Red Dead Redemption

[Agent Fisher]

Is one of the greatest games of the year, hands down. Beautiful graphics, great story line, great soundtrack.

I just beat single player storyline after probably 24 hours, on and off, and I still want to hop on my horse, ride off into the sunset and hunt down some bounties.

Oh and multi is great. Nothing like getting thirteen of your coworkers all on the same game, forming a posse and just mobbing around the west, killing everything in towns, getting ten thousand dollar bounties on our heads.

And one last thing: Nothing equals the sweet joy of lassoing someone and dragging them behind your horse as you ride through town.

[Stark]

I found it boring, the combat simplistic, the constant repetition of 'change is bad' and the way the game provides Marstens motivation AT THE END OF THE GAME really cut out any emotional involvement. The multi sucks shit due to 7 whole things to do and a horrible spawning system. I'd say I enjoyed Just Cause 2 more, and it had just as many tiresome fetch quests.

Its major achievement is revealing the sizable population of closet cowboy fanciers. It amuses me that the dead eye 'upgrades' actually make it worse and that all the guns are just reskinned GTA4 guns. How fast can you reload that 22 round internal magazine again?

[Agent Fisher]

the way the game provides Marstens motivation AT THE END OF THE GAME really cut out any emotional involvement.

How so? I mean, how did it show the motivation only at the end. I mean, I found his motivation in one of the first cut scenes, when he's tlaking to Bonnie McFarlane. He says the government has his wife and kid and want him to do some jobs for him before he can have them back.

[Stark]

The whole family thing. He's doing it all cause the blah blahed his family, etc, and aside from alluding to this throughout, you don't even MEET them until the end (where you have to replay the tutorial for no reason). I was talking to a bunch of SDNers this morning and people speculated it was orginally meant to be at the start of the game, where you'd actually give a fuck about this cardboard cutout nobody's family and care about the plot.

As it was, I fell asleep and returned the game because multi was balls. Whee, let's grief and do the same four bases over and over!

[Vendetta]

How so? I mean, how did it show the motivation only at the end. I mean, I found his motivation in one of the first cut scenes, when he's tlaking to Bonnie McFarlane. He says the government has his wife and kid and want him to do some jobs for him before he can have them back.

It only showed Marston's motivation at the end to set you up for the ending. It told you about it from the start, but there's not really a reason to give a damn about it because you wouldn't know Marston's family from a hole in the ground. (Also, Marston basically turns his asshole dial up to 11 when dealing with his family. He's nicer to complete strangers than his own wife and son.)

Also, because of the progression through the game abandoning the earlier characters and their concerns, the connections you build with, for instance, the Marshall in Armadillo don't mean dick as soon as you move on to Mexico because he despawns from the world and you'll never hear about him again (unless you buy a newspaper in the epilogue).

The ambient challenges as well were a good idea, but the only one that really felt well integrated was Treasure Hunter, the others were just random collect quests that felt really gamey and didn't really provide a tangible benefit until you'd completed them, by which time you had no need of the benefit (great, for getting up to Survivalist 10 I can make stuff that refills my deadeye. Except I can buy that for $10 and have $8000 in cash and a satchel full of gold that could buy me most of Texas, and besides I've all but completed the game and there's nothing left to use it on.)

I did enjoy the game, but it's not worth blowing your load over.
Spoiler

Also, the epilogue is rendered significantly less fun by your rebirth as a whining teenage pillock. The Wild Bunch ending was good/inevitable, but the consequences for postgame free roam were grim.

[Jade Falcon]

Can I ask Stark, are there any games you like??

Granted, I haven't played Red Dead Redemption and I've heard so many positive things about it that I wouldn't be surprised if I'm a little underwhelmed. To be honest, the western setting didn't initially appeal to me, but the more I hear, the more interesting it sounds, though I'm not making the mistake of basing that off of review sites.

By the way, for those who are amused, have you seen some of the Ebay auctions for this. People wanting £60 for the Golden guns and/or War Horse Limited edition DLC, people even selling the DVD sleeve for the limited edition...christ.

[CaptHawkeye]

It's pretty ironic that RDR got great marks for its combat, which is incredibly gamey. Marston can reload revolvers and lever action rifles FASTER than semi auto pistols and bolt action rifles. The fighting in general is incredibly boring and little more than point and click. Their is no bullet drop, sway, weapon limits, etc which means the gunplay is completely uninteresting.

10/10 game guys, but Alpha Protocol gets 6/10 for having...gamey combat. RDR is a good game, but is is worth perfect 10/10 reviews? Definitely not.

[Vendetta]

Can I ask Stark, are there any games you like?? .

He likes Alpha Protocol.

Though since everyone else seems to dislike that he may just be being perverse.

[CaptHawkeye]

I like Alpha Protocol. It's nowhere near as bad as the journalists have been screaming it is. It's just not what they expected. So they hate it.

Don't get me wrong, it's broken and needs serious help in some areas. But a lot of areas the journalists have been knocking it for are either not as bad as they think, or just as good as in games they gave 9/10 or 10/10 reviews too.

[Jade Falcon]

Can I ask Stark, are there any games you like?? .

He likes Alpha Protocol.

Though since everyone else seems to dislike that he may just be being perverse.

