The Town with No Name

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NOTE: The page was imported from the original (not a lot) and alt not original (Fandom version) CGW.

The Town with No Name
My name's not Shane, kid!
-The Man With No Name
Genre(s): Point-and-Click Adventure
Platform(s): Commodore CDTV
Release Date: October 1992 (CDTV)
1993 (MS-DOS)
Developer(s): Delta 4
Publisher(s): On-Line Entertainment

The Town with No Name is a western-based interactive movie/adventure game made by Delta 4 Interactive in 1992 for the short-lived Commodore CDTV (and the backwards compatible Amiga CD32 by extension).

Plot

In the American frontier, a drifter with a John Wayne-esque voice referred to as "the Man with No Name" gets off a train at the station outside the Town with No Name. Upon entering the town, he is quickly confronted by a gunman. Once No Name kills the gunman, an unnamed man with a cigarette reveals that the attacker was the youngest brother of Evil Eb, the leader of the Hole-in-the-Head Gang, and hints that Eb will send his bandits after No Name. No Name then explores each of the town's buildings, either by interacting with the town's residents or by playing minigames, and duels with gang members usually after leaving the buildings.

After killing every outlaw except Evil Eb, No Name confronts Eb himself but only shoots off his hat. Eb, having dropped his gun in surprise and resigning to his defeat, asks No Name to kill him, believing him to be a man called Billy-Bob, whom he had earlier challenged to a duel. No Name explains that he is not Billy-Bob and came to town to meet his sister, believing he is in a town called Dodge Gulch. Eb tells him in turn that Dodge Gulch is at another train station 20 miles away. No Name spares Eb because of their mutual misunderstanding, and the two become friends as they go into the saloon for whiskey.

To trigger an alternate ending, No Name can leave on the train that brought him into town at any point prior to his encounter with the bandit "Wildcard" Willy McVee in the saloon. As the train departs, a small boy yells, "Come back, Shane!", prompting No Name to shoot the child and tell him that his name is not Shane before the train flies away into outer space.

Gameplay

The gameplay is divided into two main forms: a point-and-click format with menus containing multiple options, followed by short animated scenes based on the player's selections; and a light gun-type interface where the player must quickly shoot a target before the target shoots back, ending the game in defeat. Minigames include three-card monte, Chase the Ace, and a target practice game where the player must click a moving drink that the bartender in the saloon slides towards No Name so he can catch it.

The duels with the gang members are typically triggered by entering and leaving buildings. However, the order in which the buildings are entered and the activities that can be done in each have no effect on when, or in which order, the bandits appear; the player can simply enter and leave any combination of buildings and fight the bandits in the same sequence. The exception after killing some of the bandits in the street is the required encounter with "Wildcard" Willy McVee in the saloon; any subsequent attempts to leave will trigger the last few duels, culminating in the showdown with Evil Eb. The one optional duel involves Immortal Isaac, a knife-thrower concealed in shadows in an upstairs room in the saloon.

If the player dies at any point, they must restart from the beginning.

Development

The Town with No Name was conceived by Fergus McNeill who came up with idea when he saw a friend wearing a pair of cowboy boots. "My mind was turned towards the whole genre of Spaghetti Western," he explained. "It was begging for me to do something with it."

