Doctor Jaeger
02-04-2011, 03:20 PM
Despite the fact that I was born in St. Louis and religiously abuse my freedom of speech and association, I don’t really fit in with other Americans. Why? Because I think tradition can !@#$ off. I don’t know why apple pie is considered the trademark American dish when blueberries grow almost exclusively in America and taste better. Not to mention Vidalia onions which are good in soup and on sandwiches with horseradish. I don’t know why we insist on calling it football when soccer actually has you using your feet and is more entertaining (THAT’S RIGHT, I SAID SOCCER IS BETTER THAN FOOTBALL!! BLOW ME GLEN BECK!!!), why steak is considered gourmet when it is just a hunk of meat that normally costs $3 to make yourself, and why professional wrestling is more popular than boxing or real wrestling.
Did any of those statements piss you off? GOOD!! !@#$ YOU AND YOUR ILLOGICAL AND STUPID TRADITIONS! But what I hate more than apple pie, football, and professional wrestling are westerns. I don’t know why so many Americans are proud of a time when all pretense was abandoned and we flat out began invading every single bit of land once held by the natives, we wore ugly hats and floppy trousers, and thought there were health benefits to tobacco. The writing of Westerns is almost always stupid, and the racism was more clear than distilled water. There are a couple of good westerns, but they break the typical formula.
Why do I say this? Well because Red Dead Redemption is a western. The spiritual sequel to Red Dead Revolver (a game I never will play), Red Dead Redemption actually feels like a prequel to the Grand Theft Auto franchise. Considering how much GTA IV appealed to me, maybe the same studio can make westerns appeal.
Red Dead Redemption
Developer: Rockstar Studios
Platforms: PS3, 360
Title Significance: “Redemption” because John Marston is going through his epic journey to redeem himself in the eyes of the government and go back to his simple life with his family, and “Red Dead” because “Grand Theft Horse” doesn’t have a nice ring to it.
Plot: Okay while this doesn’t have any official ties to the canon, Red Dead Redemption can be considered a prequel to Grand Theft Auto. You control John Marston, a cynical badass who is essentially Niko Bellic without the accent. While Niko Bellic fought in the Bosnian Wars thinking his cause was just until he was betrayed and afterwards tried to live a simple life with his cousin that inevitably lead him back into the underworld, John Marston once ran with a gang that thought it was Robin Hood-esque, stealing only from people who had more wealth than they needed despite casually killing people until Marston was shot and left for dead when his former boss went bat!@#$ crazy, he tried to settle down and live a life with his family until he was drawn back into the underworld. This also seems similar to a plot in GTA IV where Niko was forced back into the world of politics and military by a covert U.S law enforcement agency that is more corrupt than Nixon and Reagan put together, Marston’s family was kidnapped by such an agency (If not THE SAME AGENCY if Rockstar decides to combine the canons), and he is forced to kill his former gang members to free his family.
Red Dead Redemption is set during the dying years of the wild west when urbanization was beginning to set in. The entire plot is enveloped in the brutal skepticism of GTA IV which portrayed cops, criminals, government, lawyers, and lolipop loving prostitutes as psychopaths, and the fact that there flat out IS NO PROTAGONIST is something I love about the game. John Marston makes threats and kills people with the same casual demeanor as Niko, his only metaphorical humanity is his family and they are threatened, meaning Marston can and will commit mass murder to get them back. The plot and quest are actually somewhat basic, but the side stories are surprisingly well written, and it really does an effective job of showing that 1911 was not exactly a pleasant year.
Gameplay: Now the plot is a small note, the gameplay is where the game lies and also where it suffers somewhat. Combat is cover-based shooting using GTA IV’s euphoria engine. The good news is that Marston can take cover by just about any appropriate surface, the bad news is that cover isn’t magical protection as many of your fights take place in the open wilderness. John Marston has somewhat aggressively low health so the difficulty is unforgiving.
