July 15, 2010
As many of you know, my house was broken into a few months back. Along with my MacBook, several other things were stolen. My LCD television, my PlayStation 3, my Glock 17, and quite a few other things. Some of the least expensive items were recovered, however the items mentioned above were not. Those ended up being replaced by insurance, but even though I had full backups the MacBook was the most devastating loss.
In the theft scramble, the douchebags that stole my shit also made off with all of my savegame data stored on the PS3. I had completed Fallout 3, but I was still working toward exploring the rest of the wasteland (as well as the areas offered by all of the DLC packs) when the unit was involuntarily removed from my house. To add insult to injury, the disc was still in the PS3 at the time. That being the case, once I got my replacement PS3 my first goal was to get my hands on another Fallout 3 disc and start over. I haven't re-completed the story as of yet, though, since I've been distracted by another game by the name of Red Dead Redemption.
I bought the game back in May, and my initial impressions were as follows:
- Game mechanics are very GTA-like, so it's familiar territory from a controls and experience standpoint. No way to configure the controls though, which kind of blows.
- Immersive from the get-go. You get dropped right into the old west and it actually feels like it, from story to characters to voice performance. Also doesn't seem to start off nearly as slow as GTA4 did, which is also a plus.
- Attention to detail is excellent. It probably doesn't spoil too much to say your character gets shot close to the opening of the game, and after you get bandaged up you occasionally grunt and hold your wound. Beyond that, the environment itself looks gorgeous, from the dusty and rocky terrain to the individual leaves on the trees. I feel like a guest star on Little House on the Prairie.
Since then, I've been playing it fairly regularly and enjoying it immensely. My impressions have not changed, and in addition I have the added benefit of continuing to be engrossed by the story. That being said, I still take time to deviate from the story and go out to explore the land, or to go hunting. I'll either kill shit for the sake of killing it, collecting furs and the like to sell to merchants, or I'll try and complete the side challenges offered by the game's Journal. Currently I'm a highest-rank survivalist, and I'm working on becoming a Rank 9 Master Hunter (I need to hunt a famous jaguar named Khan and kill him), as well as a Rank 8 Sharpshooter which involves me shooting the hats off of two people as well as disarming them.
A few complaints have arisen from becoming involved with the game, however. Aside from my previous gripe about not being able to customize the controls, I'm a little annoyed at the game-save functionality. While not as bullshitty as say, the Resident Evil series (where you need to find the nearest goddamn typewriter before you can save your game), it's certainly not as freeing as many other games. Fallout 3 offered you the ability to pretty much save your game anywhere at any time. In Red Dead Redemption, however, you need to work under a certain set of specific circumstances. First, to save a game you have to set up a campsite. It doesn't sound inconvenient until you realize that you can't do this anytime and anywhere. You can't do it when you're in the middle of a mission. You can't do it when you're near a town, or a settlement, or a gang hangout. You can't do it near water, or near anywhere there isn't a clear flat surface. I understand the realism factor in those last parts, but seriously, there's nothing real about stopping time and resuming at a later date (and coming back if you die) anyway.
And then there's the whole water thing. Back in the days of GTA: Vice City, you had the Liotta-voiced Tommy Vercetti cruising around the city, knocking off rival mobsters, fucking prostitutes, and stealing tons of cash, but when it came to dealing with the concept of water, he died instantly. That was one of my biggest complaints with the game, and apparently it echoed well throughout the gaming community. It seemed to have been heard by Rockstar Games since, in the two subsequent GTA games (San Andreas and GTA IV) swimming was no problem at all. Unfortunately, Rockstar has reverted back to their old ways. In Red Dead Redemption, John Marsten, legend of the west, famous gunslinger and badass, will straight up die without his fucking water wings and ducky floaty. Get him in waist-deep water and he'll keel over like a whore getting stabbed in the stomach by Tommy Vercetti.
In the overall scheme of things though, Red Dead Redemption is a solid offering that I wholly recommend to fans of the GTA series. I was never big on the "Old West" genre, but I took the plunge on this because I like Rockstar's previous offerings and I was curious to see what they could do with this since it's a pretty unique setting in the sense of video games. And it's not a surprise to say they did not disappoint.
(18:19)
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