Billy Frontier

Overview

Pangea's offerings after Bugdom and Power Pete tended to drop off, and in this case, it's something that has a pretty solid theme bringing to mind some of the better episodes of Firefly or Cowboy Bebop...and despite glimpses of promises, tragically that is not the game we actually got. The Player Notes below is the review is what I added to the site in March 2024 with some minor changes (Cro-Mag Rally was added to the site later, mentioning the review).

Review / Player Notes

Another Jorio port has been released. I'm torn—they're the types of straight ports I've always wanted, but most of the Pangea titles aren't good. Power Pete and Bugdom were nice treats, but I didn't like Otto Matic, and Bugdom 2 wasn't much better. Cro-Mag Rally didn't get accolades from me either.

Naturally, I was a bit suspicious of an action game with the premise of "cowboys in space" that somehow eluded my radar twenty years ago. "This is either going to be perfectly fine or it's going to suck," I decided. But you saw the review, you know how this is going to end. Basically, there are four scenarios you can pick from, "Town Shootout", "Town Stampede", "Swamp Shootout", and "Swamp Stampede". The opening of any of these is the "Duel" sequence where you type in a bunch of arrow commands as something that sounds a bit like a piece from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly plays. If you don't complete it in time (you have to do SIXTEEN of these), too bad. You lose a life. The Town Shootout sequence started out well enough. Shoot the bad guys surrounding you, and then I realized something...I could turn, shoot, and duck, but I couldn't move! All moving is done automatically. If you run out of ammo or health, you die.

Town Stampede involved a bunch of cows going down a path while your character struggles to stay ahead but mostly he flails around with arms and legs out like Woody from Toy Story. It's like the lousy controls of Bugdom 2 and Otto Matic were taken to their logical conclusion. I love the Jorio ports and I'd like to see other games (Ambrosia Software in particular but also Freeverse games) get the same treatment. I'm not sure what went wrong with Billy Frontier, it almost looks like they had a decent concept fleshed out with characters, story, and a bigger game, but something happened and what we got was this, and the amazing port job can't save a bad game. Billy Frontier stinks. (Final rating: Rejected.)

Port & Rerelease Notes

Billy Frontier was originally a Mac exclusive (a "Cocoa" application as they used to call it, so PowerPC and Mac OS X) but it was later ported by Jorio to modern systems (modern Mac/Windows/Linux).