The "Unreliable Narrator" is one of my favorite literary concepts and the way the games can uniquely approach the conceit mechanically is fascinating...

"Noah I know you're reading this out loud" made me laugh. I like to listen to all the names out of courtesy but it's ones like those that make it fun.

this video showed up in the middle of the night in western europe as I cradled my slowly dying cat I watched it and revisited your previous content from the year as well they brought me great distraction from and comfort for my grief he just passed half an hour ago, and well I guess I wanted to say my thanks

I spend like 30% of Noah's videos trying to understand his keybindings. Enter to swap? Middle mouse to reload? Numpad 1 to pick up? What is happening?

Boy, the part on Call of Juarez: The Cartel hits REALLY hard coming out of 2020 and going into 2021.

Cool video! Clarification: Eastwood's lines at least in the Leone westerns were originally spoken in English, not Italian (the actors spoke their native language on set, whether English, Spanish or Italian). The obvious dubbing is because the Italians in those days didn't record sound on set, so all the dialogue is dubbed regardless of which langauge you watch the movie in.

"Call of Juarez: Cartel but your actions have consequences" would be an interesting game

Holy shit, Gunslinger is a masterpiece!

My interpretation of High Plains Drifter was that Clint's character was a spirit of vengeance sent to punish the townspeople for doing nothing as their sheriff was murdered. That's why he vanishes into nothing at the end, he wasn't a living human. He seemed to possess memories of the murdered marshall. That's why he was so cruel to everyone. Raping and forcing them to paint their town. They were being punished for cowardice.

Thank You from the bottom of my heart! (Polish co-writer of CoJ: Gunslinger) XD

A great way to start the year!Have a good one!

Honestly, as much as I like this review, I feel like the Dramatic Irony of Bound by Blood is entirely deliberate. The story is stronger for the fact that Ray and Thomas are doomed to live horrible lives. The very Spaghetti Westerns you mention often end in horrible fates for the protagonists like ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST and Cheyenne. Also, more than a few fans of HIGH NOON have pointed out that Marshal Kane is actually a coward and a fool who is angry that the Sheriff (him) is recruiting civilians to protect HIM from danger. A danger that he could easily avoid by leaving town and getting reinforcements. Only pride keeps him here and he is willing to endanger others to survive.

I'm always impressed at how you manage to say interesting things for over an hour.

Your scathing and insightful section on The Cartel is one of the tightest pieces of writing I think I've heard in one of your videos. I enjoyed the whole thing but that part especially. Your love and knowledge of westerns helped with the context of what these games are, and how having them made by those outside America highlights certain tropes of the genre and perhaps not understand others. I hope you had a great holiday season Noah. I look forward to your next video.

I can't believe my eyes when i saw the date of the upload was on 2017. I was so sure the subjects presented in this vid is at least 2020 onward. That's kinda depressing.

Fantastic retrospective as always. Considering how much time you must put into these, I would suggest you do the current trilogy of Supergiant games: Bastion, Transistor, and Pyre. They’re relatively short but I would enjoy hearing your perspective on them.

Spaggety westerns weren't filmed in Italy, they were film in Spain, but they had Italian directors.

Clint Eastwood supposedly received a letter from John Wayne after the release of High Plains Drifter - admonishing him for the film saying "That isn't what the West was all about. That isn't the American people who settled this country." What the fuck did he know? lol

Casually name dropping NK Jemisin as a Patron is such a flex

First Bunny now Noah, this year is ending on a high!

Call of Juarez Gunslinger is one of my TOP3 FPS games of all time.. it has great and such a satisfying gameplay, fantastic artstyle, great music, great VA, great story and characters, funny moments, serious moments, many many great cool moments, great lenght for such a cheap game + I don't usually like arcade mods in games but CoJG has pretty much my favorite of all of them that I played

Happy new year Noah, may the next year be awesome for you. Watching your videos since the Half life video and I am amazed how far you've come. Greetings from Germany.

Can we have a version of "The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly" where Noah dubs every line?

On the term “Indian,” we actually usually prefer it to the term “Native American,” because it’s specific to us and our experiences. To call us “Indigenous” or “Natives” is the same thing as calling Koreans, Arabs, and Germans by the term “Eurasian” with no qualifiers. It’s not technically incorrect, but it’s lumping together dozens of ethnicities across 2 continents, all of which have different cultures and experiences with colonizers. Besides that, “Indian” as a term was SELF-adopted as a unifying term in the US across tribes and creeds. It has a rich history during the fight for Indian rights and recognition.

