Playdate: Red Dead Redemption (07/15/2016)

Mmm... That fast archive

Yeeehaaww!

woooord

I wish I didn't go back, this game just doesn't hold up, it's pretty bad today.

I posted about this in chat, but i'll share it here too. About 3 years ago Polygon did a feature on the actor who plays John Marston. It was an interesting story, and worth reading and watching the accompanying video.

Still looked pretty good to me! Of course, I haven't moved onto the next generation of consoles yet either. I really want to dust off my copy and play it again now.

Git!

As someone who skipped this last gen, I'm playing now and I'm struggling to see what all the hype is about. I have no problem stepping back in time and appreciating things, I'll even let the jankiness go because whatever, but I'm probably 2/3 through this and still waiting for the story to be interesting.

I sort of like Marston, I love the music, and the western aesthetic is done well - there's just something missing for me.

Obviously the graphics are crap and the framerate sucks, that's why I never bought into the 360 era and stuck to PC. However I don't mean that, I just mean the game itself, it does not play well at all, the story is bad, there are no likable characters... it's all round bad. I remember liking it when I played it round my friends, but no, it's crap.

That is a problem in general with Rockstar games, when you go back all their games sucks. It's not like Nintendo or something where the gameplay holds up, I think we just like Rockstar games for reasons that become dated very quickly.

"LOOKS LIKE THAT'S ALL OF 'EM!" I mean it. Nice :)

I fucking love this game

is this the vrodeo ive heard so much about

Never cared for RDR (quit not long after Mexico, like most who didn't get into it did), but there are things that I truly love about it as well. I really hope it gets the GTA5 Remastered treatment some day... I'd love to try it again with a polished up sheen. Also, imagine first-person mode in that game...

If ever a sequel happens, I just hope they subtitle it with another "R" word so it will be "RDR: R", because that's the kind of dumb, labored joke in which I trade.

Thanks so much for the fast archive , missed this live and have been following the coup in Turkey.. Time to unwind a bit :)

I don't understand the need for the picture-in-picture in these. It covers up part of the gameplay, no matter how small, and doesn't really add anything to the experience. I know what the GB duders look like and don't need to see them looking at the game I am also looking at. Separating the feeds a la Vinny Vania is a good compromise. Honestly, I am probably just soured on it because I find the whole Youtube facecam trend asinine.

One of my favorite open world games ever, great atmosphere and in my opinion it holds up quite well actually !

Eh I like the pip :)

I really liked RDR at the time, and I have a a lot of fondness for Marston and his story. I've always been wary to go back to it because I have a good feeling it hasn't aged too well. Leave the memories alone!

The audio is super low on my pc. A lot of GBeast's content has had quiet audio recently.

This game had some of the most interesting side stories. Talking to god, the cannibals, that jenny mission in the video, finding flowers for the dead lady. Gave that whole game its unique vibe and tone.

@nickhead: Hi! I actually wrote the RDR review for the old GB e-zine at the time, so maybe I can offer some insight to why it was, and still is, so beloved.

Setting: The death of the West is a great theme. Constantly you (Marston) are confronted with the changing of the times as it slowly creeps its way westward. All around you you see signs of the changing times, and how you are a relic of the past, your kind going extinct. This really goes great with Marston's character arc, really highlighted in the conclusion of his story, but also reflected as he chases down the old members of his gang - they too know they are quickly becoming outdated and no longer fit, and they are all struggling with it in their own ways, just like Marston. It's just great.

Characters: I think the writing is pretty great. This is obviously subjective, but I really enjoyed the variety of characters and the dialogue. This is a Rockstar strong point (at least to me, barring GTA's tiredness), and not a surprise to me that I find myself really engaged with the players in the narrative. I can see how characters like Seth would be off-putting, but I generally like all of them, especially the Irishman and the old Gunslinger you encounter in Mexico.

Overall Quality: Just a lot of content. The strangers stuff was a big step up over GTA IV's Strangers and Freaks, and often gave you glimpses into other stories going on in the universe. You honestly meet the Devil in a side quest who gives you a huge insight into the finality of the game, and it's just fantastic. From the variety of things to do (I don't mean the mini-games, which are mostly superfluous, but the variety of game systems working in tandem offering a sort of playground to noodle with), to focus on minutia, it's just a pleasure. The online mode gave a really exciting glimpse into what the future with GTA:O would be, and is probably the game's most significant lasting contribution to the Rockstar brand. I happen to have always been the shotguns and revolvers and bolt action rifles guy in games, so that stuff was only a pleasure for me. For what it is worth, there are a couple automatic weapons in there if this is a sticking point. It is 1911, after all, so of course Colt's most famous would make an appearance.

@nagafen: This is a bad opinion.

@Alex please play in free aim mode man, makes the game so much better

I picked up the PS3 version a few years after release and it's always been on my list of games to play. The few times I tried to play it though, I think the controls felt pretty bad and turned me off after a few hours. Am I remembering that right? I really wish they'd release a PC port, but that seems unlikely. They set the bar pretty high with GTA V's PC version so a remastered RDR would be a ton of work.

Never got a chance to play this.. looking forward to the continuation!

This video is extremely quiet. I've verified that I have the video player's volume maxed, and other giant bomb videos are nowhere near as quiet.

Woof! Good to see those patented Rockstar janky pathfinding issues are still alive and well!

I also played it not too long after it came out, sometime in 2011 or 2012, and I didn't think much of it then, either. I've tried and tried to get into it but it's boring. There are things I really appreciate about it, most of them having to do with overall presentation, but I just found the actual meat of the game empty and and uninteresting, most of the time.

Woah in 20 minutes, I was reminded why I hated this game. The entire Elixir part is what the entire game is like. "You're done! Nope!" and repeat that a few times every mission.

