Red Dead Redemption (2010)

I got so invested in RDR2 after finishing this, so I apologize for forgetting about this game!

So, in my opinion I believe this game is great but very flawed. this is the type of game that does not respect your time and forces you to enjoy the calm and solitude of it. it drags you far away between missions in such an agonizing way, it becomes extremely obnoxious the more you play. The Mexico chapter did amplify this feeling a lot to me, but turns out, this is what the game wants you to feel. it is a waste of time what you're doing back and forth and being involved unwillingly into a war that is none of your concern because you want to achieve your ultimate goal.

I gave the game a 2nd play-through just to enjoy what the game is trying to force me into, and this time with a gnarling focus on the Gameplay much more. Basically, you have an unlimited Ammo in this game but the game doesn't share this piece of information to not ruin the immersion. I loved using the Bolt-Action Rifle! the Gun-play in general is very strong in this game.

Narrative-wise, The story great. it does have a lot of empty room for the player to evoke their imagination, but RDR2 is here. RDR1's story feels extremely gritty. The main story, or the side quest that ends rather horribly or twisted. It's just a gritty world and the game reflects it but not to a point where it is overdone. Landon Ricketts is my favorite Character in the game. But John is an absolute Clint Eastwood of gaming. yes, I know you read/heard this before. no need to shout. All the characters while being extremely grim, having a great personality to give, which is very strong in this release. and the game does know how to make a moment seem powerful. like when you cross to Mexico or when John finally returns to Abigail.

Finishing the game, however, is an extremely terrible endeavor. I finished almost all the side quests as John. so by the time I got to play as Jack, I just did the Epilogue and that's it. And this is when I decided to do a second play-through.

I just loved the game. Does have a lot jank, many bugs, many glitches, sometimes the horse just despawns out of nowhere. like literally pops out of existence, but that's probably a PC exclusive bug. Sometime I literally die for no reason, other time I times I die because I went off script, sometimes the game doesn't let me do what I want because of either jank or the game holding me back. Sometime there are NPCs that are literally stuck in ground.

There so many things that makes this game incredibly frustrating but doesn't take from the overall fun factor of the game. but not being to fully interact with the NPCs is really a tough one. I guess being 10gbs in size, I should've expected that, but to not pet the dogs is insane!

Yeah, the game has aged. the details are well done, but a on the game's time and scale alone. it is not a masterpiece, but I don't think it needs to be.

The perfect wild west and cowboy simulator. In some missions you are actually guarding the cattle, which I found very delightful and iconic. RDR1 has a beautiful desert scenery, a perfect morricone-like soundtrack, nicely written characters and plenty of fun open world activities. The game is stylish as hell and has an on point art direction from beginning to end.

I personally liked it more than its succesor because it's more purely Wild West, but I can see that they wanted to try out some other american landscapes in the second one. A great cinematic game and one of Rockstar's best.

This will be a shorter write up than this marvelous game deserves.

I was totally smitten by Red Dead Redemption 2, and it is solidly my favorite game of all. So I am surprised it took me so long to come around to playing the "original". I think I was a little held back by the visuals after being so spoiled by RDR2, FF7 Remake, and Ghost of Tsushima. But when I understood this was a soft remaster running at 60 fps, this unfair impression of mine vanished and I picked it up.

I highly recommend any fan of RDR 2 who has not played RDR to return to John Marston's story. The somewhat simpler narrative set in the Southwest state of New Austin as well as northern Mexico is a Western classic that juxtaposes revenge and anger with a striving for peace and prosperity, and the limitations of violence to meet these ends.

John's dialog delivered by the very talented Rob Weithoff fills the game with dry wit and remarkable insight for a self-described semi-literate farmer. It was wonderful to spend more time with this character I grew very attached to in RDR2. Not only is his story wrapped up perfectly, the loose ends of Dutch van der Linde and the remaining dregs of his gang are also dealt with, answering some questions I was left with at the end of the prequal.

