Red Dead Redemption

i was just about ready to launch my assault and unlock mexico but my horse died right before the big race - the one i'd spent hours getting to know! so fuck - i spent a good while looking for the kentucky saddler but never found him so finally i just went on an all-night hunting binge, levelling up enough to buy the kentucky saddler outright

something happened while out hunting that sums up this game, and all its nonsensical, fabulous breathlessness

1 - trying to kill a coyote i somehow ended up aiming straight down into my horse and pulled the trigger (!)
2 - my horse was still alive but my honor dropped and suddenly lawmen were on my tail
3 - trying to outrun them, i heard the sound of a train and realized one was headed past right in front of me
4 - i managed to race the train and dart just in front of it, cutting off the lawmen and saving my sorry ass!

total movie moment

cool. could you not have just jumped onto the train, giving the lawmen the bird whilst you steam off into the distance?

The first mission you do for the establishment side in Mexico has similar potential for cinematic train chaos. Had a guy and his horse get ground up by one last night, which I thought didn't happen.

After having to kill so many people to get to Mexico I tried to make my first act there shooting some coyotes that were trying to eat a guy, but I popped him by mistake. Then some bystanders opened fire on me from behind and I had to deadeye them to not die, then went on a chain of trying to silence 2-3 other witnesses because I thought the Mexican police might be a bit heavy. Then in the course of fleeing I saw a random event I hadn't seen before with three Mexican army guys about to execute a crying peasant guy in a quite sinister looking way, but when I shot them I got in trouble. Try to do a good deed: end up a serial killer.

AN' THAT'S LEYF.

If you pull level with a train you can press X to jump onto it, yeah.

The other day I was watching these two guys cross the rails when I heard the train come in the distance. I paused to look for a bit as one of the two guys rode onto the track and then waited. The train came. The man was crushed. I lol'd.

As for snow, you can find it in the north of Hannigan's Stead, as far up as you can go, by the mountain. I was up there hunting boar, it's quite cool, you can see your footprints in the snow. The view across the valley is amazing. I was looking out and a fierce breeze blew through the trees. I thought, a storm is rolling in. And one did. So epic.

srsly want to play this

Some people invited me to be in a posse

I went to the hideout they were working on and helped them

Then one of them shot me and they rode off

I chased them down and shot all four of them in about ten seconds

Then they voted to kick me

I am determined to stay at 0 honor, no matter how many nuns (-100) it takes. are there any children anywhere?

xp yeah that is about the standard multiplayer exp afaik

democrazy!

xp

the joke was on them, because I needed to go bed

100%

u crazy

u R crazy, dang

I haven't even unlocked Mexico yet because I keep wandering off to the fields to sit around on my horse and do nothing much

You are gonna love wandering around in Mexico, it's gorgeous.

argh so wanna go home and kick it with this game - had it for two weeks and I think I'm still in tutorial mode...

So it took me two times at the horse race to realize that I actually need to KEEP HITTING X in order to make my horse go super fast!

The entire game I've just been holding X once I get up to "top" speed. GUHHHHH. It was a piece of cake after that - I even fell off my horse once and still won easily.

Pretty turned off by the leering Mexican accents - hopefully this will be balanced out soon.

One thing about Mexico - five minutes after crossing the border I got stopped by a bunch of Federales who had their guns pointed at me! Fuck, I killed em all, what did they expect? Now I've got a bounty on my head although no one seems to give a shit. Guess I should pay it off, or use that pardon I've still got. I don't even know if they have a telegraph office in Perdido, though. (I too am doing the good guy thing..)

nice work, goole, 100%? is there any equivalent of GTA's pigeons in this?

As goole mentioned above, it is sort of creepy how American Indians have just been totally erased from this version of the Wild West.. I know it's 1911 and all but.. I guess I should just let it go. Ugh.