I've always liked the VA work in this game. They cared; it's not just Gruff Faux Passion From A Cinemax TV Movie acting you get from alot of AAA games. R* knew their shit.

I never played this game last gen for some reason. I think I'll download it on xbox one and try it out.

That's true of most Rockstar games, though.

The gunplay is exceptional in this game, as well as its wonderful and colorful characters, and its setting being almost picturesque. The game comes together very cohesively after the ranching missions. The whole fun of wandering the countryside. It's enjoyable.

I can understand the frustrations in the earlygame. Especially with the end result of the Fort Mercer arc. I'm pretty sure you're just meant to feel like everyone's dicking you around, because they are, really. Everyone has an agenda and is just manipulating you to their ends, and just barely keeping their end of the bargain. I'm tired writing this and it certainly doesn't feel like a cohesive argument, but I really do think this game shines in spite of its faults. All the characters come off as believable, and with the exception of a few select people, all come to be fleshed out and break free of the trope they represent.

It's an incredible world to get lost in.

I've played a ton of this game and Alex has had a much jankier time with this game in an hour or so than I have in dozens.

Alex. Say 'uhhhh' again.

Don't know if someone else has already pointed this out, but one of the interesting things about John Marston's voice actor/mocap actor is that, as far as I know, this was his first and only acting gig. I remember reading a piece on him (from GI, I think?) and this was totally not something he did, but he decided to do the audition for it. Very impressive work from a guy who didn't train!

Good lord this sequel needs to come out already. Incredible game. Holds up in every way.

Austin Walker no longer with us. Time for New Austin.

Man, I love this game. You guys should bring it back for another playdate once Alex gets further in.

@dan_citi: I agree. I believe that the backwards compatibility has something to do with this because the game on x360 has WAY less jankiness than this did.

If a sequel ever happens, they'll almost undoubtedly use another word beginning with R, though not as a subtitle, since Red Dead Redemption is a sequel to Red Dead Revolver.

(But man, I should play this game again. I never got far beyond the move to Mexico, which is more a result of my extreme inability to finish games than my opinions of this one).

Oh man, this looked just as good as I remember. God damn, like Vinny said this really makes me want to play it again but I just dont have the required time to do so :(

@dan_citi: @noverech: Certainly not back compat because the game actually runs better they way. This is exactly how janky the game always was. It was always notoriously fucked up. Google about the bugs in this game and fall down a million hour rabbit hole.

@nagafen: man I couldn't disagree more. I think it holds up fantastically

Man this game is bland to look at. I tried so hard to like this game when it came out and I just couldn't. It's so boring.

This game along with Shadow of Mordor are the two games that will forever be shrouded in mystery to me of why people think it's great. The gameplay is just so bad, the world looks uninteresting and bland and it just drags on being boring foreeeeeever. I tried to play this game no less than three times. I quit after 2, 4 and 9 hours respectively. There was literally nothing in any of those hours that was fun to play.

If anything, I don't even understand how they make a sequel to something and have the game play noticeably worse than it did in the original, and yet have everyone praising it.

Don't worry, I know everyone loves this game. I realize I'm one of the few that thinks it's actually terrible.

@nickhead Join the club. I played it when it came out and legitimately thought it was April 1st when I saw everyone's reaction to it. It was bad when it came out, it was bad a couple years later and it's bad now. Every single thing it tries to do, is executed on poorly. The horses don't ride well, the guns don't shoot well, the story is uninteresting, the characters are idiotic and unlikable, everything looks bland... there was never anything here.

This game is fantastic, time to play it again i guess!

Dang this game was great.

Really enjoyed this.

I remember this game being sort of like the worst of the Assassin's Creed games. Beautifully realized world that's fun to travel around in, but bad mission design, bad combat system, bad controls, bad game design all around. But big complex cities packed with people, architectural wonders and multi-story buildings to climb and jump between are more interesting environments than a big flat wasteland with a few tiny half-empty towns, and blending into crowds, fighting with a large variety of melee weapons and jumping down on dudes from rooftops with dual hidden wrist blades is more fun than doing nothing but shoot guys with some of the worst third-person shooting controls of the last generation.

Everyone is entitled to their own opinion of course but gameplay design and combat were pretty great in my opinion. Not sure what made you think it was the worst shooting in the whole generation but everyone was pretty tight and it's a universal fact that slow motion is always cool. The only nitpick I had about gameplay was the way you had to keep hammering down on A for the horse to gallop, which got a little tiring.

@humanity: The combat scenarios all involved either a) shooting people in open areas without cover, which there is nothing interesting about unless it involves things like spacing, crowd control, high-speed dodging, precision aiming to set up powerful follow-up attacks etc. -- the kind of things you'll find in varying degrees in games like Resident Evil 4-6, the Dead Space series, Vanquish etc. and absolutely none of which is in RDR, where instead you just have dumb simplistic shooting with no nuance whatsoever -- or b) shooting people in areas with cover. Now, one of the most important parts of the combat in a game with a cover system is the level design (unless it's something like Vanquish where there's so much else going on that it would've been a great game even without any cover system at all), and in RDR the level design barely even exists. I'm not talking about random encounters in the wilderness where obviously it's not going to be a complex interesting environment, I'm talking about the areas designed specifically for combat scenarios in story missions. It's like no thought whatsoever went into making any of those areas interesting to navigate and position yourself in. Not only do you not need to think about tactical positioning and repositioning given how trivial the encounters are, you couldn't even if you wanted to because the environments don't allow room for it.

It's just poor design all around.

Went and dug out my disk after watching this. Time to play it again, it's still just about my favorite game ever made.