The combat is familiar and snappy enough with a perfectly adequate dead eye system, and does not feel overly dated. Riding horses is fairly easy. I could imagine this game blew many minds when it first launched in 2010.

I finished the main story and all the stranger quests I encountered in 24 hours of play. I did not finish any of the challenges. I wish I encountered the Strange Man during my playthrough but I never saw his blip on the map where I expected it to be. Not a big deal!

I encourage you to enjoy this absolute classic.

Red Dead Redemption is the thematic and franchise-based equivalent of early 20th century breaking bad in some ways. And while I prefer Better Call Saul more(allegory for RDR2) breaking bad is a fantastic tour-de-force of a show. Despite the release tab showing I played this on a switch, in reality I played this on my Linux system using Ryujinx, and it was absolutely horrendous. I had to use my keyboard keys to look around and what followed was a control scheme so un-intuitive, I had to cheat simply to play the game. I don't even have dormant nostalgia for this game as I have never played it before. Yet the fact that, despite all the shortcomings, this game managed to climb up to my top 5 of all time is incredibly impressive.

John Marston is an incredibly rugged protagonist with a golden heart covered in dark spot and tar, on a mission to save his estranged family from the United States government by capturing the remnants of the Van Der Linde gang. This game tackles American expansionism and law enforcement even more than its successor, and its dedication to these themes is admirable. It uses the age old thematic similarities of Leones spaghetti western classics and modernizes it fantastically, adding the themes of westward expansionism to the mix. It brings up the question of how much control is too much. The US government is constantly trying to micromanage everything, from gangs to outlaws, towns and cities but barely doing anything to change the country's standards due to inbuilt corruption. The game has a fantastic propensity to find the beauty in the ugly, making this new subgenre of westerns one of the most beautiful landscape collections of any game and movie I've played/watched. But the landscape shows the difference between change and conservatism, as dutch says change is inevitable, yet people always try to fight it. Damn, if you analyse this game you can probably find similarities of these themes to the constant conservative hate against the progressive, so called "woke mob", but I'm getting ahead of myself.

Despite the minor criticisms this game rightfully received, like the awkward pacing, somewhat stilted and preachy dialogue and it being somewhat hypocritical when it comes to the character of John Marston. This game is an absolute masterpiece which definitely stood the test of time, which you cannot say for a lot of games.

I'm really not going to describe the ending and the revenge arc. It's so poignantly beautiful I cannot describe it in mere words.

Have a good day :).

Score: 94/100

(P.S. This is an updated review of my one from backloggd)

I was originally going to post a review I wrote on Blogspot back in 2011, but I'll spare you a cringeworthy, self-satisfied, seemingly-pointless list of comparisons between the minutiae of Red Dead Redemption and Grand Theft Auto IV, the other big Rockstar game of this era. I think it just goes to show something about game criticism and probably criticism in general: It doesn't age well. Criticism is just a means of reconciling art by drawing comparisons to other art. And the canon of art is an always growing, always shifting. If you wrote a review for a Led Zeppelin Album in 1975, you only had music written up until 1975 to compare it to. Your references would probably be really dated and you wouldn't be looking at it from the perspective of the legacy it would leave. All this to say: Red Dead Redemption is more than just a western version of GTA4.

Take THAT, me from 2011!

I'll attempt to explain the game in a way that's less referential and more timeless:

Sand. Horses. Pixels. The Old West. Red Dead Redemption is an interactive experience for your television that puts you in the boots of one of the baddest dudes to ever wrangle a steer and fire a six-shooter. In his quest, which will take you many many hours to complete, you will traverse beautiful landscapes, tangle with all manner of ne'er-do-wells, and live the life of a man left behind by a world moving forward from it's wild good ol' days to an era of industry and structure. By the time you reach it's heart wrenching conclusion (which, again, will take you an absurdly long time to get to) you will feel the fullness of a story well told.

