I do wonder if anyone else remembers the electronic game released in 1980 by Bandai, called "Gunfighter"? This speccy game, Vaquero (Eng: Cowboy) is immediately reminiscent of that. It consists of a human player and a CPU player, each playing a gunfighter in a duel to the death. Wagons move up and down the screen, often blocking the line of sight between the two players. (don't they know there's a duel on here?). You get several lives and the aim of the game is simple:- kill or be killed.
This is a BASIC implementation of the game with keys Q=up, Z=down, 0=fire. It certainly runs fast enough, but for me the playability is undermined somewhat by the fact that instead of shooting a bullet of finite speed across the screen, the weapon instead appears like an instantaneous laser beam and the CPU player is just too darn quick. He'll shoot your feet off in about 0.2 seconds and even if you get shot in the feet you are still dead. You can outwit the CPU though if you shoot rapidly enough, but not seemingly all of the time (or perhaps I haven't played it enough just yet). If this game just had conventional bullets then it'd be much better IMHO and more faithful to the intended setting which presumably is the Old West and not Star Wars. Another weird thing is that the game looks like a TV studio testcard when you die. Overall though, it is good to see this game which is indeed like my aforementioned (better) "Gunfighter" game (that I misplaced years ago) and I think there was also an Atari 2600 version very much like this too.
