Marston takes careful aim at some crows.
Before you jump to the bottom of the page and post a comment about how I’m an ignorant twat, let me preface this entire post with a statement: I enjoyed Red Dead Redemption. But that doesn’t mean it’s immune from my rage for all its failings. And let me tell you, it had a lot of shit that pissed me off.
Video games where you get to play as a cowboy are few and far between. I’m not sure why the western genre for games never really took off, but they can be a lot of fun. I suppose the mouth-breathers feel it’s more important to buy a new version of Madden every year, so developers are constantly tied up copying last year’s football garbage into a new game. That precludes them from making new games with western motifs.
I’ve always enjoyed the western genre of film. The Good The Bad and The Ugly, True Grit, and Tombstone, just to name a few, are movies I can watch over and over again. There’s just something exciting about getting to live vicariously through those gunslingers. Besides, the whole genre boils down to just being a badass. And how could anyone not like a film genre dedicated to badasses?
So, playing a video game western, there’s a short list of stuff I want to do:
- Kill people.
- Quick-draw showdowns.
- Rob people/banks.
- Hijack trains.
- Be a badass.
And here’s a list of stuff I don’t want to do:
- Herd cattle.
- Catch horses.
- Take care of a farm/ranch.
- Deliver corn.
- Hang out with an annoying kid.
- Scare away crows.
- Watch boring cutscenes of talking.
- Not have sex with prostitutes.
- Be a law-abiding citizen.
After a few annoying tutorial missions at the beginning of the game, which show you how to herd cattle and catch horses, Red Dead Redemption lets you get on with the gunslinging and killing. Great, right? You betcha. After 30 or so hours of gunning down bad guys, John Marston (the main character) has a final climactic battle with his old mentor, Dutch. After that, you are “treated” to one of the most horrible songs ever recorded, and Marston rides home to be reunited with his wife and son.
The End.
Oh wait, it’s not?
This has nothing to do with my post, I just thought it was a funny picture.
Nope. You get to the really fun stuff now which includes: herding cattle, catching horses, delivering corn, scaring away crows, hanging out with an annoying kid, and taking care of the day-to-day business of a farm. This happens for mission after mission. It’s an endless assault of the most boring shit imaginable. All the crap that I couldn’t wait to get past in the tutorial is now being forced upon me after spending the last 28 hours of gameplay shooting people. What? The? Fuck?
A parallel would be Clint Eastwood’s stellar film Unforgiven. He plays an outlaw who reformed and settled down to have a family. He temporarily leaves said family to go kill bad guys. The movie ends after a final climactic battle. The movie does not subject us to another half an hour of him returning home to till soil and catch pigs. That would be a terrible. It would ruin the entire narrative. It would be pointless and anti-climactic. Guess what? The same shit holds true for Red Dead Redemption.
I didn’t go through all those missions just to end up playing a really fancy farm simulator. If I wanted to do that, I would just play Farmville on Facebook. Not that I would ever do such a thing. So why the fuck would I want to do it with shiny Xbox 360 graphics? It was a terrible idea that was ultimately pointless, anti-climactic, and ruined the entire narrative.
The story of Red Dead Redemption was basically that of John Marston, former outlaw who had reformed his evil ways and settled down with a family. His family gets kidnapped by the FBI (don’t ask, obviously this makes no sense), and he is extorted into killing the members of his former gang so he can get his family back. After doing all that and returning home, the story is over. There shouldn’t be any more. And if you’re going to do more, you shouldn’t have it be all the boring shit that no one cares about.
I guarantee that nobody who played this game ever did any of the side missions that involved herding cattle or catching horses. That shit was boring as fuck and irritating as hell. It shouldn’t be in the game at all, let alone exist as a series of required missions after the killing has finished.
My thoughts exactly.