Wow, this review sucks too. Fine, here's the old one:

There is a lot that can be said for picking a theme and devoting all the time and effort available toward fleshing out and perfecting that simple concept. This is precisely what Rockstar San Diego did for Red Dead Redemption. It is a relatively simple, single faceted experience that is rendered with such care and attention to detail that it is one of the most immersive and beautiful games ever created. Yet, because it is such a simple, easy, and sometimes repetitive experience, it lacks a certain amount of depth. Best played in short bursts, Red Dead's campaign mode can come to be quite a grind to the finish. This is not a new problem for Rockstar, masters of the sandbox game format. I've played nearly all of their games since Grand Theft Auto 3, but actually finished only a few of them. I believe that this exposes an apparent flaw in the sandbox genre itself, or at least the way in which it has been presented in the past. So yeah, the appeal of the sandbox game is freedom. Freedom to go where you want and do what you want. To experiment in a living, breathing digital world. The campaign just kind of works around this already present world to give you things to do in it. This means that right off the bat, the world and all the fundamental mechanics of the game are there for you to explore. This creates a sense of wonder and exhilaration in the very beginning of the experience, which wears off long, long before the conclusion, 40 hours in. You just start to get bored when you fell like you have gone everywhere and seen everything, and at that point, if you are feeling like that, you probably have. Rockstar has tried to remedy this problem in the past by locking off certain areas of the map and gradually opening them up. Red Dead Redemption does this too. And while there is a certain amount of joy derived from seeing the new scenery of each area, there are no real new, unique experiences to be found in these new areas. Just more of the same gameplay set in a different setting. Essentially, this is what Red Dead Redemption is. It is GTA set in the old west. Comparing GTA 4 and Red Dead just on on appearances could be like comparing apples and oranges. The vast open expanses of the old west certainly seem to be at odds with the cramped urban sprawl of Liberty City. However, when you boil it down, these games are extremely similar in terms of gameplay, tone, story, and mechanics. I would say Red Dead is the better game in the end though for several key reasons. Unlike GTA, which had an extremely annoying policy of making you restart a mission from the beginning if you failed, Red Dead has a checkpoint system, which relieves enormous amounts of stress. Red Dead also has a greater array of activities that the player can do on the side of the campaign. Some are just pointless and boring- picking herbs, horseshoes, cards. Some are quite a bit more fun- bounties, random roadside encounters, hunting, going to movies. While they are very hit or miss, at least they are there to mix things up a bit. Hunting, in particular is a blast and the wild animals found all over the world of Red Dead is one of it's very best features and something new to the Rockstar formula. Some of the very best experiences i had with the game came from being stranded in the wilderness with no horse and having to fend for my life against a pack of wolves of an extremely lethal cougar. These moments where I was truly struggling to stay alive were particularly notable because of the fact that they were mostly absent from the campaign mode. This game is pretty damn easy. Once you have the dead eye and a couple decent guns, you are essentially unstoppable. Unlike GTA 4, where if you broke the law, it could be pretty difficult to get away from the cops alive, in Red Dead they essentially have no chance of catching you. This is due in a big way to the fact that you a riding a fast, extremely maneuverable horse through open fields instead of trying to maneuver a difficult-to-control-car through busy streets. Red Dead's greatest strength is it's tone and atmosphere, which never breaks for a single second over its entire run time. Essentially, the game is an extremely beautiful Western, in which can control the main protagonist. The writing and acting is sharp and clever, if a bit repetitive, just how you would expect from Rockstar. The plot is a decent yarn filed with many of the conventions of the genre. It is at times very heartfelt and touching and contains some really great scenes that would be right at home in a classic Western. There is a certain underlying cynicism to be found in the story, something also present in the GTA games. Red Dead smartly goes for a more serious approach to homage though, as opposed to the borderline genre parodies of Vice City and San Andreas. You might not laugh as much as you did at older Rockstar games, but you will probably take the story a lot more seriously, as it tones down the outlandish comedy quite a bit. So yeah, Red Dead Redemption is essentially Grand Theft Auto set in the old west with a few minor changes. But then again, this same thing can be said about almost every sandbox game. Since GTA 3 simultaneously invented and perfected the formula back in 2001, not much has changed, Sure the games have allowed you to do more things than you could before, and the attention to detail and production values have improved drastically, but it's still the same basic idea. That being said, red Dead Redemption is perhaps the best sandbox game yet because it has the most beautifully crafted world, the most memorable story, the best (original) soundtrack and the most consistent tone of any of the similar games to come before it. It's a highly immersive experience that only the collective efforts of a large and highly talented studio can afford. A true next-gen experience.