…is what I’d say if this were GTA IV. Most of the weapons you use have a very low rate of fire, but the shot placement system is incredibly responsive and enemies have somewhat low health. Marston will auto-aim, but he will NOT BLINDFIRE. You have to hold down aim to shoot, so in some close-encounters having a firearm is a liability. One thing that wasn’t in GTA IV is the Dead Eye ability, a cross between Dead to Rights: Retributions Focus Mode and Splinter Cell: Convictions Mark and Execute system. Dead Eye levels up as you play. Initially it is basic bullet time, but later on it will mark specific points on enemies which Marston will automatically shoot when you give him the command until it reaches it’s peak when Marston manually makes those marks as opposed to it being automatic.
Now other than that, if you’ve played GTA IV you know how the wanted system works, how the random encounters work, and if you played Twilight Princess you know how the horseback riding works. New aspects are the bounty system which will cause random encounters with powerful and aggressive bounty hunters occur based on how many crimes you’ve committed, it getting more dangerous as you accumulate more bounty, and the horse breaking mini-game which unlike Twilight Princess actually requires focused input as opposed to simply being a quick time event. The hand-to-hand combat system has also changed, though not for the better. This was possibly done in order to accommodate a much less sticky aim function, but now hand to hand combat has been reduced to pressing the right trigger until your enemy falls down.
You also get quite a few ambient challenges in the form of treasure hunting challenges, survivalist challenges (Gathering useful herbs), master hunter challenges (killing wild animals and skinning them), and sharpshooter challenges. These all have ten levels, all unlock a small reward when level 5 is completed (Survivalist map, free stagecoach rides, increased dead eye recovery and a new rifle) and at level 10 unlock completely unnecessary abilities as you cannot turn up the difficulty level (A satchel that holds two times the recovery items, an increase to the capacity of your dead eye meter, and you get free recovery items by picking flowers and pissing off PETA). Most of what you do is just for the hell of it. The number of minigames, the amount of land you have to explore, the number of animals you have to kill, this is one mother of a sandbox game. I at one point lost an hour playing Liars Dice.
Voice/Music/Sound: I am not as well studied on period weapons so I don’t know how accurate the sounds are, but that being said the sound design for the animals is realistic.
This is a very VERY bad thing because it means that such intelligent and aggressive hunters as grizzlies and cougars often only make noise AFTER they’ve pounced and killed your horse. Other than that, animal noises are distinct and this helps when you’re trying to hunt specific animals and can find them by listening for their cries, growls, and the sound their claws make when they eviscerate a Kentucky Saddler.
Voice acting is interesting and oftentimes humorous, though the peripheral NPCs don’t have that many spoken lines so you may hear the same question asked several dozen times during one game of poker.
But the music… now I’m normally not a fan of country music, but there was one song in the soundtrack that I found insanely appealing.
Graphics: Characters are expressive and the wilderness all looks beautiful. Graphics design is top notch, but the lack of variety in some of the frames related to the things you randomly kill is something I feel I should mention. Oh, something I should mention, you can pause cut scenes. I wish all games had that function.
Programming: Red Dead Redemption has sort of a reverse Saint’s Row 2 deal. In Saint’s Row 2, the game began to get buggy when I had a few save files and was near the end of the game. Red Dead Redemption did have some glitches that actually became less frequent when I had more than just the auto-save and had unlocked Mexico. Now the glitches didn’t cause crashes but at some points they forced me to reset the system. Horses, especially ones tied to carts and wagons, have a tendency to blend into the environment. I remember one chariot race mission where everyone’s chariot had fused with the ground. There was also one point where I tried to take cover near a rock but almost completely at random Marston was launched almost 10 meters into the sky and fell to his death.
Fortunately this was near an auto save point, so I was able to laugh at it without later screaming bloody murder at the frustration of losing ten minutes of progress to the laws of physics taking their revenge on me for playing Halo. The bugs rarely cost you more than two or three minutes of progress, but I’ve heard some PS3 owners complain that occasionally characters walk animation will fail and they’ll begin gliding through the environment.
Difficulty: Health is very low and some enemies may kill Marston in as little as two shots, but the difficulty is offset by the fact that health regenerates at an incredibly fast rate, ammo is easy to come by, and the fact that everyone uses lever-action, single-action, or bolt action rifles and pistols. The most dangerous moments of the game are the hunting challenges because of the games ugly habit of causing cougars to spawn off-screen, and in the last area you unlock when two to four grizzlies all spawn at once.