Alpha Protocols not too bad, hate the bloody hacking minigame though, but once you've got a couple of ranks in sabotage and squint a bit, it's not as bad.

[Whiplash]

I like Alpha Protocol. It's nowhere near as bad as the journalists have been screaming it is. It's just not what they expected. So they hate it.

If that line of logic were true, then no one would have liked Brutal Legend.

[Stark]

I love the hacking minigame. It's easy to avoid the games using EMPs equipment and skills anyway which is nice. The hacking is definately much harder than the others.

[General Zod]

It's pretty ironic that RDR got great marks for its combat, which is incredibly gamey. Marston can reload revolvers and lever action rifles FASTER than semi auto pistols and bolt action rifles. The fighting in general is incredibly boring and little more than point and click. Their is no bullet drop, sway, weapon limits, etc which means the gunplay is completely uninteresting.

10/10 game guys, but Alpha Protocol gets 6/10 for having...gamey combat. RDR is a good game, but is is worth perfect 10/10 reviews? Definitely not.

It's a Rockstar game, of course they're going to give it a 10/10 on reviews. The idea that review scores actually mean anything besides how much money the mag in question is getting paid is kind of hilarious.

[Oscar Wilde]

I'm finding it pretty ok. Multi is definitely more of a "get people on friends list, clear bases and throw knives into each others heads" thing, though I've been doing a little alone to grind XP.

Gambling is easily where most of my time has been spent. The AI seems to jump around, Poker is pretty good but Liar's Dice is incredibly easy because they seem to take their dice as the ultimate factor. Player with one dice: "I think there's one four." I have two twos. I make that bid "You're bluffing!" Blackjack is fun, horseshoes is a bitch.

[Stark]

Liars Dice is totally broken. It's the dumbest game in the world. As you say, if you win the first hand you've won. Luckily you can't bet for shit and money is useless anyway, just like in all Rockstar games.

[Oscar Wilde]

Oh that reminds me: Does the money you get online do anything?

[Stark]

I thought it was just score.

[Aaron]

I enjoy the setting (I'm not a closet cowboy fan) so I forgive a lot of the games failings. Though I am thoroughly confused with the ending:
Spoiler

Why did the FBI come for Marsten? And then gun him down?

AP is by far the superior game IMO though. Despite the horendous intro/training mission, bad cover system and graphics, it's got an interesting plot, some cool abilities and if your one of those guys that likes to shove a tonne of shit on his guns then thats a plus.

[CaptHawkeye]

I got the impression that Ross was not using Marston officially. He was basically having Marston do 98% of his job anyway. When he finally shut down the last gangs in the game, he probably figured Marston was just another loose end.

It probably wouldn't be that hard to convince the Army and Police that Marston was STILL a heavily armed and dangerous criminal after all.

[Whiplash]

Played a little of it today, not enough to critique though. I really liked the marked targeting. Lassoing someone and then dragging them while you're on horseback was a blast. Shooting worked well for me. The only issue I had was cycling through the weapons menu (the toggle was weird, it kept skipping weapons), but I think that more to do with me not being entirely used to the 360 controller (I don't play it much). Definitely not a 10/10, but worth a buy I guess.

[chitoryu12]

I got the impression that Ross was not using Marston officially. He was basically having Marston do 98% of his job anyway. When he finally shut down the last gangs in the game, he probably figured Marston was just another loose end.

It probably wouldn't be that hard to convince the Army and Police that Marston was STILL a heavily armed and dangerous criminal after all.

In all honesty, Marston technically WAS a heavily armed and dangerous criminal. I don't think he was ever given an official pardon for his crimes, and the player's actions in free roam could easily make him out as an outlaw.

As for my opinion of the game, I'm having the time of my life with it. Multiplayer is loads of fun if you get a good posse that can communicate well. You'll bowl over everyone else.

[Ritterin Sophia]

This is a LeMat .32/.42 Ball, Single-Action Revolver with a 9-round cylinder.

An interesting fact is that it was used in the Civil War as a service pistol by the CSA.

The cool thing about this gun is that thing below the main barrel is a 16-gauge smoothbore one-shot shotgun.

The retarded thing is that the one really nifty gimmick of this gun is non-functional in the game.

[chitoryu12]

*image*
This is a LeMat .32/.42 Ball, Single-Action Revolver with a 9-round cylinder.

An interesting fact is that it was used in the Civil War as a service pistol by the CSA.

The cool thing about this gun is that thing below the main barrel is a 16-gauge smoothbore one-shot shotgun.

The retarded thing is that the one really nifty gimmick of this gun is non-functional in the game.

They probably just couldn't be arsed to program a way to let you switch between the shotgun barrel and the pistol barrel.

The only two advantages the LeMat has over any other pistol is the high ammo capacity (which is beaten by only the Mauser) and the fact that it uses revolver ammo, which is very common for the first 2/3 of the game. When pistol ammo becomes cheaper and easier to get later in the game, the Mauser decimates every other handgun simply by volume of fire.

[Big Orange]

This game seems a bit generic, as nicely polished and presented as it is judging by the trailers, I haven't played this game yet, but what I like the most about Red Dead Redemption is how open and vast the setting seems to be. This game looks like a thinly veiled development platform for GTA V with the more indepth rural/widerness areas going on for miles ala San Andreas.