Either I'm a freakin' gamegod, or this game is short beyond all short. I complained that BG&E is too short at ten hours. A six hour single player adventure game is goddamned near unacceptable.

But I have to give the game this... once it was done, it was so good I wanted to play it again. Most adventure games I play once and that's it. In many cases it's because I prefer the notion of experiencing each game once and only once, but most of the time, they're just too long to play again and I've already bought something new. So maybe that was the plan for Red Dead Revolver: an adventure game short enough to finish several times and good enough to be worth the time.

Red Dead Revolver. Odd title. Let's get past that right away. Has a great rhyming quality though, which makes it work.

RDR is a '60s Spaghetti Western turned into a game. And they absolutely nailed it, presentation-wise. The intro movie, the aged film effect, the fonts... and the music. In an extremely smart move, RDR contains actual music from the heyday of the Italian Western film. If you've ever been a fan of classic Clint like "The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly", you will positively revel in the audio tracks.

The plot - such as it is - also borrows heavily from the genre. It's like a greatest hits of Sergio Leone. Typical stuff, grizzelled loner Red wanders into town on a private mission. Plus there's a gigantic bit lifted directly from the Sharon Stone movie "The Quick and the Dead" that you couldn't miss with both eyes shot out. They even made the main bad guy sound like Gene Hackman.

But it's really just a big pile of homage. Although individual scenes are mostly nice and badass, the overall storyline is weirdly assembled. For example, after the town shootout tournament, you and two others head out after the Evil Governor. Now, you have good reason (but precious little evidence), and Annie Stoakes wants revenge for losing her farm, but Jack Swift? We have no idea why he would throw in to go kill the Governor. There's no motivation, just a lot of cliched Western chatter. And supporting characters like Shadow Wolf and Buffalo Soldier literally come out of nowhere.

RDR is fundamentally a third person shooter. Left stick moves, right stick aims/controls the camera. Draw weapon with L1 (which just means you will have L1 depressed for the entire game) and shoot with R1. Red becomes a bounty hunter early on, so there will be no rope tricks or riverboat gambling. He shoots, and with a cool slo-mo effect called Deadeye, he shoots well. There's an armory of available weapons, great looking environments packed with enemies, and a handful of boss fights.

Happily, the Western-styled gameplay elements differentiate it from being a cheaper SOCOM with cowboys. You ride on a horse a couple of times, and a steer or buffalo. You get to jump onto a moving train, which is fun but a little wonky. But the star elements are Deadeye and showdown dueling. When you activate Deadeye, the image goes black and white and time slows down while you highlight predetermined target areas on your victim. Once the slo-mo time runs out, all six of your shots are peeled off in rapid succession, creating a very satisfying machine gun effect.

Deadeye can be done at any time, assuming your power meter is filled. The meter is pretty generous on refilling, so there's usually no need to hold off on Deadeye. Not all the playable characters get Deadeye, and those that miss out on it have some other kind of special attack instead.

Then there's the dueling showdowns, a staple of any Western. The duels occur only during scripted story events, so you can't duel anybody, anywhere (which sucks, especially since you can't do it in multiplayer.) When a duel begins, you first have to pull off a quickdraw by yanking down on the right analog stick and then pushing up on the stick, neatly simulating the motion of going for your piece. Then, almost like the slow motion Deadeye effect, you target areas on the enemy. This time, however, you have to manually lock in your targets by clicking R1, so it's entirely possible to select non-vital areas (like shoulders) or even complete misses. When the slo-mo ends, you fire... and if you're good, you will have killed the guy.

It's pretty slick how you have to control your target reticule during the duels. It's all done on the right stick, so you have to teach yourself how to go from the quickdraw to the targeting without losing too much time. Because if you take too long, either the slo-mo runs out, or your enemy will have already shot you up instead. I like that the entire process is done with basically one motion on one stick, with a couple ancillary R1 clicks. It feels more like an actual gunfight, rather than the usual L1-R1-stick deal. I typically start locking in targets at the crotch and work my way straight up to the head.

As you go through the story, your dueling opponents get faster and faster, to the point where you have to get all your clicks in and accurate with no mistakes. Most reviews I've read say the later duels are too hard, but I did not find them to be that bad. Even on hard difficulty, I never needed more than six attempts on any single duel, and most of them I won on the first try.

Having been through the game twice (on Normal and Hard), there really was only a couple levels that gave me pause. General Diego's level can be extremely unforgiving if you don't shoot the long range targets fast enough. And the timed Mansion Courtyard level was a total bitch on Hard. It's a three minute level, and I needed over an hour to get past it. That's a lot of failures. Most of the levels are not that annoying.

You might find the normal combat controls a trifle inexact. It reminded me of the obnoxious, scattershot style of the Grand Theft Auto games, but it is honestly much better than that. Largely because the enemies aren't as terrible as in GTA. Nothing is worse than standing alone in Vice City at the epicenter of a gangland firefight. RDR is better, but it can still evoke the battle plan of run-around-in-circles-firing-aimlessly.

There's two types of combat levels in RDR... linear path levels and arena-style levels. The arenas are usually the toughest, since baddies can pop up on all sides. This is where you'll die the most. They are fun in a frantic way, but err towards being cheap in the classic GTA style. The linear paths are more interesting, in that they keep you moving, and you can use stealth and cover to pick off the hombres.

Although the hub town of Brimstone feels like a free-roaming GTA city because you keep coming back to it for conversations and shopping, it is not. Each level (including the passive visits to Brimstone) is a level unto itself, and you must do everything in the plot's linear order.

The levels run every movie scene in the book... rocky canyon, saloon brawl, ghost town, gold mine, rancher's farmland. They run about half day and half night, so there is plenty of variety and details to take in. There's a classic film effect over most of the game, adding scratches and lines and dirt to the look. That stuff looks great, but there's also an obnoxious double image blur effect on the right hand side of the screen... at first I thought the game was continuing the "old crappy movie" look, but it's so bad at some parts that I wonder if it's not just my PS2 dying. I'm still not sure.

The split-screen multiplayer mode is actually one of the better multi experiences I've had on the PS2. RDR offers several varieties of deathmatch, but they are all "most X wins"-based. Playing 1P will unlock a ton of playable characters (nearly every model on the disc, it seems.) Each character has his or her own starting weapons and special R2 ability. The deathmatch levels are mostly limited versions of the in-game levels.

The power-up mechanism is bizarre but appropriate. There are no weapons or health scattered throughout the level; every time somebody dies, a random playing card is dropped. The color of the card indicates an instant weapon upgrade, health increase, etc... but collecting five cards and coming up with a good poker hand will grant you a momentary hugeass power-up. Most often this is some kind of evil weapon like Burning Shotgun or Acid Arrows, but there's also Ghost, Untouchable, and the ultra-obnoxious Everyone Is Drunk. There are two types of card distribution methods - Stud Poker and Texas Hold 'Em - so brush up on your poker hand ranks.