Which brings me to my next point. You can choose to be good or bad, sort of. But you really are forced to be good. If you do bad shit like steal peoples’ horses or kill people indiscriminantly, you become a wanted man and it becomes impossible to do anything. That’s fine, I suppose, but it really just shoehorns you into being good. So, the things I want to do become difficult, like: robbing people/banks, hijacking trains, and killing people. Sure, you do get to kill people, but only during missions. Sometimes there are missions where you know who you have to kill, and if you go ahead and kill them before the scripted time you are supposed to, the mission fails. What the fuck is that bullshit? And what about all the prostitutes in the game? They are constantly after you to purchase their services, and sometimes when you save them they offer a freebie. John Marston always politely refuses, saying he’s married…to a former prostitute. Well, if you get to be amoral shooting people in the face, then why can’t you be amoral and go around cheating? Marston’s moral compass doesn’t offer much consistency. Besides, if you can pick up hookers in Grand Theft Auto IV, then why can’t you do it in this game, too? You could even catch a nasty case of Syphilis, just for an added touch of realism. And as an aside, the cutscenes that play before each mission are really fucking long. Way way way too long. By the time I reached the 300 farming missions, I didn’t have the patience to watch these insufferably long cutscenes any more. I just skipped them all. The game didn’t lose any enjoyability.
Of course, I kept on playing because I knew there had to be another real mission coming. They couldn’t just end the game with a bunch of farming bullshit. Finally, after a punishing 600 farming missions, the final mission comes. The FBI decides that for all your hard effort, they are going to betray you. They send in the Army, and you single-handedly gun everyone down. Your wife and kid escape, but you get trapped by a rather small contingent of bad guys. You are forced into a quick-draw and no matter what you do, you get killed.
The End.
Fuck that shit!
Oh wait, it’s not?
You single-handedly won an entire revolutionary war, but this many guys kill you.
Nope. Remember that really fucking annoying kid from the 800 farming missions? Well, now you get to play as him. John Marston’s son Jack just turned 18 and he is out for revenge. Apparently, the legal age for revenge in the U.S. is 18. His voice is so shrill it’s ear-shattering. Every time he talked, I wanted to punch a hole in my TV. The true final mission of the game is to hunt down the FBI leader and kill him. It’s relatively short, so at this point I was just playing the game to get it over with. All enjoyment had been jettisoned long ago amidst the 1200 farming missions. Once you find the final bad guy and kill him, the game ends for the third time.
The End.
Sort of. Well, now you can free-roam around the game and complete side missions to your heart’s content. So, if you didn’t get enough cattle herding and horse catching the first time around, you can do that some more.
But you know what? I don’t want to fucking play as Jack Marston. He’s a whiny bitch. I couldn’t stand every second of the game you were forced to be alongside him, and I sure as hell don’t want to play as him now. I played the entire game as John Marston, I don’t want to finish it as Jack. That would be like playing through all of Super Mario Brothers as Mario, then dying when you face Bowser, and eventually returning to kill Bowser while playing as Toad. No one wants to play as Toad. Toad sucks.
The ending was typical bait-and-switch bullshit. It was a craptastic ending on par with anything Shyamy Shyamalan could dream up. No thanks, I don’t want to see the character I invested so much time in die at the very end. Fuck all that noise, Rockstar Games. After killing thousands of bad guys, single-handedly winning the Mexican Revolution, and absorbing millions of rounds of ammunition into his body, there’s no way a handful of dudes is going to kill John Marston. The game creators were going for something sad/profound like the ending of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, but instead what they got was hokey shit like the ending of Buried. You know, a “twist” ending that is only there for shock value, does nothing to help the story, and just generally pisses off the audience.
Li’l Marston
Taking a look back at my two lists, the first list, of things I want to do in a western, I got to do 3 out of 5. The other list, stuff I don’t want to do in a western, I did 9 out of 9. That sucks. Listen up, video game industry. Next time you make a western genre game, make sure you can play through the entire game as an outlaw. And don’t make all the boring farming shit mandatory. No one wants to play through 3500 farming missions. Not even Farmville players could stomach that.