Why It Has No Name

  1. Awful mix of graphics; the 2D models are extremely poorly drawn and look like they were made with Microsoft Paint, the color palette is dull to look at, and the 3D models look they were poorly made with 3D Construction Kit/Virtual Reality Studio.
    • The DOS version looks even worse, as all the graphics are horribly dithered and compressed due to most DOS at the time not having the graphics capabilities of the Amiga.
  2. The voice acting is so garbled and atrocious that you might even wonder if it was really done by human beings. What's more, because the game was developed in the UK, about half of the actors don't bother attempting American accents at all, while the others put on awful-sounding imitations of an American accent. According to WatchMojo, the protagonist sounds like a robot Arnold Schwarzenegger in an abandoned building. Likewise, YouTuber Retsupurae compares his voice to "John Wayne with a stroke", and according to Joel from Vinesauce, the characters sound like aliens trying to decipher the human language.
  3. The story is bad, and it feels like a generic Western movie.
  4. The music is awful. The only decent bit of music is the opening credit's theme (a remix of the main theme from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly), and even there they screwed up the sound mixing, meaning that most of the instruments are inexplicably panned to the right. The opening music in the church is the worst, as it can easily be considered ear-splitting (courtesy of "The Jester", a barely credited musician). In addition, the opening song on the DOS version is even worse than the one in CDTV, as it’s just two short loops of music.
  5. The sound, in general, is poorly mixed with the music often drowning out the voices. Some of the voice samples in the CDTV version don't play correctly, starting late and/or finishing early, leaving you unsure exactly what the characters are meant to be saying.
  6. False advertising for two reasons:
    • On the back and the front, it looks like it's going to be live action, yet in reality, the game is animated. Also, pictures are also out of focus and of poor quality, adding to the game's amateurish feel.
    • And on the bottom, it claims to be "Entertainment for All Ages", but the game is filled with violence and blood; in one scene, the Man with No Name has sex (off-screen) with a prostitute; and in one of the endings, No Name kills an innocent young boy in cold blood for incorrectly calling him Shane.
  7. The game flows very unevenly with scenes that appear to happen for no reason, many of which are never referenced again. Said uneven flow also makes the game's story hard to follow.
    • For example, in one cutscene, the Clint Eastwood expy asks a Lee van Cleef expy, who is never given a proper introduction or seen again, if he "has the right time". The middle-aged man then opens his pocket watch, revealing a realistic-looking photo of a young girl on the inside of the lid. Suspenseful music box/pipe organ music plays for about 20 seconds while the scene remains fixed on this image before the music suddenly stops and the van Cleef expy replies with a nearly inaudible "No".
      • This is actually a reference to a similar scene from the film For a Few Dollars More, in which Colonel Douglas Mortimer (van Cleef) checks a pocket watch with a photo of a woman, later revealed to be a picture of his daughter, on the inside of the lid.
    • Plus, if No Name chooses to shoot the Eastwood expy at the blacksmith, the latter will draw his gun more quickly and shoot off No Name's head without any bloodshed, ending the game in defeat.
    • When Evil Eb's littlest brother and three other outlaws — Nasty Ned, Massive Jake, and Bad Bart — are killed, the town's undertaker, Mr. Diablo, slides across the screen while a short organ rendition of the Funeral March ending with an out-of-tune church bell plays. It is presumed that he picks up their bodies for burial, but it seems nonsensical to include this scene because it's a redundant reminder of the outlaws' deaths. A popular fan nickname for him is "Retarded Abraham Lincoln" given his stovepipe top hat, beard with no mustache, and disturbing facial expression. For reasons unknown, when Zippy Zeke and Crafty Clint are killed, Mr. Diablo is replaced by the Grim Reaper, who materializes out of a fiery portal in the sky and spins around for a couple of seconds as it descends to the ground, showing itself to be a crude two-dimensional sprite.
  8. Being killed at any point sends you back to the beginning of the game with no opportunities to save your progress. This wouldn't be too bad if most of the outlaw duels weren't based on trial-and-error and there was actually a way to skip scenes that you already completed. This mechanic was probably used to pad out the game's short length (it can be completed in less than 30 minutes if played in full, even less if the player doesn't stop to do any activities in the buildings that bear no weight on the story).
  9. There is no instruction manual under the cover, just a blank white page, and is completely inappropriate and unacceptable for any game.
  10. Most of the jokes fall painfully flat, such as the infamous "My name's not Shane" joke in the ending.
  11. The text for the "Meanwhile" splash screen randomly uses the same font as that of the Back to the Future trilogy logo. At the same time, the "Back in Town..." card uses the same font as that of the logo for the Beverly Hills Cop trilogy.
  12. You can end the game by simply going back on the train you leave at the start of the game, which then blasts off into space in a manner similar to the Millennium Falcon spaceship from the Star Wars film saga (one of the game's unused audio files is the standard Star Wars end credits music, which was likely cut due to copyright). This allows the player to complete the story in as quickly as 2 seconds!
  13. Half of the time, the characters' lips don't move when they talk. The other half of the time, their lip movements are low-effort, looping animations that do not sync with the dialogue being spoken at all.
  14. When No Name beats gang member "Wildcard" Willy McVee in a poker game in the saloon, there are no hints that you need to kill him while he is talking before he shoots you from under the table.
  15. The ending is terrible: it turns out that the game's entire plot was just a misunderstanding. No Name was in the wrong town at the wrong time, so he buys the leader of the criminal gang, Evil Eb — who mistook him for a man called Billy-Bob — a round of whiskey despite the slight matter of his having murdered Eb's entire gang.
  16. Sometimes the models of the characters change which makes no sense.
  17. The cursor in the CDTV version moves so slow, yet at one time, when you need to kill Zippy Zeke, you need to quickly do it before he kills you. He is so fast that the sluggish cursor makes him nearly impossible to kill.
  18. The game doesn't give you any proper instructions during the story.
  19. If you die, the camera comes careening towards No Name's grave to the sound of an airplane crash-landing, followed by a horribly drawn picture of No-Name in heaven, and it just makes no sense.
  20. Lots of loading times, especially when played on the CDTV.
  21. The DOS version doesn't bother updating the tutorial, rendering it completely useless and nonsensical, as it frequently references the CDTV's controller, despite it not being compatible with PCs and nothing which remotely resembles it being available for the platform.

The Only Redeeming Qualities

  1. The game can be unintentionally funny due to its poor production values and bad voice acting.
  2. "My name's not Shane, kid."

Reception

"What were they thinking?"
The Shit Scale
Games that are debatably bad High level of shit contamination The very high category The severe zone Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde Major code red
👆
This product belongs to the "MAJOR CODE RED" category of the AVGN's Shit Scale.

The game had a mostly negative critical reception, including a D+ from Amiga Game Zone, a 35% from Amiga Format, and 3 out of 10 stars from PC Review. Dave Winder of Amiga Computing was more positive, stating that the game is "let down by its lack of real lasting gameplay, but the interactive elements and the fact that there is so much humour and so many hidden sequences lift it above being just another game."

Retrospective reviews of the game noted its surreal humor and perceived lack of content; while Tanner Fox of Game Rant did speculate on the developer's intentions, he otherwise opined how it was hard to tell if Delta 4 deliberately conceived the game as a parody or not.

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Trivia

  • It has spawned some popular memes, like Mr. Diablo (the Abraham Lincoln lookalike undertaker who slides across the screen after many of the outlaws are killed, presumably to pick up their bodies for burial), "Give me a drink, Bartender!", "Do you have the right time, old man?", and "My name's not Shane, kid!" (a reference to the 1953 film Shane).
  • This game is known for its bad voice acting, because the makers of this game couldn't afford actors and did the voices themselves.
  • This game was, in fact so bad, Fergus McNeill (the director and lead animator) himself apparently despised this game, neither Delta 4 Interactive nor On-Line Entertainment list it in their release histories.
  • The Stranger's voice is based on John Wayne.
  • When you go into the Jailhouse, the men you see on the Wanted posters are the makers of the game.
  • Since the game wasn't released by a big company, it was released only in the United Kingdom.
  • It is possibly the game with the fastest gameplay to finish in history.
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