The James Logan Courier

By Billy O'Keefe
McClatchy-Tribune (MCT)

Those who stroll unknowingly into "Call of Juarez: The Cartel" are in for a serious case of video game culture shock. The third game in a series of gunslinging first-person westerns takes place in present-day Los Angeles amid a looming war between the United States and a Mexican drug cartel, and while the national park setting is slightly novel, the game's first shootout would otherwise feel at home in that other series that has "Call of" in its title.

"Cartel's" chief protagonist has ancestral ties to the previous game's protagonist, but otherwise, this may as well be a new series altogether. If you played previous "Juarez" games precisely to get away from assault rifles, C4 explosives, launching rockets at choppers and small armies constantly firing on your position, "Cartel's" embrace of all that in the first mission alone will leave you deeply dismayed.
Whatever attempt "Cartel" makes to justify this change isn't helped any by its storytelling. The leap to present day doesn't strive for novelty, opting for a pedestrian cops-versus-gangs story instead of something that calls back to the Old West or makes the main character a fish out of water. You can play as one of three characters — "Cartel's" online co-op functionality lets you assign two other players to the other two — but all three are dull caricatures who blather in cliches and (along with their enemies) repeat themselves way too often.

From wikipedia:

Izaak Walton (August 9, 1593 - December 15, 1683) was an English writer, author of The Compleat Angler.

Walton was born at Stafford; the register of his baptism gives his father's name as Jervis, and nothing more is known of his parentage.

He settled in London as an ironmonger, and at first had one of the small shops, in the upper story of Thomas Gresham's Royal Burse or Exchange in Cornhill. In 1614 he had a shop in Fleet Street, two doors west of Chancery Lane. Here, in the parish of St Dunstan's, he gained the friendship of Dr. John Donne, then vicar of that church. His first wife, married in December 1626, was Rachel Floud, a great-great-niece of Archbishop Cranmer. She died in 1640. He married again soon after, his second wife being Anne Ken — the pastoral Kenna of The Angler's Wish—step-sister of Thomas Ken, afterwards bishop of Bath and Wells.


Read The Complete Angler, by Izaak Walton, published in 1653, one of three of his works available free from Project Gutenberg.