Awesome, thanks so much for explaining that to me! And it happens to be on sale on steam right now too, guess I’ll be getting it! 😁

I know it’s pointless to argue semantics about genre definitions but I do enjoy discussing the boundaries of where one genre ends and another begins.

While I won’t argue Valley of Gwangi is Weird West since it has dinosaurs, do you think subverting Western tropes is enough to make something Weird West? I mean, The Quick and The Dead plays pretty loose with the laws of physics just to make for some fun shots:

Or there’s Western comedies like Blazing Saddles and Maverick that subvert a lot of Western tropes. I guess I’d almost define Weird West as whether or not something could happen in the West (even though it obviously didn’t). So inclusion of vampires, monsters, dinosaurs are “obviously” Weird West but a Western where the “monsters” are simply cannibals isn’t Weird West to me. Of course, there’s also the sub-genre of Acid Western where things might get super weird but not in a supernatural way. And this is why I like making these posts, to discuss the fringes of the genre.

I don’t know anything about Deadlands, feel free to make a separate post about it! (and yes, this is me shamelessly trying to keep this Lemmy community active).

I’ve seen some books in the Deadlands universe, like Ghostwalkers. Do you know if any of them are good?

It’s a shame it isn’t on any streaming service. I wouldn’t mind watching it but I definitely don’t need to own it on DVD.

Yeah, once we start discussing modern day movies it’s hard to draw the line between Weird West and just a vampire movie in an abandoned town. I was thinking about John Carpenter’s Vampires too, which has a final showdown in an abandoned western town kinda like how From Dusk Till Dawn is in an isolated bar.

Welcome! If you worked on the wikipedia page then you’re much more of an expert on Weird West than I am. Hopefully you can post some things here too!

I know, this really gets to be splitting hairs about genre definitions. I don’t mind calling Cowboys & Aliens a Weird West movie because it takes place in the Wild West and then goes full-blown scifi. Something about upending a normal Western setting with scifi seems to work for me.

Yet creating James Bond-esque gadgets using technology that technically existed in the era (steam-power, magnets) doesn’t feel as scifi to me because while the devices are new to the residents, this isn’t “sufficiently advanced technology indistinguishable from magic”. Besides, if we consider James Bond-esque gadgets to be scifi, does that mean the James Bond series itself is scifi? I would’ve said no, but I can see your argument for it.

In the end, it doesn’t really matter. I just thought it’d be fun to discuss where we define the boundaries of this genre.

The arbitrary rule I gave myself (I don’t expect anyone else to follow it) is I’m only including items that actually take place in the 1800s. I’m trying not to do space westerns but we’ll see how long that lasts.

It’s definitely more violent than kitschy, but I wouldn’t call it horror.

Let me know if you make it through the whole thing!

That’s great to hear! Thanks for the update!

I played it. Overall, I wanted to like it more than I actually did. The world building was fun but the gameplay was just kinda awkward. I remember the game starts you out with $0 and 0 bullets and then throws you into an ambush. With no bullets and no way to buy bullets, that first battle is unreasonably difficult. Once you actually defeat them, loot their corpses for money, and buy bullets, the game gets better though.

Also, as an unrelated rant, I don’t like when someone names a specific thing after an entire genre. I have a similar complaint with the TTRPG called “cyberpunk”. You can say Mike Pondsmith created cyberpunk and that’s technically accurate, but it’s also horribly misleading.

I have a friend who played this game. He said he would search every spitoon he came across just in case there was money in it. The game eventually told him he was disgusting and let him wear the spitoon as a helmet.

I’ve had the Deadlands: Ghostwalkers book on my wishlist forever but I still haven’t gotten around to buying/reading it. Looks right up my alley though!

Definitely! I was gonna get to that one eventually. It reminds me a lot of System Shock in that it’s an “immersive sim” and I’m terrible at it.

I don’t know what you’re talking about. This is just a standard uniform all Darkwatch members wear when hunting monsters.

Oh. And there’s this…

Tala was featured as a digital pinup in Playboy’s Girls of Gaming issue in 2006.

Yeah… definitely a game of its era.