Jay’s Internet Log

In all honesty, my initial impressions of this game came back in late March, when I was privileged enough to stand in line for two hours at PAX East to play the game for ten minutes.  Those ten minutes however sold me wholeheartedly on the game, even if the demonstrator wouldn’t let me invert my controls, so I had a hard time doing anything.  I did leave that little tented-in area knowing that I wanted to play more of this game.  This past Tuesday, I spent about an hour or two playing single player, and then a few hours messing around with multiplayer, and a few hours Wednesday as well, mostly in single player.  These are my initial impressions.

Red Dead Redemption begins with our character John Marston getting off of a ferry, seeing a Model T painted in red (I’ll get to this in a second), walking through town with two “officials”, and then being placed onto a train and having to listen to everyone’s problems for the ride.  When John gets off this train, his adventure begins.  The opening sequence plays like a movie, and I like when games start this way.  I haven’t ever seen anything as epic as the opening sequence of Call of Duty 4 however, from jumping to that helicopter and then being driven through the streets of Irafganistan.  That was truly amazing, but I digress.  The red Model-T caught me off guard.  I’ve had a Model-T in my family for my whole life, and I was always under the impression that Henry Ford’s statement was true that all models can be purchased “in any color, so long as it’s black”.  While this saying is true for the model years after 1913, earlier cars were available in Brewster Green, Red, Blue and Gray.  I guess I learned my thing for today.  Okay, so now that this is out of the way, let’s talk about what I think about this game.  Many reviews are saying that this game is like “Grand Theft Auto in the Wild West”, and that statement tends to hold true for the most part.  The controls are very similar to GTA, and instead of cars to drive, you have horses to ride.  You can even walk up to a man riding a horse and pull him off it, just like you can pull somebody out of a car in GTA.  Also, the horses use the same GPS system that cars do in GTA, which is a bit weird at first, but needed in a game such as this.  In my few hours playing the single player, I don’t feel like I’ve even scratched the surface with this game.  The map is enormous, and each little habitation that I’ve come across has been well-designed and just feels right.  The music that I’ve heard stretches from just ambient sounds and soft strumming of guitars to fast-paced action music, but everything that you’d expect from a Western-style movie, and it really helps build the atmosphere.  The characters seem much tougher than those in GTA, probably because this game is set in 1911 in an area where everyone carries guns and have bad attitudes.  There are a lot of non-mission-specific fun things to do as well.  I played Poker, Blackjack, some dice game, and horseshoes so far, and for the most part, they are fun.  Some of them do get boring due to the pacing of the games.  Lionhead did a better job with Fable II’s pub games, but overall, these are nice diversions.  Out in the wilderness, there are many animals, either hunting or being hunted.  I’ve killed different types of birds, a cougar, a rattlesnake (that bit me first), many deer, an armadillo, rabbits, and a cow to name a few.  After you shoot an animal, you can walk over to it and take its hide, which leaves a pink corpse on the ground, which can be disturbing at first.  You can sell these hides but I’ve yet to do so.  My backpack must stink really bad!  I found a treasure map, which shows a location nearby where you have to dig up the treasure, and I’ve caught a horse and broke him.  One of the most memorable missions for me so far has been just simply herding cattle, because it just felt right.  It wasn’t difficult as it was somewhat of a horse riding tutorial, but it made me feel like I was in this world, and when a game has that effect, I call it a success.

Multiplayer is a bit of a mess I think, but this is most likely due to me not knowing what to do, and I didn’t read the instructions on this mode, so I was just playing around.  In its simplest form, when you start up Multiplayer, you are sent into what’s called Free Roam, and you spawn somewhere in this huge world with no real rules on what to do.  In here, you can meet up with friends, shoot people to gain XP, or find a game to jump in to.  The most fun I’ve had with this so far is when we were spawned in a fort that had cannons all over it.  I jumped on a cannon and saw some guy on a horse.  He died, and I got a Wanted level, which brought in lots of reinforcements.  My team and I started taking them out until we realized that they weren’t going to stop spawning.  We leveled up quite a bit, shooting these cannons and it was a lot of fun.  When we tried team-based modes, we did okay, but not spectacular.  We came across a bug in the game where a donkey somehow got up on top of a stagecoach and kept bucking it.  It was quite funny, and when we jumped into the stagecoach, it took a few seconds for the donkey to fall off, so we got a few laughs out of it.

Overall, this game’s production value seems to be top-notch as you’d expect from Rockstar, and for me at least, it’s the Game of the Year from what’s been released so far.  I am really looking forward to putting much more time into this game.  It isn’t often when games actually live up to the hype that preceeds their release, and this game has had a lot of hype, but it is living up to it in a great way.  I can’t recommend this game enough, even if it’s just for the single player portion of it.  If you like the GTA-style games, or just gaming in general, you can’t go wrong with this title as there’s something for everyone.  Nice job Rockstar San Diego!