I am really enjoying RDR. Wasn't the biggest fan of GTA4 but I like this a lot more. I think the comparison is a bit silly really as they are two different genres. When I first played it I found it to be closer to Fallout 3 than anything else down to the atmosphere and scenery. The acting is definitely the best in a game so far. Uncharted 2 comes close in terms of acting but this game just has so many characters. The dialogue is a lot longer and better developed than in GTA but I guess they have made a real effort to make it a wild western life simulator as well. There are some special things that you can do like ride a mine cart whilst shooting mothers in the face that you don't really get in the drive-here-shoot-this nature of the other game.

One of the things that impressed me is that the PS3 version isn't that bad at all, graphically. The PS3 version of GTA4 was rendered in 480p and upscaled to the monitor which was pretty dreadful. Apparently Episodes from Liberty City has the same treatment as RDR and runs closer to 720p so I might get that.

Stop posting ed youre banned.

My exams are over now you scurvy cur!

That is a fair point though, I would love my old avatar back

Right now on RDR Im getting in duels to incense my fame by cheating on card games and getting caught.

Also won a game of Texas hold em Thanks to cheating I love this uniform.

right now on RDR after running around exploring shit I'm back at the ranch and I'm HERDING CATTLE INTO A PASTURE ... still waiting for this to get good (???)

If you didn't like GTA4 and bought this, you probably made a pretty big mistake.

Untrue. I found GTA4 VERY boring and unlikable. (why on earth a gaming company would make the main character the least likable (sp?) douchebag on earth is beyond me, and CELL PHONE RING every 2 seconds ugh), but I am really, really enjoying Red Dead Redemption.

i'm just thinking now, and maybe it's cos it's been a while since i played it but i'm thinking maybe final fantasy 13 wasn't even that bad. it was overblown and you wouldn't tolerate it's style of storytelling anywhere else except this game but even though the plot was terrible, weren't the characters actually not so bad?

i'm just thinking now, and maybe it's cos it's been a while since i played it but i'm thinking maybe final fantasy 13 wasn't even that bad. it was overblown and you wouldn't tolerate it's style of storytelling anywhere else except this game but even though the plot was terrible, weren't the characters actually not so bad?

don't get it twisted, that game was a stinker and the story/characters were horrible. Writing and stories in videogames are awful and almost insulting in the way that they have to pander to the absolute lowest common denominator in order to keep their appeal broad enough to make back their enormous production costs. What is there to like about characters who deliver shitty dialogue and are involved in a shitty plot? IMO you can't pull undigested kernels of corn off a turd and pretend its "the good part", it all stinks and came out of an asshole.

i'm just thinking now, and maybe it's cos it's been a while since i played it but i'm thinking maybe final fantasy 13 wasn't even that bad. it was overblown and you wouldn't tolerate it's style of storytelling anywhere else except this game but even though the plot was terrible, weren't the characters actually not so bad?

yeah, they aren't really that bad. most games don't really put a lot of effort into giving the characters real personal conflicts to overcome, but this game actually did a fair job of that at points. it's the sort of thing where if they had actually done a lot more of that and made it a significantly larger part of the game, it may have actually been a fairly good game story. i think that's a large part of why palumpolum is such a good section. the game stops really being about the vapid CIE story that nobody gives a shit about and it becomes just about the characters and all the shit they're going through, which is kinda surprisingly sincere for a game like this.

it also helps that there is internal justification for why all the characters are kinda annoying. like snow is incredibly fucking obnoxious half the time, but i can kinda see how an otherwise decent person might end up so warped from this circumstance that they feel the need to march around the world going I'M THE HERO just as this enormous defense mechanism. in that case it isn't really just empty machismo, but this thing that's kinda explained and annoys everyone else in the game as well. i generally appreciate shit like this. if a character is going to behave a certain way, i think it goes a long way in the believability and tolerability to actually explain why this is the case. really would have liked to see snow get SHIT ON a lot more though(preferably LITERALLY[as ][/as])

anyway, i think the biggest example of square's lack of commitment to this is the sazh/vanille relationship. that could have really been a whole lot more interesting if square was willing to take it further(or committed to telling a worthwhile story). it was a really outstanding storyline in the making, where these two people who become unusually close friends get torn apart when it's revealed that one totally fucked up the other's life. there's a ton you can do with something like that, doubly so considering it involved sazh's kid. as it turned out, sazh [somehow] didn't really care that vanille ruined his life and that whole conflict is pretty much just halted in a five minute span, rather than making it an important part of the story. the relationship between any of those three characters could legitimately have taken up an entire cd, perhaps the rest of the game, if any of them weren't so goddamn innocuous. giving the most interesting conflict to the characters most incapable of actually having a conflict is the stupidest fucking thing you can do when telling a story. despite not really being a more interesting situation, the relationship between hope and snow is actually rather good at times because hope spent most of the game incapable of just shrugging it off. in general, conflicts just don't work when the characters are written to be generally unphased by life-changing events. square never got that memo.

i really think the game's downfall is that there isn't more of this character development, and what little there is completely tails off after a while. it's like the writers thought the actual personal conflicts were as interesting as all that FOCUS bullshit, or that the focus idea somehow counted as a personal conflict, but that really isn't the case at all. i think it's easy to compare something like this to final fantasy 7, which did a pretty good job of creating some interesting character conflicts and making them enormous parts of the narrative all throughout the game, even to the point where the primary story becomes secondary most of the time. it's no surprise that people universally give more of a shit about final fantasy 7's characters, despite really having pretty much the identical sort of shallow main characters. i don't even think the linearity ruined the game as much as this did, since that degree of linearity is pretty much par for the course for games of this nature anyway. either you can stomach that about jrpgs, or you'll just have minimal tolerance for the genre. it usually comes down to how interesting the story is and how much you feel like the story's action is a part of the gameplay.


i feel a little silly making LONG POST AFTER LONG POST about this shitty game, but i find this game's failures really interesting. i've never played a game that was so AWFUL but really only missed being pretty good by a few critical story mistakes and terrible choices. i think if they hadn't opted for that nauseatingly friendly vibe the story has, and went for something a lot more edgy and volatile, a lot more people would be rallying behind this game. the characters were really set up to do that, moreso than any game i've played that elected against it, but they blew quite a few perfectly good chances at making the story good.

Playing Little King's Story, Sakura Wars: So Long My Love, Super Street Fighter 4, Marvel Vs. Capcom 2, and Dead Rising.