BLG 2010 – Part 4

It may come as a surprise, but we absolutely love games here at Citizen Game. Old games, bad games, big games, whatever. We love to play them and we love to talk about them. Right now everyone else is trying to sort out and definitively list the “best” games of the year, to compile them into Top Ten’s and Best Of’s. We don’t do that because we don’t really care which game was best this year. We only remember the games we love and they’re the ones we really care about. So, to that end, Citizen Game will be presenting its Best Loved Games of 2010 in a series in the run up to Christmas, with staffers taking a moment to reflect on what made their favourite games of the year so special to them. We encourage you to do the same in the comments.

This is Part 3, where Mark D, Barry and Danny extol the virtues (or should that be sins?) of Red Dead Redemption. (You can find Part 3 here.)

Mark D:

GTA IV in the Wild West is a description used often when talking about Red Dead Redemption but it is an accurate one. Its slower pace doesn’t give much leeway should you want to cause some mayhem and this put a lot of people off of the game, but they really missed out. I had so much fun just exploring the world; travelling on horseback between the different towns, taking on quests in the wilderness as well as hunting down bears in the snowy northern mountains with a knife. As amazing as the story is and how well the ending is put together I had the most fun in the multiplayer, an area of games that I usually avoid. A buddy and I teamed up and roamed the landscape together, never causing trouble with other players they picked a fight first (which happened all too often). Having other people start fights while we’re doing missions would normally irritate me to no end, but there were two of us and we’d spent a LOT of time practicing with throwing knives. Once we’d got the hang of the range of the things we were one-hit killing machines and nobody else would use them because, well, who’d bring a knife to a gun fight? Eventually other players just started ganging up on us. We fought, we died, we fought some more and I had the best fun in any multiplayer game that I’ve had in 2010.

Barry:

“You know you’re gonna die, right?” This is why I love Red Dead Redemption. Player character John Marston is as cool a gunslinger as they come, but he’s not above taunting his enemies in a shootout in such a fatalistic manner. Mechanically, such fights aren’t even that interesting or challenging, but it’s incidental characterization like that that really sells RDR in spite of its faults.

And the game’s greatest strength is its character (as opposed to characters). You can see it in the dust and the scrub of New Austin, in the worn faces of the people you fight, befriend and rescue. Fictional though it may be, it’s no less convincing as a genuine historical Frontier. The game looks and feels every inch like a classic Western, the locations and the people that populate them often seemingly the very definition of the archetypes we associate with the genre. None more so than Marston himself; the mysterious rogue with a troubled past that’s come back to haunt him, fighting for his own brand of justice in a cause greater than himself. Tough as cowhide, with a voice that sounds as old and as weather beaten as the landscape around him, he’s  a hero in the style of Eastwood’s Man With No Name. And I may be a little bit in love with him.

John Fucking Marston. With the game’s awesome soundtrack ringing in my ears, I’d follow him into Hell and back.

Danny:

This was the game my Dad would have loved to play. Like so many others, he loved a good Western, and RDR is a bloody good Western. I think that’s the same reason it’s such tough going. The story is long and slow and, like any good Rockstar game, revolves around how the protagonist deals with the cruel world around him. It can be boring at times, but I loved that. What’s more boring than riding across the desert, on your own? If anything, down time like this made the final act of the game even more enjoyable – the comfort of being home, spending time with your family before crashing through one of the best endings of the year. What’s a Western without an explosive ending eh?