Ahhh just what i need at the end of new year eve. Warm food, cold drink, exhausted body and hour and a half video.

Don't think I've ever heard Noah so genuinely enraged by a game before...

Great video, but a small nitpick: Gunslinger and Borderlands use outlines with Borderlands also using textures with drawn in "ink lines" while Gunslinger uses regular textures with a high contrast and exaggerated saturation shader, none of the two games use cel shading which is a very specific form of shading that tries to mimic the "cels" used in old animations. For a game that uses cel shading see Wind Waker and games that uses cel shading with outlines XIII and Jet Set Radio (although notably both use it only for the characters and the environments are just painted to look cartoony without using any procedural form of toon shading).

Can't believe this guy isn't more popular

Happy New Year. Well written, and quite honest look at a series that could have been much more than it was. Having said that, the final game Call of Juarez: Gunslinger is still one of my favorite shooters and ranks second on my list of favorite Western games ever made. (Behind Red Dead Redemption. Granted it's not exactly a crowded genre) This was totally worth the Hour and a half devoted to watching it. Thanks for that.

Playing through Gunslinger at the moment and was pleasantly surprised by the secrets in that game. They're little pieces of American frontier stories and they are actually pretty progressive. Like, they talk about the genocide the Americans waged against the native Americans, that the battle at wounded knee wasn't a battle but massacre of women and children and even put battle in quotations. Almost hard to consider that it's the same studios that made Cartel.

It's not that far removed from our, Polish sensibilities, we had Wild West in a form of our Frontier "Wild East" Centuries before Americans and those are too linked to days of glorious past, freedom loving heroic vagabonds, warriors honor and else. Look up Henryk Sienkiewicz.

Super bunnyhop and Noah on the same day? You spoil me.

I bout fell out of my chair when this man read "N.K. Jemison" out of his notebook like it ain't no thing.

I wasn't expecting genre knowledge or an earnest review of the Juarez series narrative and it's relation to the genre. I really enjoyed this. Thumbs up.

This got nothing to do with the video,, really, but did you see Logan, Noah? It very much tips its hat to the Western, and shows how similar the old genre is with the current Superhero era. And its bloody good.

After watching this, I want to see Noah's thoughts on Red Dead Redemption.

Great video Noah. I always appreciate how socially and historically conscious your analysis is. The subtext of the "Cowboys and In'juns" level from Call of Juarez always made me uncomfortable. It's important to be critical of pernicious aspects of games, even ones you generally enjoy.

Really interesting to contrast The Cartel and last year's Ghost Recon: Wildlands, which was a surprisingly grounded and cynical take on America's war on drugs, despite advertising itself as yet another spec ops power fantasy (which it definitely still is). The Ghosts kidnap, blackmail, and torture their way across Bolivia on behalf of the CIA. The good ending has the Bolivian government completely collapse, the rebel movement the player(s) have been helping the whole game dissolve into infighting militias, and the head of the cartel put into the witness protection program by the CIA. I was really shocked by how much a game where 4 special operatives effectively destroy an entire country stuck to the realities of the subject matter.

I absolutely love the style and effort you put to these video essays. Thank yoy Noah!

I'm very sorry to nitpick, but at 1:05:47 you amalgamated Daniel Floyd and James Portnow. Fantastic video though, like with Homefront before this I'm always excited to hear a nuanced take on what can be considered more marginal games in the higher end of the production spectrum, ones that are typically dismissed by mainstream critique for their mechanical failings but also overlooked for deeper and more subjective analysis for not particularly standing out in a markedly thematic or design based respect.

The past week I kept thinking "will Noah give us a present and upload something?" I guess we've all been very good this year :D

I'm Polish, and I'm obviously speaking only for myself and not for Techland developers, but at the time Cartel released I did not see America in any big, negative light. There were some dark spots, but no place in the world is perfect. Now unfortunately the last 2 years have changed that. It is now difficult to have a single week without something happening in America that makes me grab my head while my mouth just goes "What?" before my brain even manages to process the stupidity or tragedy of the situation. I keep telling myself that this is just a vocal minority that just so happens to be currently in power and that most people are not like that, but it's sometimes getting really hard to do. It's always hard when you look at news too much, because "Nothing horrible happened today" isn't a news story, but I heard more terrifying news from America this past year then I did my whole life. Twitter existing might have something to do with it, cause believe me, no matter where you are in the world it's hard to escape American news if you understand English. Meanwhile the party in power in my country is passing laws to get the judicial system to submit to them while the rest of the EU is yelling "WTF are you doing?", and things like Brexit and Spain happened, so I guess we're all equally getting fucked and the future looks bleak. I do not know where this leads, but future historians are going to have a doozy. On a lighter note, I played the first Call of Juarez back around the time it came out and liked it quite a bit. I had no idea it had any DirectX 10 stuff since no one dared to touch Windows Vista with a 10 foot pole.

