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Red Dead Redemption

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1 minute ago, Hero-of-Time said:

Have you ever played the original game, @Julius? It's well worth playing and it's a much snappier and streamlined experience than the Redemption games. 

I haven't, I'm guessing that would be Red Dead Revolver? I think I've seen it a few times before while going through the PS Store sales, but it never clicked for some reason or another until just now :laughing: I hadn't really heard too much about it, but you've put it on my radar now so... 

*adds to wishlist* :D

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I was actually close to buying RDR2 the other week. I've yet to play it and was tempted to snap it up when I seen it for £20. I think most places now sell it for around that price.

Yeah it seems to have taken its time reducing to be honest! I've been wanting to pick it up to just add it to my shelves, as I'm sure I'll get around to it at some point, but after cancelling a bunch of pre-orders recently I figured I should play the one that's already on my shelf before I pick it up. 

Am I remembering right that you skipped RDR2 at launch because of the news that came out about Rockstar's crunch and staff treatment? I remember being excited for that game but not planning to play it at launch (as I hadn't played the earlier Redemption), but that certainly went some ways to souring some excitement for it at the time. 

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7 minutes ago, Julius said:

I haven't, I'm guessing that would be Red Dead Revolver? I think I've seen it a few times before while going through the PS Store sales, but it never clicked for some reason or another until just now :laughing: I hadn't really heard too much about it, but you've put it on my radar now so... 

*adds to wishlist* :D

Yeah it seems to have taken its time reducing to be honest! I've been wanting to pick it up to just add it to my shelves, as I'm sure I'll get around to it at some point, but after cancelling a bunch of pre-orders recently I figured I should play the one that's already on my shelf before I pick it up. 

Am I remembering right that you skipped RDR2 at launch because of the news that came out about Rockstar's crunch and staff treatment? I remember being excited for that game but not planning to play it at launch (as I hadn't played the earlier Redemption), but that certainly went some ways to souring some excitement for it at the time. 

Yup. That's the one. It's certainly a very different game, that's for sure. You should read up on its development. It's was originally a game being made by Capcom, before Rockstar came in and saved it.

Yeah, that was big part of my decision for not picking it up at full price. To be honest I completely forgot about that whole situation. Thanks for the reminder!

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I replayed Red Dead Redemption for the first time since release in the lead-up to the sequel. It wasn't as good as I remembered it, although I still had a decent time with it. The samey missions really started to bug me after a while and the story really drags during the second act, but the atmosphere is great. I still need to play Red Dead Redemption 2, but I feel like there's no way it won't get some sort of next-generation upgrade, so buying it at this point would probably be stupid.

One thing that really impressed me when I replayed the game was how they'd done motion capture for all of the sidequests. Even if it's just two characters standing around talking to each other, it feels so much more natural than the usual head-bobbing and arm-waving that you usually get from NPCs in sidequests.

 

5 hours ago, Julius said:

I haven't, I'm guessing that would be Red Dead Revolver? I think I've seen it a few times before while going through the PS Store sales, but it never clicked for some reason or another until just now :laughing: I hadn't really heard too much about it, but you've put it on my radar now so... 

*adds to wishlist* :D

Man, I absolutely hated Red Dead Revolver. It's the complete polar opposite of Red Dead Redemption. Bad atmosphere, bad writing, extremely video gamey. There's also a huge difficulty spike near the end. Absolute garbage. I'd only play it if you're interested in the genesis of the series. I wouldn't play it just because you like the sequel.

That's my two cents, anyway. :p

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Continued my journey this evening and just finished up at Fort Mercer.

Game's definitely got into its groove a bit more and continues to grow on me. At the moment, I've changed my approach on quests and am talking to all of the Strangers I can find, and just pick away at whatever chooses my fancy and is in the general direction I'm heading anyways. What I've learned is to not pick flowers at night, because a cougar leaping on you out of nowhere will scare the crap out of you and make you bite your own tongue :blank:

What I'm quite liking is the size of the map that I've experienced so far. Everywhere feels a stone's throw away from the next, so I've found myself using the fast travel option less and less - unless it's on the other side of the map and there's nothing else to hit on the way - and just taking in the vibe if the game more, running into helpless people whose wives keep getting hung and who die the moment I arrive. Oh well ::shrug:

Other than that, I do have one major (minor) complaint, and that is the shotgun. Every other gun I own gives at least as much feedback through the DualShock as the shotgun, and honestly, most of them make it vibrate more. It's very jarring, and gives the shotgun I own at the moment no reason at all to be picked up, because it just doesn't feel great to use. 

Also been some weird NPC interactions. First time I arrived at Thieves' Landing I started walking towards the saloon only for this guy to rush out with a shotgun and kill me in a couple of hits, completely unprovoked and unrelated to any of the quests I had on me. I saved a guy from a cougar who then kept running, and running, which meant the music didn't go away, which meant after my earlier run-in with a cougar I was on edge after accidentally killing my horse. Yeah, I slipped and pulled R2 for the first time ever in a video game and ended up shooting my own horse at night surrounded by a pack of cougars. Go figure! :D there have also been one or two times where the writing just went off. Bonnie lecturing John on being a murderer after very kindly and calmly asking for some help with tracking something down just felt really out of the blue. 