Jeez, I can't believe I said "true next gen experience". Barf. Anyway, I'm looking forward to some Premium Upcoming-Era Occurrences happening real soon on these new consoles coming out in less than a month.

With Read Dead Redemption 2 being released on the current-gen consoles, I went and popped in its eight year old predecessor on my sole console, the beloved Xbox 360. I'm admittedly a little late in the party, only having a sort of return to video games with the 360 as my main conduit to channel my long bounded passion for playing video games.

Yearning for that unmistakable experience one only gets from playing endless loops of immersion from video games. And Red Dead was such, as it served as my gateway back to console gaming and yep, it entirely blew me away.

Make no mistake, RED DEAD REDEMPTION is Rockstar's brightest gem.

Prior to playing RDD, my favorite game from Rockstar's colorful assortment of crime-ridden open-world video games was Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, absolutely. Bully closely followed with its novel premise of middle school debauchery; Both of these being excellent games and deservingly revered as such by players for years and years.

But somehow, Red Dead Redemption, Rockstar's glorious effort to put players into the old west of classic, bygone Sergio Leone spaghetti/vendetta films, managed to overtake both San Andreas and Bully in my book. It's compounded various elements from both said games and has somehow improved upon them in various ways to elevate it from both its sandbox predecessors . And I think it also goes down significantly to how subtle it is thematically (rightfully so, for a western) and how slowly it took its time to be properly absorbed as you play through it.

Westerns are established slow burns. That spirit of the tense pace in classic westerns is properly and respectfully carried on into this game in magnificent strides. The story is almost nonlinear, throwing us into a loop, slowly peeling out our protagonist's story as the story goes on.

The open world we're thrown into is vibrant and feels lived in. Not to mention, it's such spectacularly vast look back into the landmarks of Old America. I could just go on and on around the titanic map to have a look around of Rockstar's vividly detailed Wild West on horseback hours on end.

And I have to laud the excellent shooting mechanics and gameplay of this beautiful game. Though the use of the 'dead eye' feature admittedly felt like it made pretty much almost all the missions easy for me, it just felt so good to be a Clint Eastwood type of sharpshooter, and RDD laid out a impressively creative way to interpret that through player's eyes.

Overall, Red Dead to me, didn't feel like a game per se, but a wholly new experience that Rockstar blessed us with eight years ago (that's madness imo). Must've been mindblowing then, but it still holds up that element of astonishment to this humble Xbox 360 cretin. There's no such thing as a perfect game, but I honestly believe that RDD comes pretty close.

Because of the scope and liveliness of their worlds, Rockstar gets away with a lot that most other game publishers wouldn't. As the company that made open-world games mainstream, Rockstar can create an area to explore, characters to interact with and missions to discover, and that will be really all that the public asks for. Very rarely does a Rockstar game that doesn't center around an open world stick in the public's consciousness. No one is clamoring for a new game in the State of Emergency or Manhunt franchise. Coming in the five year gap between GTA 4 & 5, Red Dead Redemption's release in 2010 was a much-needed hit for those players dying for an open-world experience.

Playing this game for the first time in 2018 - eight years after its original release - I couldn't help feeling like Red Dead Redemption was doing everything that a Grand Theft Auto game would do, just on a smaller scale. There's a much more diverse and expansive open world to explore, but it's not as if there's a ton to do in these secluded areas. There are animals to hunt and plants to pick, but the character interaction is minor, with the exception of occasional random people. Sure, it can be fun riding your horse from the deserts of Mexico to the snowy Northern mountains, but there's a limitation to how much can be done along the way.