One of the things Techland isn't given much appreciation for is that all of their tech is made in-house. That is something that even the very big studios are not able to do.

I just found this channel, and jesus you've got some analytical chops. I need more time to watch these

So, I've never played Bound in Blood, but is it possible that the Polish developer didn't know that "family farm" in this context would mean "plantation" and, by extension, slavery? Not defending it, just wondering if something got lost in translation.

I just finished the first two games and wanted to hear someone else's opinion on them. Surpisingly, this is the only video that delivers in this regard. It is a bit rough compared to his more recent creations, it is still enjoyable nonetheless. Also, there is a mechanic that was not mentioned in the first part of the video - you cannot shoot bodies, like, at all. It is such a strange thing and I haven't seen it in any game before. I guess they wanted players to be more focused or immersed, or maybe they wanted for the tone to be more mature? Such a weird thing to add to a game.

Just to clarify (and this isn't a correction) but the Spaghetti Westerns also utilised Spain a lot in their productions as well, especially the "Dollars" trilogy. It didn't hurt that Spain had (and still has) a lot of Wild West theme parks too, which was ideal for keeping production costs down when it came to sets.

I waited for thirteen hours to watch this so Noah could be the first thing I listened to in 2018.

Calling ray a man shaped boulder is hilariously accurate and creative.

Great analysis as always. One small trivia about Italian cinema in the 70s, they weren't filmed totally in Italian, they'd get everyone to speak they're native language then dubbed it over for international distributors.

Good luck in 2018 noah keep vids coming and enjoy your road trip across America that's ambition

Gunslinger is a great little game. I'm really glad I bought it based on this video. It works great as an apologia for the Western genre (and also game violence, kind of). The whole unreal and mostly consequence-free tall-tale atmosphere, combined with the "Nuggets of truth" (like the way these in-game cartoon badasses get shown in their real, dweeby-looking photo form, or the one that states outright that the Natives were probably the only ones who one could actually call the "heroes" of the West) have a clear message. The tales of the West are mostly bullshit, but they are fun, awesome bullshit, and there is still value in telling them, so long as you remember what really happened and don't confuse reality and fiction.

Loved this video. I had to leave home to do stuff but I couldn't stop listening until the end. I feel Gunslinger's art direction made its visuals age better than all the other games in the franchise. I played it last week and it didn't feel nearly as old as it is.

When I have nothing to do, I love watching your videos. You're so classy and well spoken.

Ooh boy, grab the popcorn fam, there's gonna be some verbal ripping and tearing in this one.

I'm glad there's someone out there who dissects stories in video games with this level of depth.

Yes, to people outside of america is hell scape

Gunslinger is such a fantastic game and best of the series. Would love to see the series continue with that style.

Wife and I just started playing this series about the same time you uploaded this, hahahaha. Great stuff. EDIT: I must admit, your opinion on The Cartel is what I expected, and morally, I can't argue against it. My wife and I are trying the co-op function and it actually implements some unique features. I thought I was lightyears ahead of my wife in terms of level, but it turned out she had blitzed past me while I wasn't aware! The competitive-cooperative interplay coupled with light stealth I thought was very interesting and hope perhaps it inspires a different franchise.

I've generally detested most of what I've seen come out of Techland as a developer, but Gunslinger honestly looks promising. Love the ending sentiment of this essay.

Outlaw by Lucas arts is the first western shooter I can think of, at least that I played. Back then it wasn’t a bad game but it came out around the same time as Quake and had the graphical fidelity of say, Duke Nukem 3D. So it definitely wasn’t a looker even back then, so I can’t imagine it having aged well. It just stands to remind me how ancient I am. But still my fondest western shoot outs come from that game.

This franchise is now 16 years old and this video is 4 years old. I just started a playthrough of Call of Juarez 1. It's an interesting, if clearly janky experience.

I'm gonna replay Gunslinger now. Awesome analysis as always, Noah! Happy new year!

inb4 "Why are you FORCING ME to hear your POLITICS Noah, just talk about the GAAAMMMMEEE without bringing YOUR POLITICS into your CRITIQUE OF GAMES THAT TALK ABOUT POLITICS" comments.

Happy new year!

I think this is one of the best retrospectives by Noah.

