Andy Laub

“Are you gonna get Red Dead Redemption?” they said. I said I didn’t know; I knew the game was a reboot of sorts for the franchise, but having never played the original (Red Dead Revolver) that didn’t mean too much to me. There was a lot of talk about how this new installment in the series would be taking a lot of cues from Grand Theft Auto 4 (the Best Game Ever™) to the point where the proper title was eventually replaced with Grand Theft Auto But With Horses for the sake of convenience.

And that was really my hangup; I wasn’t sure if I could love a GTA game sans the A. I enjoy those types of games because even after the game proper is long since finished, it’s fun for me to drive around the city and just play. I couldn’t picture doing that on a horse (or really any other means of transportation). Honestly, the earlier the game’s setting, the less interesting I find the driving experience. The Godfather or The Sabotuer are both good examples of games that are just not modern enough to make the driving element engaging to me.

So I didn’t buy Red Dead Redemption. My recent changes in both mindset (don’t buy every game) and cashflow (inconsistent) have prevented that, so far. However, when I got a “we miss you; free rental!” call from the local video store (yeah, we have those!), I knew what I had to do. Three days should be enough time to get to know a game, right?

I think it was somewhere around hour ten when the truth really hit me. This isn’t just Grand Theft Auto But With Horses; this is a real, bona fide Grand Theft Auto game that just happens to be set in a world before the automobile was ubiquitous. Everything else – the mission structure, the tone, the general story, the gameplay, the feeling – fits seamlessly into the GTA framework (I sincerely hope to come across at least one ancestor of a current GTA character), and when you start to think of this game as an endeavor on the same level with such a behemoth it becomes that much more impressive.

Suffice it to say, Red Dead Redemption is a very good game that I had a lot of fun with in my limited exposure to it. There are a few nitpicks, the biggest being that it’s difficult to tell friends from enemies which wreaks havoc on your reputation; the auto aim isn’t particularly picky about who it points your barrel at and then suddenly you’re WANTED and all hell breaks loose. I still can’t figure out the fast travel system, if there even is one. Something about setting up camp and then jumping from there to a previous settlement, which I never experienced.

In typical Rockstar fashion, though, the pros far outweigh the cons. Visuals and design are solid, and audio continues to be a strong point just as it has in the GTA series. With no radio the music instead is sparse and appropriately Western, mellow when appropriate but becoming more frantic during shootouts and other dramatic sequences. Voice acting is superb, especially in the case of main protagonist John Marston. He reminds me very much of Timothy Olyphant’s character in FX’s Justified.

Unsurprisingly, gameplay is nearly identical to Grand Theft Auto IV, with a few notable exceptions. The new(?) DeadEye system (which effectively lets you slow time to pick off a number of targets) is an absolute joy to use and may stand out as the defining mechanic of RDR combat versus GTA combat; I don’t foresee it working in the context of a more modern setting but it’s very appropriate here.

Most exciting though, is that we’re finally seeing a game from Rockstar with no health meters! RDR has gone the way of many modern shooters in that you still have a finite amount of health, but as your condition becomes more critical the screen turns red. If you can find cover, the reverse happens after a few moments. It makes for a much less stressful experience and unlike DeadEye, I hope this propagates to all future GTA games.

In short, Red Dead Redemption is both a great game by itself and, if you’d like, a worthy entry in the Grand Theft Auto franchise. Three days was enough to get to scratch the surface but I definitely look forward to spending more time together in the future.

I took a brief hiatus from my Forza 3 marathon on Thursday to pay a final visit to Liberty City with The Ballad of Gay Tony, Rockstar’s latest (and likely last) installment of downloadable content for Grand Theft Auto IV. Given my fondness for all things GTA, it shouldn’t come as much of a shock that I was watching the credits roll by lunchtime Saturday.

Rockstar’s approach to TBoGT doesn’t differ much from the previous installment – once again you’re put in the shoes of what was previously only a supporting character. As I said before, the experience you enjoy the most really depends on which character and lifestyle you are most comfortable with. In this case, that character is Luis Lopez, ex-con turned bodyguard of/business partner to nightclub impresario “Gay” Tony Prince (who bears a remarkable resemblance to Robert Downey Jr’s Tony Stark).