My recommendation for everyone who hasn’t played Red Dead Redemption is this: After you kill Dutch and return home, stop playing the game immediately and start playing the expansion pack, Undead Nightmare. That’s where you get to kill hoards of zombies. That was really fun.
Verdicts:
The Game Overall – Good
The Game’s Ending – Shitty
Undead Nightmare – Good
I would have completely forgiven the last two hours of the game if the finale was a five minute scene of two guys staring each other down before a duel with Ennio Morricone blaring in the background. Alas, I was let down.
Gotta be the voice of
reasondissention here.I loved this game, including the end. Especially the part where he was doing “Nothing” with his family. It lent the experience some genuine emotion instead of ending with a cut scene. I also loved the fact they gunned him down and Jack carried on…
This is the only video game in my life I ever got 100% completion on… Loved every minute of it. And yes, that means I •Herd cattle.
•Caught horses.
•Took care of a farm/ranch.
•Delivered corn.
•Hung out with an annoying kid.
•Scared away crows.
•Watched boring cutscenes of talking.
•Was a law-abiding citizen.
Would have been nice if we could have banged the hookers though. LOL
“Would have been nice if we could have banged the hookers though.”
Fogs, at least we agree on one thing.
LOL. I distinctly recall feeling ripped off about that. Nawwww… you gotta be kidding me!! LOL
The way you put it, it sounds like RDR has a Fallout 3 style of gameplay but with a ‘Family’ and herding cattle, delivering corn… I mean, okay, Fallout 3 doesn’t let you do it with prosititutes and it doesn’t have an expansion with zombies, but it does let you use nuclear ordance, beat people with robotic fists, and euthanise man-trees… and who doesn’t want to put a man-tree out of its misery?
and by ‘it doesn’t let you do it with prositutes’ I mean as it doesn’t let you do it because there kind of are no prostitutes, or at least there aren’t any without some advanced form of radiation poisoning.
And that’s another thing RDR doesn’t have: a radiation system based around the tick of a geiger counter. And who doesn’t love geiger counters?
RDR is more like Grand Theft Auto IV: same company, same game engine, similar control setup. Getting it on with the prostitutes would make any game even better.
As much as I love Red Dead Redemption, I do agree with many of your points. The cattle herding, horse wrangling and other mindless chores were very tedious, and it was annoying to have to go through them at the beginning of the game. Still, once the entire area is opened up, things get pretty damn awesome. I loved the freedom to do whatever I wanted, and the Undead Nightmare expansion was the icing on the cake. I would take this over GTA IV any day.
Undead Nightmare really was a hell of a lot of fun. I wonder if they toyed with the idea of zombie horse breaking and zombie cattle herding?
What A Fuckin Co-inky-dink.! Im Playing This Shit Right This Second….Im Just Riding My $750 Dollar Horse.!!! Nothing Fancy..Running From Random Cougars And Bears…….& Where The FUCK Did A Leapord Come From.?!
LOL!
The ending is great what are you talking about. It all makes complete perfect sense. With all John did, there was NO way in hell the government of the time period would let him walk. Corrupt or not. With the ending of him surrendering in the manner he did was because all he would be doing is putting his family in more and more danger. The government would’ve taken Jack and his wife instead of a gang. He knew if they killed him, the government wouldn’t bother the son or wife. Uncle already was killed by the governmet’s action, he didn’t want his son or wife to have the same fate. The ending is completely clear and a terrific way to play it out. If John was still alive, he would basically have to live in the wild. The government would have any police officer shoot him on site. Would you like that ending better? Quit complaining about “WAHWAHWAH NO ME GUSTA JACK BLABBLALALA” suck it the fuck up and appreciate the awesome story and ending in the game.
Why yes, I would have liked that ending better.