Amazing conclusion to an amazing piece! Thank you sir and also thanks for kindling in me a now quite rooted love and respect for westerns new and old.

the second part is the best,amazing adventure i really liked its one of my top fps!

Revisiting this video much later after finally having played through most of the series: I think you perhaps misunderstood the ending of Bound in Blood. Ray killing William isn't meant to be a shocking escalation of his selfish behavior, it _is_ completely in line with what he's already been doing the entire game, and it _is_ absolutely the expected result. That's why it's the first thing you see starting a new game, and why William provokes Ray in the first place. William figured that the only thing that would get Ray to recognize that he's being a total psycho is if he killed one of the very few people he actually cared about. The thing that makes his progression from the prequel to the original game fascinating to me is that while William was right in that it did get Ray to recognize just what a terrible person he's being... he was wrong in assuming he would succeed in cleaning up his act afterwards. Ray just made a very big superficial change to his character without actually addressing the delusions that made him the person he was.

I gotta be real with you, I didn't remember why I subscribed to you at first. After watching this video I definitely remember why. Happy new year buddy.

Ok, I know these games are amazing, but that's irrelevant to the most burning question here. Who made that adorable cactus? It's so cute!

"There is no tragedy when someone is shot in a game of paintball" You've obviously never seen Byker Grove.

Back when I was almost driven to stop playing my import copy of Call of Juarez in 2006 purely due to its longest-loading-times-I-ever-experiencedness, I would never have guessed that one day I would be watching a video retrospective on the series' overall brilliance. It really did get better with every new title ... well, O.K., I did not play Cartel, so that probably helps with that opinion.

You've got the most charming intros, man. Happy New Year!

23:40 oh look someone stumbled onto my high school nickname

the man really just said Bound in blood is a happy ending like you played the first game you know what happens next.

These videos have been my discovery of lockdown. Nice work mate.

NEW NOAH LETS GOOOO. I havent even watched yet but thank you

I played through the game recently and another bleak aspect of the native american depiction was how they would all have alcohol bottles on them or around them. This is a reference to the rampant alchoholism that natives are known for... just another piece of history that made it into this game while having no place being there.

"If it gave some sort of small, solitary shit about that kind of thing" had me laughing out loud😂😂

16:40 The "Natives" use the term pretty frequently as well. People from all over the world, including other countries on the American continents, call U.S. citizens "Americans" without referring to Canadians or Mexicans in the same way. Words are fickle, and intent is elusive.

22:06 bottom right. Is there something you want to talk to us about Noah? We can help.

That introduction brought back so many memories watching classic like 50s 60s and 70s wild west shows when i was a kid in the 90s. 😍😍😍😍😍😍. Death valley was one of my favorites😍😍😍😍

Excellent, I loved this.

So, can we start calling the series "kielbasa western"?

Great to see you making reviews again.

49:14 Counterpoint: not every game has to be Spec Ops: The Line. Video games, no matter how cynical, are supposed to be fun, especially when they take place in the Wild West. The reason Spec Ops: The Line was successful was that the writers understood the FPS genre enough to properly deconstruct it at a time when the market was oversaturated with Modern Warfare clones. Most writin' teams can't pull that off, as most writers see "deconstruction" as an excuse to be dark and edgy for the sake of dark and edgy.

Perfect way to ring in the new year! Thanks Noah!

Thanks for the video Noah. I think I will now go on, eat a can of beans and watch a western, maybe "My name is nobody" after I learned the story of Silas.

Wow. I always wanted to play these games when they first came out but never got around to it. You have convinced me to finally fulfill that want. Great video!! I’m definitely going to get these games now!

Ah I’m so elated to see another franchise retroactive of yours.

This was awesome! Thank you for going over one of my fav series (except the 3rd game :P ) So cool to find such an insight into these games.

Absolutely fantastic video my dude. Keep up the good work!

This was fascinating to watch/listen to. I only played the last game of the series, but i absolutely loved it, especially the unreliable narrator parts!

I pretty much agree with how you think people outside the US see the US. When I think of the the US, guns, Las Vegas, and Company manipulation comes to mind. The only thing that changes when I think of a western is guns, war with Mexico, and crime. So yeah, you've progressed as a country, but more as the Corporate States of America, than anything else.

Honestly , the last game Gunslinger, looks really fun lol I almost want to get it, I'm sure its cheap af rn

Great as always! Man, I'd love for you to do one of these on Kane&Lynch.

I want a Elder Scroll retrospect now with Noah referencing Tamriel twice.

Thank you, Noah. Happy new year! :)

Ok, a year later I think we finally deserve a comment on the key layout you are using, Noah)