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2 April, 2008
Casual MMO: Bang! Howdy Review
There's a sign hanging outside of FrontierTown: population 27. But to look at the streets here, you won't see any cowboys or gunslinger girls wandering about. You won't see them sauntering in the barbershop, the general store, the bank, the train station or at your ranch either.
To see other players you'll have to visit the saloon. There, people's avatars appear in chat scrolls. You can click on them to see their wanted posters: a mix of their fancy duds and the badges they've earned for being the fastest mini-strategy gunner in the West.
This is Bang! Howdy a casual MMO-flavored set of mini-strategy games. A cheeky entertaining Wild West skin with customizable avatars and chat, wrapped around the game equivalent of turn-based dodgeball meets rock paper scissors.
Two to four opponents square off on a tiny map, weilding their cowboys or steam engines in 5-15 minute matchups. Can you collect more gold nuggets than the other guys? Or can you shoot the nuggets out of the hands of the faster collectors? Each of your units can only move once every 10-20 seconds, so you better make the most of each of them.
Special, more powerful units and temporary power-up cards are available for sale - you can buy them with the money you earn in games, or money you buy with money.
There's a healthy range of personalization - many different wardrobe pieces and badges. The matches are in 3D, but the game itself is 2D, so that flat art is easy to expand upon.
there wasn't much of a sense of their avatar affecting the in-game play. Avatars/profiles seemed more like a trophy case. It would have been nice to see an eye-patch wearing woman in a sombrero up and kicking my ass, besides that small cameo for the scoreboard down at the bottom.
The matches are pretty simple to play and difficult to master; the personalization is varied but the opportunities to show off are somewhat limited. This is a lobby-based game, more than an MMO. Everyone goes to the saloon for matchups, so you can see some random faces drift by the primary chat scroll. But it's all tumbleweeds in the other areas of the game.
Still, Bang Howdy! was a lively experience that loaded up in Java and let me start playing on my Mac laptop in approximately 90 seconds. The writing, music and art are fun and catchy. I could play here and there thoughtout the day, without a huge commitment. I spent $10 on a good load of gold to help me get started; less than I spend keeping my (dormant) World of Warcraft account. Good luck to 'em!
Bang! Howdy official Site (Bang! Howdy on Wikipedia) is an independent MMO-strategy game published by Three Rings Games, the online games craftsmen behind YoHoHo Puzzle Pirates. It came out of beta in December 2006.
Posted by justin at January 26, 2007 11:00 PM
Comments
wow
Posted by: cjmcwhor ![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://interactive.usc.edu/members/jhall/nav-commenters.gif)
at January 27, 2007 4:21 PM
I played some of YoHoHo Puzzle Pirates for comparison, and that game has a persistent world. People were standing around, dressed up as pirates, talking. There was a more playful feeling to the casual interaction; the pieces stitching together the mini-games. Players each have a house they can furnish, so there's more of a developed economy around customization and items superfluous to puzzle gaming.
Posted by: Justin Hall at January 29, 2007 12:47 PM
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