Overall: The sheer amount of content and variety means that this game engine could very easily be converted into an MMORPG, and actually probably WAS except I can’t access multiplayer on my 360. Though the main story is basic, the amount of time you can lose in the game is comparable to RPGs, and despite some frustrating moments the game is fun to play.
My Rating: 5/5: A must own for sandbox game fans, possibly one of the best free-roaming games ever released.
Did any of those statements piss you off? GOOD!! !@#$ YOU AND YOUR ILLOGICAL AND STUPID TRADITIONS! But what I hate more than apple pie, football, and professional wrestling are westerns. I don’t know why so many Americans are proud of a time when all pretense was abandoned and we flat out began invading every single bit of land once held by the natives, we wore ugly hats and floppy trousers, and thought there were health benefits to tobacco. The writing of Westerns is almost always stupid, and the racism was more clear than distilled water. There are a couple of good westerns, but they break the typical formula.
Why do I say this? Well because Red Dead Redemption is a western. The spiritual sequel to Red Dead Revolver (a game I never will play), Red Dead Redemption actually feels like a prequel to the Grand Theft Auto franchise. Considering how much GTA IV appealed to me, maybe the same studio can make westerns appeal.
Red Dead Redemption
Developer: Rockstar Studios
Platforms: PS3, 360
Title Significance: “Redemption” because John Marston is going through his epic journey to redeem himself in the eyes of the government and go back to his simple life with his family, and “Red Dead” because “Grand Theft Horse” doesn’t have a nice ring to it.
Plot: Okay while this doesn’t have any official ties to the canon, Red Dead Redemption can be considered a prequel to Grand Theft Auto. You control John Marston, a cynical badass who is essentially Niko Bellic without the accent. While Niko Bellic fought in the Bosnian Wars thinking his cause was just until he was betrayed and afterwards tried to live a simple life with his cousin that inevitably lead him back into the underworld, John Marston once ran with a gang that thought it was Robin Hood-esque, stealing only from people who had more wealth than they needed despite casually killing people until Marston was shot and left for dead when his former boss went bat!@#$ crazy, he tried to settle down and live a life with his family until he was drawn back into the underworld. This also seems similar to a plot in GTA IV where Niko was forced back into the world of politics and military by a covert U.S law enforcement agency that is more corrupt than Nixon and Reagan put together, Marston’s family was kidnapped by such an agency (If not THE SAME AGENCY if Rockstar decides to combine the canons), and he is forced to kill his former gang members to free his family.
Red Dead Redemption is set during the dying years of the wild west when urbanization was beginning to set in. The entire plot is enveloped in the brutal skepticism of GTA IV which portrayed cops, criminals, government, lawyers, and lolipop loving prostitutes as psychopaths, and the fact that there flat out IS NO PROTAGONIST is something I love about the game. John Marston makes threats and kills people with the same casual demeanor as Niko, his only metaphorical humanity is his family and they are threatened, meaning Marston can and will commit mass murder to get them back. The plot and quest are actually somewhat basic, but the side stories are surprisingly well written, and it really does an effective job of showing that 1911 was not exactly a pleasant year.
Gameplay: Now the plot is a small note, the gameplay is where the game lies and also where it suffers somewhat. Combat is cover-based shooting using GTA IV’s euphoria engine. The good news is that Marston can take cover by just about any appropriate surface, the bad news is that cover isn’t magical protection as many of your fights take place in the open wilderness. John Marston has somewhat aggressively low health so the difficulty is unforgiving.
…is what I’d say if this were GTA IV. Most of the weapons you use have a very low rate of fire, but the shot placement system is incredibly responsive and enemies have somewhat low health. Marston will auto-aim, but he will NOT BLINDFIRE. You have to hold down aim to shoot, so in some close-encounters having a firearm is a liability. One thing that wasn’t in GTA IV is the Dead Eye ability, a cross between Dead to Rights: Retributions Focus Mode and Splinter Cell: Convictions Mark and Execute system. Dead Eye levels up as you play. Initially it is basic bullet time, but later on it will mark specific points on enemies which Marston will automatically shoot when you give him the command until it reaches it’s peak when Marston manually makes those marks as opposed to it being automatic.