The only way that would happen is if they gave it as much realistic power as Saints Row 2. They wanted a realistic feel and they did a great job of it. I don’t understand what your problem is. Is killing the only thing you look for in a game? You don’t want to feel emotion? Have it feel realistic? Have it something that could’ve actually been done in real life. I would find it boring a story of one man who fucks up every person in site over and over again then says yay I win and goes home. It’s why I hate Call of Duty so much and why all practical people do. GTA IV was to an extent but again, there’s too much random killing for it to be realistic in a modern society. Could you explain to me a little bit why you feel it should only be killing in the game?
And the farming stuff is only like 15-20 minutes total gameplay, so quit fucking complaining. I beat from the gang leader to the end of the game in less then a few hours so that is more horse shit then horse shit itself.
I don’t feel like it should only be killing in a game. But this game in particular is filled with tons and tons of killing. You mow down hundreds of people, and literally destroy an entire army, almost single-handedly. Right there the realism is thrown out the window. So, to give it a “realistic” ending betrays everything that has already come before in the game. It makes no sense that you could kill so many people, yet a small handful of guys is too much for the main character to take on.
The thing I really don’t like about it is that it betrays the story arc of John. It begins with him trying to start a new life, only to be reeled back in to the business of death. He helps the government and brings his old gang to justice. If you played the game “good”, then by the end John will have redeemed himself. He will have earned a happy ending. Despite what you do in the game, the government betrays John and kills him. His character arc is therefore rendered meaningless. There was no point to his redemption if he ends up dead.
To make matters worse, I don’t want to finish the game as his son. Narratively speaking, it makes little sense. Overall, the ending of “Red Dead Redemption” is far more frustrating than any “Call of Duty Game.” The reason is that of COD, there is no story and no character development. RDD had story and character development, and to piss it away how they did was incredibly frustrating.
Oh thanks for ripping on the best game ever i only bought it for the horses westerns are popular due to horse lovers like yours truley so think before you post your crap
You’re welcome “for ripping on the best game ever.”
I will promise to always “think before” I post my crap if you promise to READ THE FUCKING POST before you leave a moronic comment.
If you had bothered to read it you would notice I gave the game a score of Good. That is the second highest score possible on this website.
The only missions I never liked were the last few accept for the final battle
I totally agree. Playing as Jack is a major fail on the part of the game designers. The final battle was all right, I suppose, but the way it ended was frustrating.
I hated the last few missions and I don’t like playing as jack because after John dies it all goes downhill because your playing as his gay and pointless son
FIRST OF ALL….however reviewed red dead redemption on this website is probally still a virgin(because all he wants to see is prostitutes getting banged on a GAME..c’mon!!) hates his life because he doesn’t have a taste in anything and will die a miserable idiot …..this game is by far the best game around and will maybe even stay the best 99 persent of people who played this game LOVES it and if games could win oscars this game would definitely receive it……..!!!!!!!!!!!
I wish I could decipher what you are trying to say.
you say its not the game that’s faulty but rather the story and the way u play thru it. I’ve never played a game where u die as the father and then get to play on as the son, regardless of ur feelings about jack as a character u cant let something so epic be lost on you. also prior to becoming jack u only have to complete like 6 rancher missions hardly a tiresome task for someone whos just probably dumped atleast 15 hrs. into the most awesome cowboy experience ever. and not being able to shag pro’s in the early 1900′s is no curse
OK, here’s the thing. I liked Red Dead Redemption. You can see that where I gave it a score of “Good” at the end of the review. This blog is meant to be sarcastic/satirical. You are taking it way too seriously. I usually find something that annoyed me, and write a big post around that one thing. Just read any of the other reviews on the site, and you’ll get the picture.
regardless of your opinion you still shouldn’t either a been able to a. give it an objective opinion or b. given a spoiler alert what fun would someone have playing the game regardless of how they feel about it when not only do you say how the game ends but you also tell how the epilogue ends is wellregardless of how you felt you still could have kept from telling every single mundane detail of how the game goes. wanting to be a badass is your perspective of a Western not everybody views it that way some people just want to do write and be noble and if you don’t like it thats your own opinion and it doesn’t take away from the game. ultimately Rockstar didnt cater to ur particular view point and u have something to say on the matter as if ur any authority on the wild west or people’s perception of it.