Don't get me wrong, there's still plenty to do in this world. Main missions follow the same general outline you'd expect from Rockstar, and it is fun to find side missions, new outfits and hunt outlaws. Red Dead Redemption does a fine job of presenting all the hidden items you can find and how to do it. There's varying levels of difficulty to this too. For example, you might have to search for a certain amount of plants, but the game will tell you where to find them. On the other hand, treasure maps almost ask you to explore the world on your own, almost literally searching for a needle in a haystack. There's a nice variety to what the game asks you to do, and doesn't demand you do most of what the world has to offer.

But at the same time, this still feels like a simpler version of what Grand Theft Auto has to offer. It's interesting to see this type of exploration outside of a bustling city, but by exploring the Wild West, there's inherently less to see and do.

I did find that the way Red Dead Redemption presents real-world missions to pop up to be a nice addition. I always feel like every Rockstar game is testing elements to be added into the Grand Theft Auto series (the racing of Midnight Club, the facial expressions of L.A. Noire, etc.), and I hope this is brought to GTA 5, which I also haven't played yet.

How Red Dead Redemption does improve upon what Rockstar has done in the past is by making smaller moments impactful. The first ride into Mexico is soundtracked by the beautiful music of Jose Gonzales, and made for my favorite moment in the entire game. I also like how the game's final act plays out, basically making you go through many of the training moments from the beginning of the game, but this time, teaching your son everything you've learned. It's a nice cyclical way of telling this story.

I also found that this and Bully are really the only two Rockstar games that center around the main character in a meaningful way. With GTA, your character is little more than a cypher to let the gamer play out their desires. But here, the story centers directly around the life of you and your family. As opposed to most GTA games, you're fighting for those close to you, and not just for success and greed. Slowly, it seems like Rockstar is trying to integrate real emotions into their games and it’s a valiant effort. It’s not quite there yet, but I admire that they’re telling the story of a character who is essentially a good guy, regardless of how you play his story.

I really liked Red Dead Redemption after all this time, but I still don’t understand the love that this game has received for the eight years since its release. It’s a solid, engaging game that takes the most basic elements of GTA and puts it in a different time and setting. I kept waiting for the moment that the game clicked for me, where it got to that “great” status it seems like everyone appoints it. This is a well made game, but it never reaches masterpiece level, as most people seem to consider it.

I decided to pick up Red Dead Redemption (RDR) with my prior interest in other Rockstar titles, and the next Red Dead coming out in October. Although I didn't enjoy this game as some of Rockstar's other games, it was still a fun experience worth having.

Spoilers ahead: I think my biggest gripe with RDR is how I had no emotional interest in the family I was working so hard to reunite with. You go through a ten hour campaign without having any attachment to the true cause of your actions. I think I would have had more fun had John Marston been hunting down his old gang members solely because of revenge. I did believe the ending was sad after having reunited with your family, and being stabbed in the back by the government officials. Your son only alluded to this like 300 times while taking him on the hunting missions though..... The missions in Mexico are what saved this game for me as the gameplay was a ton of fun and the characters were enjoyable. Finally finding the gang members was nice too.

I also enjoy most of the mini-games that try and make this world feel populated, which is difficult for a game to achieve back in 2010. With that said, the missions where you have to herd the cows and chase your dog around (without the dog ever being given a scent to actually follow a trail) were SO BORING. They could have left these missions out without any effect on the story.

I'm still super excited for Red Dead Redemption 2.

Played on PS3

10/10 - Masterpiece - My fifth favourite game

Pros:

John Marston - His character and personality, as well as how he interacts with the world, makes the player bond with him and see him as a real person with goals and fears

The Western setting makes you feel like you're playing The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, with fluid gunplay, a vibrant and living map, and many characters you grow to adore.

Cons:

The story is so long that some missions almost feel like filler, and many characters are extremely forgettable. I found myself thinking "Who is this guy again" many times throughout the story when reintroduced to characters later in the game

Somewhat outdated graphics and clunky Rockstar controls