When it released last fall, Activision/Neversoft's Gun was a fairly well-received title, even if it was met with equal amounts of controversy and apathy, the former being protests about its content, the latter being its sales numbers. It did well, but didn't do the blockbuster numbers it was anticipated to reach. Nevertheless, it was a decent third-person shooter that managed to prove that Neversoft can do more than make games with skaters who call each other "bra" instead of "bro." Rather than allow it to fade into obscurity, Activision decided to bring in UK dev house Rebellion to translate Neversoft's title into PSP-ese. Okay, that was kind of cheesy, but you get the point. It wasn't exactly a bad idea, given that Rebellion is responsible for PSP titles such as Dead to Rights: Reckoning, From Russia with Love, and Miami Vice: The Game. Out of those three, Dead to Rights is probably the dodgiest, but consider the source material... then consider this upcoming game's source material.

Gun Showdown makes no pretenses about the fact that it's derived from the console title. However, Activision also made it clear that there are more elements in the mix so that this new game isn't just a flat-out port. While the game retains Gun's storyline (click here for the review of the PS2 game if you're not familiar with it already), it's also got added elements based on both feedback from gamers and the wishes of a writing and development team that wanted to add a few more pieces of shrimp to the gumbo before it came off the stove, but couldn't. All of the Hollywood voice acting and cutscenes are intact.


Speaking of the cutscenes, the Activision team showed off a cutscene of one of the early levels, the brothel shootout in which Colton White, the game's protagonist, meets Jenny, his cohort in the action. Drawing inspiration from the widescreen ratios of the current-gen games, Gun Showdown's cutscenes almost look like a mini 480p screen, although they look like they're short a few polygons. Still, it's not a bad effort considering that the PSP processes at a fraction of the PlayStation 2. The rest of the game's visuals look fairly close to the console game, with truncations made for terrain textures and some of the graphic violence cut out. Granted, it's still pretty brutal, and Colt can still decapitate someone with a carefully timed shot, but it probably won't induce the tooth-sucking and "daaaaaamns" that the console game did. Unfortunately, scalpings didn't make the cut. Allegedly, this is because fans didn't care for it. I'm betting, however, that the controversial protests regarding the game's cultural insensitivity to Native Americans might've had something to do with it.

While we weren't able to get hands-on with it yet, the game looks to utilize the face buttons, much like Syphon Filter: Dark Mirror, to aim the camera for Colt to shoot. Since we didn't get to play any of it, we hope that the controls are as tight as Sony Bend's instant PSP classic; we were told that the targeting reticule is still being tightened and tweaked. Fortunately, with a tap of up on the D-pad, the Quick Draw feature is still intact, enabling players to rapidly administer death and justice in interchangeable order. Since the game takes place in a streaming world, the PSP will be consistently reading off the disc. How much that's going to factor into battery drain remains to be seen, but we were promised that the load times shouldn't be too bad; Activision is estimating somewhere around fifteen to twenty seconds once it's optimized, which still sounds better than Liberty City Stories by our stopwatches.