I won’t mince words — the basic, vanilla Western isn’t to everybody’s liking. Some people find the concept of cowboys and indians, the dusty wilds of the American Southwest and gunslingers dueling in the street at high noon to be hokey; anachronistic relics from the childhood fantasies of a generation silly enough to have been born before personal computers could fit in your front pocket.

Let us ignore for just a moment how stupid and wrong these unimaginative people are (and they are, believe me) and assume that the standard Western in video game form is boring on principle (which they generally aren’t). What do you do with something that you don’t especially like on its own? You mix it with something different that you do like and you suddenly find that it doesn’t taste as bad as you originally thought. Or, if you already liked it, you now realize you’ve created something truly amazing… or at the very least interesting.

The following five games take the standard tropes of the Old West and stir in something that changes up the flavor — kind of like Cold Stone Creamery, only without the pretentious highway robbery prices. Seriously, $4 for a small with one extra mix-in!? Where the hell’s my Dairy Queen?

Ahem. But I digress…

Welcome to the Weird West.

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1.) Oddworld: Stranger’s Wrath

(Oddworld Inhabitants & EA/Xbox /2005)
Mix-in Flavor: The Oddworld series.

Lorne Lanning’s much beloved Oddworld series, originally planned to consist of five main games and several spin-off titles, ground to a halt after the release of Oddworld: Stranger’s Wrath for the original Xbox (although recently things have been looking up for Odd-fans). But don’t take that happenstance to mean that the game isn’t quality. Quite the contrary, in fact.

Taking on the titular role of  The Stranger, a mysterious bounty hunter in a pseudo-wild west setting, this first/third person action-adventure release certainly kept the “odd” coming — most notably in that the Stranger’s ammunition for his weapons were actually living creatures!

If you don’t have an original Xbox floating around, it looks like you’re going to have to wait for the still-delayed Oddbox to release on Steam, as this one sadly never made it to the backwards compatibility list for Xbox 360.

2.) Damnation

(Blue Omega & Codemasters/PC, PS3, 360/2009)
Mix-in Flavor: Steampunk

Ahh, Steampunk. You were an underground geek niche for so long, but currently you’re the flavor of the month. Still, there aren’t really two genres that fit together much better than Steampunk and the Western do. It’s just a crying shame that they couldn’t have done so in a better game than Damnation.

Yes, we reviewed Damnation last year, but while we enjoyed the potential of its Alternate History take on the aftermath of the American Civil War, it didn’t exactly receive high marks for the execution of its gameplay mechanics. Hey, we never said every game on this list was going to be a gem, did we? Still, if you can find a friend willing to endure the horrible dialog, broken controls and graphics that feel like unfinished placeholders, you might consider renting it for some MST3K-style co-op mockery.

3.) Darkwatch

(High Moon & Capcom/PS2, Xbox/2005)
Mix-in Flavor: Horror/Supernatural

Remember when vampires were cool? Back in the good old days, before Stephanie Meyer got her grubby paws on them and began churning out her ham-fisted, self-insertion Mormon fanfic ode to female subservience, vampires were the aristocracy of the monster world — regal and powerful, terrifying and majestic, dark and sensual. Now? They sparkle.

But if we wind the clock back to August of 2005 (two months before the *gag* first Twilight novel hit store shelves), we can remember a time, not so long ago, when vampires were still awesome. And an outlaw-turned-vampire named Jericho Cross who has to join an ancient order of vampire hunters called Darkwatch in order to bring down the uber-powerful vampire lord that transformed him after he was accidentally released during a botched train robbery? Sounds like a thing of beauty to us. Can somebody please set the Wayback Machine to summer of 2005 again? I’d like to return to a time before the term “Team Edward” had any meaning.

4.) Red Steel 2

(Ubisoft/Wii/2010)
Mix-in Flavor: 50% Samurai/50% Post-apocalypse

When Red Steel was first revealed in the pages of Game Informer, prior to the release of the Wii, we thought we were looking at the Second Coming in video game form. The amazing promise of what motion controls could be were as-yet untainted in our minds by that silly thing we call “reality.” However, when the resulting game finally hit the market it caused even the staunchest anti-abortionists to buy stock in coat hanger manufacturers in hopes of preventing future accidents like this from being born.

Thankfully, Red Steel 2 didn’t follow in the footsteps of its painfully awkward predecessor and actually turned out to be a pretty decent action game for the Wii (a shocking accomplishment in its own right for a third-party title on the system). Mixing the Eastern lone swordsman with the Western lone gunslinger to create the game’s protagonist and seasoning the whole mess with a healthy dash of desert-punk and some nifty cell shaded artwork made us almost forgive Ubisoft for the first Red Steel. Almost…

5.) Samurai Western

(Aquire & Atlus/PS2/2005)
Mix-in Flavor: 100% Samurai – No fillers or artificial additives

Where Red Steel 2 played with the juxtaposition of West and East in the same setting, Samurai Western goes the other route, dropping Gojiro, a bushido driven warrior searching for his wayward brother, into the rough-and-tumble Old West.

Published in North America by niche genre champions Atlus, Samurai Western is actually related to the Way of the Samurai series, though it lacks many of that franchise’s hallmarks, such as the branching, story driven narrative. Which isn’t to say there’s anything at all wrong with slicing up hordes of filthy gaijin barbarians in their dusty little backwards hick towns. Come on, who hasn’t fantasized about that at some point or another? Show of hands?