1.) Do you watch Western films? How many of them focus on “badass” stuff and how many focus on farming?
2.) Punctuation can be your friend.
Man I fully understand where youre coming for with this review. Just RDR and havent felt this let down from a game in ages. I guess the whole open world and have your own experience was a complete illusion. It real just came to a fairly uninteresting story with a bunch of mondane tasks and stupid mini games to amuse you momentarily which got old very fast.
Yeah, that’s pretty much it. Great game, fun open world experience, which is completely ruined by a stupid ending. Sorry to hear you were let down like I was. But go on and play the Undead Nightmare version of the game, it’s really cool.
Rockstar tends to forget sometimes that they make video games and not movies. Therefore while character development and story are both great, gameplay is the first and foremost important part of the game. And playing ‘Farm Simulator 2000′ just isn’t fun. Neither is swapping out your character for some random guy for post-game free roam.
But the rest of the game is fun, for the most part. It just annoys me to hear people refer to this as one of the “greatest video game endings of all time”. Have you guys ever watched a western? It was pretty generic and cliche as far as western endings go and a bucket of bad ideas as far as video game endings are concerned.
Thanks for the comment, Sapple. Farm Simulator 2000 nearly ruins the game. Fortunately, yes, just about everything that came before was totally awesome.
Bitch please kidding
Not being able to have sex with prostitutes is nothing to complain about. it’s a 15 second animation where the camera shakes outside of some window, the fact that you will go to such lengths to bitch and moan about it is purile as is the rest of your long winded cynical gripe.
Sadly, parody is lost on you.
I would just like to say that I am incredibly happy that I still subscribe to the comments on this post. That is all.
Yes, it’s been a constant source of entertainment.
I completely agree, this game sucks like a buck tooth prostitute, I still havnt completed it because it’s just a tedious chore travelling. from one town to another let alone actually doing any missions, you can’t build a camp here your too close to a road “grrrrrr..!!” why can’t I just effin fast travel simply??? Then there ate yhe show downs where you can’t just aim pick your shots and fire, no you have to have some weird red v blue gauge race which I have no idea if I’m gonna win or lose dispute having aimed placed my shots and frantically pulling the trigger to see nothing happen until my enemy guns me down time and again, so I get pissed off with it, put it back in it’s box for another couple of months then think ooh I should finish red dead then I play for 30 mins and realise why I hate this game, it’s slow, boring, laboursome and tedious, how rockstar can make a great sandbox like GTA and to some degree L.A noire and completely drop a bollock with red is proper baffling but in my opinion they did. I will never finish this game and an unfinished game is a game that clearly sucks.
You are definitely not a fan of this game!
Hey RETARD…..you CAN fast travel, and it IS very simple and easy…what kind of drugs are you on? I’d like to know so I can avoid them.
You might want to try some Prozac. It will help with your rage issue.
The “boring” stuff and the ending didn’t bother me, however having to play the post-game free roam as Jack held no appeal to me all. In open world games I usually spend a lot of time exploring and doing side-missions after the story is finished, but my desire to spend any more time playing as Jack is non-existent. Even though I realise it wouldn’t make logical sense, I wish there was some way to go back to playing as John. Undead Nightmare is cool and all but I enjoyed riding around in the “normal” world a lot more.
I think you are right. If you could play as John again, the ending would have been more palatable.
LOL…”And here’s a list of stuff I don’t want to do:
•Herd cattle.
•Catch horses.
•Take care of a farm/ranch.
•Deliver corn.
•Hang out with an annoying kid.
