I can still remember the day my Dad brought home our Atari 2600. It was awesome and totally unlike him. It wasn't like my family had tons of dough to throw around and I was only six so it couldn't have been a toy solely for my use. But I don't remember either of my folks ever playing it with me or without me so I don't think that they were gamer types.

Outlaw was cool though. It was basically a two player joystick game where you and another fool faced off  and commenced to bust caps. It wasn't that easy though (almost, but not quite) before you could shoot up your buddy you had to shoot through an obstacle. Either a cactus, stagecoach or a big wall. It was a lot more fun then it sounds, at least for a seven year old. 

 I remember playing this game roughly 8 million times. Mainly because outside of Combat, which I also played 8 million times, it was the only game that I had. 

I think my favorite part of Outlaw was how when you shot the other cowboy he fell to the ground square onto his Wrangler covered ass.

 I always got a kick out of blasting my cousin Tom's cowboy right in the melon only to have him fall to the ground in a very comfortable looking seated position.

I think that the best thing about Outlaw besides the way the bodies hit the floor was the awesome art on on the packaging. The pictures were always so serious and adult like and totally unlike what the gameplay was actually like. I understand where they were coming from though. Who would buy a game if the picture on the box was of a couple of cowboys made out of squares shooting smaller squares at each other? 

I like how this one has a Clint Eastwood like character holding two guns across his chest like the game was going to offer you a High Plains Drifter-like experience instead of the cactus shooting sim that Outlaw really was. 

As I recall there was also a target practice game where a round ball bounced around the left side of the screen and you got to practice your quick draw skills by trying to hit it as many times as you could or something like that. 

I am fully aware that Outlaw doesn't seem that thrilling and honestly it wasn't. But looking at the screen grabs of the game brings back memories of me laying belly down on our orange shag carpet for hours at a time shooting at that bouncing ball. At the time the thrill of being able to move something around on the TV screen was enough to keep me occupied for days at a time. 

You know, maybe that's why my parents bought it. To keep me out of their hair. That's the main reason I bought the Nintendo Gamecube for my daughter and it's served it's purpose as babysitter a million times over...