Now other than that, if you’ve played GTA IV you know how the wanted system works, how the random encounters work, and if you played Twilight Princess you know how the horseback riding works. New aspects are the bounty system which will cause random encounters with powerful and aggressive bounty hunters occur based on how many crimes you’ve committed, it getting more dangerous as you accumulate more bounty, and the horse breaking mini-game which unlike Twilight Princess actually requires focused input as opposed to simply being a quick time event. The hand-to-hand combat system has also changed, though not for the better. This was possibly done in order to accommodate a much less sticky aim function, but now hand to hand combat has been reduced to pressing the right trigger until your enemy falls down.
You also get quite a few ambient challenges in the form of treasure hunting challenges, survivalist challenges (Gathering useful herbs), master hunter challenges (killing wild animals and skinning them), and sharpshooter challenges. These all have ten levels, all unlock a small reward when level 5 is completed (Survivalist map, free stagecoach rides, increased dead eye recovery and a new rifle) and at level 10 unlock completely unnecessary abilities as you cannot turn up the difficulty level (A satchel that holds two times the recovery items, an increase to the capacity of your dead eye meter, and you get free recovery items by picking flowers and pissing off PETA). Most of what you do is just for the hell of it. The number of minigames, the amount of land you have to explore, the number of animals you have to kill, this is one mother of a sandbox game. I at one point lost an hour playing Liars Dice.
Voice/Music/Sound: I am not as well studied on period weapons so I don’t know how accurate the sounds are, but that being said the sound design for the animals is realistic.
This is a very VERY bad thing because it means that such intelligent and aggressive hunters as grizzlies and cougars often only make noise AFTER they’ve pounced and killed your horse. Other than that, animal noises are distinct and this helps when you’re trying to hunt specific animals and can find them by listening for their cries, growls, and the sound their claws make when they eviscerate a Kentucky Saddler.
Voice acting is interesting and oftentimes humorous, though the peripheral NPCs don’t have that many spoken lines so you may hear the same question asked several dozen times during one game of poker.
But the music… now I’m normally not a fan of country music, but there was one song in the soundtrack that I found insanely appealing.
Graphics: Characters are expressive and the wilderness all looks beautiful. Graphics design is top notch, but the lack of variety in some of the frames related to the things you randomly kill is something I feel I should mention. Oh, something I should mention, you can pause cut scenes. I wish all games had that function.
Programming: Red Dead Redemption has sort of a reverse Saint’s Row 2 deal. In Saint’s Row 2, the game began to get buggy when I had a few save files and was near the end of the game. Red Dead Redemption did have some glitches that actually became less frequent when I had more than just the auto-save and had unlocked Mexico. Now the glitches didn’t cause crashes but at some points they forced me to reset the system. Horses, especially ones tied to carts and wagons, have a tendency to blend into the environment. I remember one chariot race mission where everyone’s chariot had fused with the ground. There was also one point where I tried to take cover near a rock but almost completely at random Marston was launched almost 10 meters into the sky and fell to his death.
Fortunately this was near an auto save point, so I was able to laugh at it without later screaming bloody murder at the frustration of losing ten minutes of progress to the laws of physics taking their revenge on me for playing Halo. The bugs rarely cost you more than two or three minutes of progress, but I’ve heard some PS3 owners complain that occasionally characters walk animation will fail and they’ll begin gliding through the environment.
Difficulty: Health is very low and some enemies may kill Marston in as little as two shots, but the difficulty is offset by the fact that health regenerates at an incredibly fast rate, ammo is easy to come by, and the fact that everyone uses lever-action, single-action, or bolt action rifles and pistols. The most dangerous moments of the game are the hunting challenges because of the games ugly habit of causing cougars to spawn off-screen, and in the last area you unlock when two to four grizzlies all spawn at once.
Overall: The sheer amount of content and variety means that this game engine could very easily be converted into an MMORPG, and actually probably WAS except I can’t access multiplayer on my 360. Though the main story is basic, the amount of time you can lose in the game is comparable to RPGs, and despite some frustrating moments the game is fun to play.
My Rating: 5/5: A must own for sandbox game fans, possibly one of the best free-roaming games ever released.