I am gonna do the proto-airplane mission if it KILLS ME. I remember hearing the girl talking on the train at the very beginning of the game about "flying machines" or whatever, remembered that the game takes place in 1911 and was like I AM DOING THAT.

there are indians in the third segment

there are no pigeons but when you add up all the flower picking and hunting of different things...

i will inflict on you all a spoiler because it pissed me off and disappointed -- you never get to drive a car! there's a stat in the game "distance driven" even! assholes!

maybe something for dlc

The car is the Liberty City Theme Park of Red Dead Redemption

Haha the fucking flower picking. I refuse to do "Flowers for a Lady" because I am sick and tired of carrying around like 50 bazillion bouquets of Wild Feverfew.

never forget 1911

the survivalist maps are a godsend. plus, it tells where to find which flower in the challenge description! it's really less of a hassle than those fucking pigeons.

being an outlaw definitely keeps the game more active. I was capping people from the train last night ^_^

love that you can actually jump from your horse to the train

don't think you can go the other way however : /

are there benefits to extreme low honor? i played as a goody goody and people kept giving me stuff.

can't decide if i'm going to pull the trigger on this, i borrowed it from a friend over the weekend and got as far as finishing the first tutorial horse race. it seems pretty rad but i have a track record of giving up on open-world games about 35% of the way through. at least there don't seem to be any dialogue trees.

the only diffs I have noticed from low honor is you get different random encounters, like to steal and murder instead of helping folks (by stealing and murdering). also you get bounty hunters chasing you which keeps things lively.

there is no fence to be on with this game if you have the gaming system to run it imo

yeah i'd call it R*'s best w/o much hesitation

big praise indeed

it's close betw. this and vice city for me, nostalgia's strong w/the PS2 GTAs

the writing and v/o is head and shoulders above even IV. the mission design is finally good. the secondary challenges are interesting well-thought out, hit that grinding w/o grinding sweet spot. the body physics and gun combat are excellent (the gta games are kind of bad as shooters, really!)

i'm not totally without complaints but most of the things that bugged me about the GTAs have been mostly fixed. and the things it does well it does really really well. you can't understimate how important it is to have a game be pretty.

funny i think it's closest to bully in terms of uh vibe, maybe cos of the atmosphere and hazy old timeyness

Yeah the voice acting is pretty great, isn't it?

They're good at gluing a bunch of pretty different kinds of story together. The Sam Elliott dude you meet when you first get to Mexico has a total Japanese deep-mystery vibe goin on. "I'm the last of my kind..." "So what are you waiting around here for?" "I don't know..."

explain me social club. what is it? why do i need to join? what do i get? is it more multiplayer focused or does it add to the single player game? etc

The voice acting is great, and I love how well RDR hits Western tropes. The concerns about federal interference in the wild west, the outlaw versus the law, the formation of community, the move into modernity, the simultaneous empathizing/hatred of the Other -- they really studied how Westerns work before making the game.

priest outside of the saloon drove me so crazy that i was compelled to lasso him and train track the dude after draggin him around town for a bit.

def more murderous in this than most games, must be the outlaw vibe.

Man, I am loving the storyline in Mexico. Really great.

btw did u dudes know that wild horses don't have horseshoes but non-wild horses do

o_O

so here's a question

If I have avoided every GTA game because of discomfort with the premise, would there be similar ethical considerations that would lead me to want to avoid this game as well or does the gameplay exist in a setting with fewer relatable-to-real-life ethical qualms?

imo its way way way more ethically sound than the other gtas. you will be killing peeps, but i havent really run up against anything where i had to kill innocent people, and the rewards for doing so because why not are minimal.

obv I don't have an issue with killing ppl, otherwise I would never play any game ever

you shoot a hell of a lot of people, is that a problem?

xps lol

your character is presented with option to be more honorable or not in a few given cases. there is a mission or two where you have to do some heinous stuff but the immorality of it is the point, narratively.

if you're asking this question at all, maybe go do something else

NOTE: i am not as far into the game as some other people are, so i cant say things dont get shady further on, but it feels like a concerted effort was made to give you a non (or at least semi) violent out - the fact that you can lasso and hogtie criminals instead of shooting them, and that you get more $$$ for doing so is a big indicator of a different approach i think.

Well my issues with GTA run more along the lines of "gang violence is awesome and btw aren't these minorities/immigrants amoral sociopaths; ps women are playthings" so if the storyline is more about framing issues like that in unflattering/impactful terms rather than "yay boobies/blood" (I know some of the later GTA games are supposed to be more mature in this regard but, you know, life's too short), maybe I'll check this out.

Personally, I feel that the honor mechanic does a good job of making you feel guilty for misdeeds. The presence of it makes RDR feel a lot less nihilistic than GTA. And even mistreating criminals can dock you honor. I lasso'd a thief and rode him around until he died and I lost honor. The whole thing kinda made me feel dirty and immoral.