•Scare away crows.”
Those are very minor, very brief things added to the game to give flavor and add something a little different. All epic games/RPGs (all games period with few exceptions) do this. The vast majority of players enjoyed these things.
“Watch boring cutscenes of talking”….Skip past them…..DURR. Do you have to be told to wipe your butt as well? I’d hate to see your underwear.
The other things that you DO want in the game ARE in the game with the exceptions robbing trains and screwing prostitutes.
I do agree that it sucked major balls when John died though, I was not a happy camper when I realized I would have to play as Jack from now on
At least we agree on the ending. And you can’t see my underwear, because I like to freeball it.
Just found your review after a random Google of things I hated about RDR. I agree on so many points, but I wanted to add that even if they had lessened the amount of herding, it still would have sucked because the way herding works in the game is so finicky, it took too long for such a pointless side mission. And my GOD do I hate jacks voice! Playing as jack would have been at least bearable if he had a gruffer and more manly voice, but no, we got Terry Jones from life of Brian meets screech from saved by the southern fucking bell! I can live without banging prosti’s but at least let us become BAD, not “wanted but overall a nice guy” that strangers still trust, if our moral compass got too wicked it should have let us try and recruit strangers to help us rob trains/banks and once they helped us let us decide whether to kill them and take their share or let them live to acquire higher percentages of loot but run the risk of them becoming mutinous.. just sucks seeing a game with such potential be dragged down by poor planning/writing
Hahaha, hilarious points! Yeah, the herding was just miserably. I couldn’t stand it at all. Thanks for dropping by, and I’m glad you are one of the few who agree with me.
I just bought the game of the year edition and skipped playing the normal game to play the undead nightmare version on disk 2. Sounds like a definitely made the right choice. This game rocks fighting zombies!
Yeah, Undead Nightmare is definitely really cool. I hope you enjoy it. If you do, I’m sure you’ll enjoy the regular game just as much.
There is a huge problem with this review. IT DOESN’T MENTION HUNTING FUCKING BEAVERS.
Oh, I just won the revolutionary war, now I can find beavers while random grizzly bears maul me from my Lind side.
Then after I finally have the beaver skins, I get to watch a guy fall off a cliff, and I can’t even loot his camp and body.
Bullshit.
You must be thinking of another game. But I laughed pretty hard at your comment, anyway.
sorry…. i posted the comment from my phone. which sucks. let me clarify:
Finding 5 beaver pelts to complete the flying moron story was nearly impossible for me. I figured I had to beat some part of the story to get across the bridges at the “thieves” area. So i did. (which is helping the rebels win the kinda revolutionary war)… so then i cross the bridge, go up to the mountains where there are trees and water (what beavers love) AND THERE ARE NO BEAVERS.
when there ARE beavers…. they disappear after you shoot them.. or then five apear, AND SO DOES A MOUNTAIN LION THAT MAULS YOU.
finally i get my beaver pelts…. travel back to meheeko for the abysmal flying moron story line… then return the the plains area….
AND NOW THERE ARE BEAVERS EVERY FUCKING WHERE…….
finished the game this morning. bad ending. can’t agree more with your review.
Red Dead “breaking in a horse” Redemption
Oh OK, gotcha. I never finished that side mission. I hate those kinds of things where you have to go around collecting shit. I’m also glad you agree on the ending. Based on the comments above, it clearly seems to go 50-50.
I might be late to the party but you sir are a complete and sensless idiot, if all you wan’t to do is kill people like a badass then go play COD you whiny bitch.
Thanks!
I think we all know who the real whiney bitch is here.
Your trying to play a game full of story and immersion but you don’t want/like story or being immersed. Red Dead Redemption is a fantastic game you just choose your games poorly. If all you want to do is be an outlaw and kill people then playing a game with redemption is probably the stupidest thing you could do. So well done for wasting all that time.
Clearly, you didn’t waste your time reading the entire post.