As a result, the game is centered around Algonquin, Liberty City’s equivalent to Manhattan, and the high-roller atmosphere extends to fast cars, great new music, and a slew of new over-the-top missions. Of course it’s not all fun and games, but I’ll just leave it at that with regards to plot. You’ll run across plenty of characters that you’ve been previously introduced to, including one loose end from the core game that I was glad to see tied.

I have to say, I really liked Luis as a protagonist – while he kept getting thrust into situations that were less than ideal, I never felt that things were completely out of control like I did with Niko or Johnny. One constant across all GTA games is that you can continue to experience the city even after completing the missions. You may find it telling that when presented with that option in TLaD I opted instead to return to the original game. I don’t expect that to be the case this time around.

I remember the first time I played a Super Nintendo. The game was Super Mario World (was there any other?), and it was a demo machine set up in the local Kmart. During that time, I always relished shopping trips, as I knew that if I was lucky nobody else would be playing and I could spend a few minutes with my favorite plumber.

Imagine then, going back home, and trying to enjoy Super Mario Bros on the original NES. It wasn’t bad by any means – it just wasn’t “special” anymore. Mario World boasted multi-tiered backgrounds and sprites bigger than anything I’d seen before – remember the giant Bullet Bills? It had amazing new environments! It had Yoshi!

What’s interesting, then, is that no 2D platformer came along after Super Mario World that really made it look outdated and stale. The next huge Mario game was Super Mario 64 – and while it’s notable for the fact that it brought a third dimension to the Mushroom Kingdom, comparing it to any Mario game that came before it is basically apples and oranges.

An eternal plus for Mario is that the game was never meant to be photorealistic; so even today the NES and SNES titles manage to keep some freshness. The original SMB is a little flat, sure; but Mario 3 will always be an exceptional game. While the graphics in this day and age could easily be surpassed by my phone, it doesn’t matter, because they were what they were. They were, and always will be, classics.

Where am I going with this?

I just finally got around to playing Indigo Prophecy. It’s not a new title, having seen release on the PS2 and Xbox a few years ago. My curiosity was piqued during a discussion about it last year, and recently reinvigorated by the news on the developer’s follow-up title Heavy Rain.

My point here doesn’t require me to go into too much depth regarding the plot of Indigo Prophecy, so suffice it to say that it was in their best interest to make things look as realistic as they could. That is an admirable and common goal among a good portion of games nowadays. And I suspect had I played the game 3 or 4 years ago when it came out, I would’ve found it perfectly acceptable.

However, I have been playing games almost exclusively on the Xbox 360 for nearly three years now; games that have truly raised the bar in terms of what video games should be. It’s not really a stretch to say that these games have spoiled me with their bright colors and slick graphics – that’s kind of the point.

So from the minute I put in Indigo Prophecy, the deck was stacked against it. It probably didn’t help that I had just finished Prince of Persia, one of the most beautiful games available on the current crop of consoles, the night before. Everything about Indigo Prophecy was blocky, muted, flat… stale.

The thing is, I’m not convinced that these modern 3D games can ever be enjoyed the same way classic 2D games can. Why would I want to play the original Gran Turismo when I know that Gran Turismo 5 is even closer to the game Polyphony Digital really wants to make? I think that when the paradigm of game design shifted away from traditional 2D, sprite-based platforming games towards 3D polygonal mishmash, all of the 2D games that were great at that time (Mario, Metroid, Zelda) were immortalized.

I don’t think we’ll see that sort of phenomenon again for awhile, what with the massive leaps in technology happening so frequently. Look at Grand Theft Auto IV, versus Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, versus Grand Theft Auto III. You’d expect the differences between this and the previous generation to be pronounced, but even the two games on the same console are worlds apart after only 4 years.

This is going to end in one of two scenarios:

1. Games will continue to develop and advance, graphically, until they can’t go any further. We will have games that are truly photorealistic to the point where the only way to improve is to increase the scope of the game and continue to expand the player’s environment.
2. Console games as we know them will phase out due to some dramatic shift in technology. True, immersive 3D, I suppose. A sort of holodeck type of thing? Once this happens, it will basically render the current types of games moot, leaving the last of their kind to become legendary like some of the great SNES games have become.

So basically what I’m saying is that I like new games, and I like old games. It’s the in-between area that fails to light my fire.