Billy Frontier

released on Jul 28, 2003

Billy Frontier is an collection of arcade style action mini games with a "cowboys in space" theme on the iPhone and iPod Touch.


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"Honestly, I never considered Billy Frontier to be one of our best Mac games."

Remember that scene in Breaking Bad where Jesse Pinkman is playing RAGE, but it's a version made exclusively for the show that converts it into a rail shooter? And if you're at all familiar with video games as a medium, you can immediately tell how jank it looks since they're just using slightly edited gameplay footage and trying to pass it off as a different genre than it actually is? Billy Frontier feels like that. It's like a fake game that someone plays in a TV show when they can't pull the license for anything else.

Everything here feels exceptionally half-baked. You've got four core game modes, and I'll break them all down in the hopes of demonstrating why they don't come off as a cohesive whole:

Duels. You're put into a duel upon selecting any of the other three game modes. The game prompts you to hit a combination of arrow keys within a time limit. If you get them all, you win the duel. If you don't get them all, you lose. There is nothing more to this.

Stampedes. You auto-run towards the camera like one of the levels from Crash Bandicoot. Picking up hot peppers gives you a speed boost, picking up coins gives you points. You can jump over obstacles, and if you don't, you'll stumble and lose speed. There are only two of these in the game.

Target Practice. Objects get thrown up from the bottom of the screen, and you have to shoot them out of the air. You'll be prompted with something like "shoot five peppers". Shooting five peppers does not win you the game. You have to wait until you run out of either time or ammo, and then you win. The optimal strategy is to blast the peppers and then sit and wait patiently for a minute and a half so that you don't accidentally shoot a skull that instantly kills you and makes you fail the mission. There are only two of these in the game.

Shootouts. What I imagine is intended to be the meat of the game. These are rail shooter segments where you walk into an area, stand stark still, and then freely rotate the camera around to shoot at enemies. Unlike most rail shooters, where the goal is to be fast, and snappy, and constantly pushing you forward, the rail shooting segments in Billy Frontier are slow. They're incredibly slow. They do the rail shooter trick where they hide power-ups in crates and barrels that you have to waste time shooting open if you want the prizes inside, but clearing a screen doesn't automatically advance you. You have to hit the alt key to manually go to the next screen, which means you have all the time in the world to methodically swing the camera around, carefully shoot at the boxes and barrels, and stock yourself back up to hundreds of bullets and maximum health. The fact that you're actively rewarded for doing this means that you're going to be doing it every single time you're prompted to keep going. I was starting to get a sneaking suspicion that this was actually meant to be a tool to teach children how to use a mouse, ala Minesweeper. I never found out for certain, but I can't think of any other reason why this mode would require this much precision while also being this plodding and methodical. Anyway, there are only two of these in the game.

In total: six Duels, two Stampedes, two Target Practices, two Shootouts. Game is over within half an hour. This isn't new for Pangea Software — you couldn't play a game of Nanosaur for more than twenty minutes if you wanted to — but it feels so thin. It's a collection of barely-related minigames that feel as though they were crammed onto the same disk just for the sake of being labelled as a package.

The personality isn't really here, either. The instruction manual boasts about it being this cosmic, spare-faring combination of cowboys and aliens, and it doesn't especially feel like it. There's one little alien design with a curly mustache and cowboy leathers, and another very ill-advised alien design that wears a feather headdress and throws hatchets, and that's about it. The other creatures are cow people, frog people, Kanga-cows, and Kanga-rexes. It's boring! These are designs that look like they were pulled straight from the basic enemy pool of Spyro the Dragon and dropped directly into a stock "Western" asset pack. Pangea was shooting for The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly, and they landed somewhere closer to Wild, Wild West.

There are little bits here and there that I like — the way that Billy's lip trembles in the duels, the legally-distinct Morricone soundtrack — but man, is this a rough experience. Apparently this got an iPhone port back in 2009, and I have to agree with Pangea president Brian Greenstone in saying that this feels like it'd have more of a home on the early App Store than on an iMac. It's simple, it's bland, and it's far from Pangea's best work. A major letdown this late into the company's history.