape I got quite good at it and could beat it at level 10 without being hit. Can't do it now though when I revisted it.

[pjgathergood]

A great game, simple but really good fun. I was originally going to post "I had the Acorn Electron version" (late on in my original BBC days I got an second hand Elc and a pile of games that I used to keep at my grandparents to play in the school holidays, my Beeb being far too bulky too haul back and forth!!). Except... a quick browse of bbcmicro.co.uk and everygamegoing.com suggests there never was an Elc version of this game! Either a) it was one of those games that wasn't advertised as being compatible on both but actually was, or b) I'm thinking of a very similar clone... which is quite likely. The depths of my memory suggest it had elements of Acornsoft's 'Bandit' (unreleased but downloadable), but not quite that game... it's now really bugging me what game it was I'm thinking of, argh!!

Either way, I've just downloaded 'Cowboy Shootout' and wasted 20 minutes playing away at it. Despite it's ultimately repetitive simplicity, if I'd have had this in my "main" BBC playing days this would likely have been a favourite. It's only holdback is that it doesn't really progress - it could up the skill level slightly with every few enemy kills, or maybe have two enemies on higher settings, or at very least have a colour pallet change once in a while. I can imagine though, that as a two player game it really comes alive.

It also puts me in mind of Software Invasion's fun 'Gunsmoke' not only for a similar setting,
but for an interesting comparison - both games share a near-indentical graphic of the man when he is hit by a bullet. As both games are indirecti-sh clones of arcade games, I can only assume the originals shared a similar image (which itself resembles a game-and-watch sort of image) which in turn inspired the image in these two games. Give 'Gunsmoke' a play and see the similarity of the image. :)
By the way, for years I thought Program Power was originally Micro Power's educational/business arm; but apparently it was a simple name from PP to MP a year or so into the company's life; and there often seemed to be quite a bit of crossover of names on game packaging/on-screen graphics (likely the game coding had been completed but the name change came before packing printing). Essay over... back to one more blast of 'Cowboy Shootout'!