The game continues to grow on me. It's still rough around the edges, and I think it could definitely do with being modernised in some way, even at this early point. I know the Xbox backwards compatible versions are the best way to experience it, but forgetting all of the technical issues, it just feels a bit clunky at times, like it's getting in it's own way (such as with the map like I mentioned before), and that is where it shows its age. Whether it's just a new coat of paint or being remade to stand proudly alongside it's sequel, I think it would benefit greatly from it, because I do get the sense that there's something special there. 

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Only played for about an hour this evening. After cleaning up a couple of quests and doing a few jobs, I crossed the border with Irish to Mexico...

...and had what I'm sure would have been a great moment completely ruined by the game itself. The music started kicking in, which went on for about a minute before some wolves came at me. I'd tipped my hat and said hello to a stranger on the road before, so I knew things were somewhat muted for the music to be front and centre, so I tried to shoot at the wolves as they had already started attacking my horse. Well, another stranger on the road - who was also being targeted by said wolves - took the gunshots to mean that I wanted a firefight, and started shooting at me. My horse got killed by the wolves, I had to kill a stranger to survive, and had to stand around waiting for another horse to arrive. Tried to use my most recent auto-save to see if I could enjoy that moment properly, but because of the way the game works, I ended up at a safe place I hadn't even visited yet on the other side of Mexico. 

So yeah, that grinds my gears a bit. Which brings me to the AI in this game probably being where it most shows its age, because even when you capture someone alive with the lasso for someone who just got robbed/harassed/whatever in a town, everyone always seems to think I'm inclined to go on a killing spree with only my lasso out. 

:blank:

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Finished this earlier today, probably got to sit on it a bit more before I hopefully update the Gaming Diary thread...but I really ended up liking it. 

It's very ambitious for a title from over a decade ago, and it shows a lot of the time. The frame rate, as I mentioned before, can be very poor on the hardware it was originally intended for; the AI is temperamental in more ways than I have fingers to count them on (it's a good thing Sakurai taught us how to count in binary with our fingers! :p); and there are more bugs than I can throw rocks at. There was one in the penultimate scene to the "ending" where I followed two characters into a barn and one was frozen in place in-engine from my gameplay, standing next to the in-engine version for the cutscene. The camera panned through him at the end and I got a creepy look at the back of his eyeballs through his head, which was lovely. 

But take that away, and there's a strong Western story, a stellar cast (if a little exaggerated at times - though I guess that's the Rockstar touch), one or two excellent quests (and a stellar job of curating those quests, there are less than 20 in total but they feel purposeful), a whole lot of mission variety (some of which I've said before that I want to see in the Breath of the Wild sequel, in terms of structure and presentation), and a game I'm not surprised at all is as beloved as it is. It's rough around the edges, and perhaps would benefit from a remaster/remake in the Red Dead II engine, but I say that thinking that's the best way to make me like this game and appreciate it even more. It deserves to be brought to that standard. 

My favourite thing in the game is something I'll throw in a spoiler tag, but I wanted to push back and test something to see if Rockstar had thought of all the possibilities in a game which gives you a lot of control over your actions. And then I'll mention my favourite quest too. 

Spoiler

I'm talking about Javier Escuella. 

When you finally get to him, the game presents you with two options: kill him, or capture him and take him back to jail him. I caught him, threw him on the back of my horse, and the guy kept mouthing off - and eventually got onto the topic of Abigail, and kept pushing. In my mind, everything he'd done up to this point had been fair game, but I couldn't see the John the game presented me with not doing something about this. 

So, I thought, What if I kill him then throw him in prison? And so I shot him, rode back, threw him behind bars, and for that cutscene I thought I'd done something totally immersion-shattering, as he just threw him in there, stood around for long enough that you'd think there was supposed to be voiced dialogue for the scene - but didn't say anything - and the scene ended. 

In the next scene he's handed over to Ross and they react to me handing him over but dead. This is my first Rockstar campaign that I've seen through to the end, so maybe they do this a lot, but I can't overstate for a second how much I appreciated the effort and thought clearly put into this game based on that alone. To be honest, it was probably at that point that I started enjoying the game more. 

As for the quest, it was the one titled I Know You. I love when games get meta or self-referential, so having the guy with a top hat reference my deeds - both good and bad - from other side quests, and then him just vanishing (John's conscience or something religious?) really added a lot to the character of John Marston that I didn't know I needed. 

And while towards the end it certainly became very apparent what was going to happen, I sure as hell wasn't expecting...

Spoiler

...the time skip and to be playing as Jack Marston. I clapped, that was awesome. 

If anything, I thought a sequel was being set up based on how much John was talking about the future and essentially preparing him for life without him leading up to the ending. There's a whole other level of appreciation I have for the game with the ending they have, such as realising that there are so many interactions they had to record his voice for when to see the credits from that point you could probably reach it in 15 minutes or so. 

A great video game. Look forward to mulling it over in the coming days, and hopefully getting around to Red Dead Redemption II later in the year! 

Edited by Julius

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