fully automated gambling is a mainstay of digital entertainment, but whenever its presence is established in other titles i never once felt the need to participate. too much time, too little reward. i imagine most players feel the same given the achievement stats for new vegas, a title where hustling on the strip is the game’s core motif. and yet in spite of my disposition, i found myself spending an inordinate amount of time in red dead redemption II playing poker. when i wasn’t playing poker, i’d be hitting blackjack, and if i wasn’t betting against the dealer i’d be making my bones in dominoes. on paper, none of this served any real practical purpose. unlike the brisk pleasures of most computerized gambling, a round of poker in RDR2 takes much, much more time – your opponents need to shuffle the deck, lay out the cards, or place their chips on a bet. sometimes their decisions won’t be near instantaneous, and in all cases, the victor will smugly reap the spoils of their bet, dragging their hoard of chips inwards. as if the protracted length of gambling wasn’t enough, RDR2 axes the high-stakes poker variant from the original game, so even in the best-case scenario – a six player poker match, no player leaves early, and you rob everyone of their chips – you can only stand to net $25 dollars in profit. a handsome sum in 1899, but a pittance in contrast to RDR2’s other revenue streams, especially when you factor in the time investment. it’s all too likely you’ll end up losing money if you gamble poorly. why bother?

i still gambled a lot though. no matter the inconvenience of the supposed realism on offer, i wanted to fleece people. i wanted to stop and think about my decisions, and i wanted to withstand droughts of bad luck only to tap in when fortune was turning in my favour. and i guess uncle’s smug aura at camp made me want to rip him off all the more. the defining trait which enables this engagement is also RDR2’s greatest strength: the level of verisimilitude it aspires to. the slowing-down-of-affairs intrinsic to RDR2 is somewhat uncharacteristic of rockstar, but they’ve thrown their immense weight behind a kind of granularity not often observed even in comparable massive AAA productions. i honestly think it saved the game for me. i had to force myself through gritted teeth to finish the first red dead and GTA IV, and i’ll never finish GTA V at this rate, but conversely for close to three weeks straight i lost myself in rockstar’s portrait of the old, dying west, however illusory it was.

GTA is very much predicated on extreme player agency in real-world facsimile. the dedication the team committed to this vision creates this inherent friction where in the absence of real limitation, the world rarely feels alive but feels more akin to a little diorama or a quite literal playspace. the devil is always in the details with these titles, but i find the fetishism for the microscopic to be little more than framing at best and rote at worst. maybe if you walk the streets of san andreas in GTA V and get lost in a suburb, quietly observing the mundane (they need an umarell minigame in these games), a lived-in feeling really does exist, but this does not feel like genuine intent so much as it feels like supporting the foundation of american pantomime.

while the quotidian is nothing more than a byproduct in GTA, its function in RDR2 is the games essence. new to the series are various impositions which carefully stitch together simulation elements, asking for a stronger degree of investment from the player than past rockstar entries, both in a literal and abstracted sense. hunger and stamina have to be continually managed for both the player and their steed, money is harder to come by than prior rockstar games, and every activity (hunting, fishing, crafting, cooking, gambling, weapons maintenance, chores + camp support, horse grooming, even just simple travel given that fast travel isn’t immediately present) represents an innate time investment – gone is the sense of casual gratification, tightened ever so slightly more for the sake of a more cohesive world. naturally i’d be remiss to not point out they’re intrusive to only the mildest of degrees - it’s certainly the ‘fastest’ game ive ever played with a simulation bent - and rockstar’s aim here isn’t necessarily to rock the boat but instead one of vanity, to impress with their technological prowess and visual panache.

i understand that rockstar titles are now once-in-a-generation events subject to whatever epoch of games discourse they are releasing in but it is with great amusement that i look back to two strands of dominant conversation at the time of the game’s release: that it is too realistic for its own good, and that its mission design is archaic. both are conversational topics that, at least from my perspective, miss the forest for the trees with critical rdr2 discussion, and at least partially feel like people taking rockstar to task for GTA IV & V’s design after forgetting to do so the first time. firstly, everything addressed as cumbersome in rdr2 is polished to a mirror sheen; whatever truth might be found regarding rockstars digital fetishism impacting personal enjoyment loses a bit of edge when one considers that the inconveniences imposed on the player are essentially operating at a bare minimum. for every measure of sternness here there is a comical remedy. players might be expected to have attire fitting for the climate zone they travel in lest they suffer core drainage, but the reality is that preparation is easy, conducted through lenient menu selection, and at no point is the player strictly via the main narrative made to trudge through the underutilized snowy regions. even a snowy mission in the epilogue automatically equips you with a warm coat, negating the need for foresight. temperature penalties are easily negated for lengthy periods of time if you consume meals that fortify your cores. you don’t even really, honestly have to eat. the penalties associated with the ‘underweight’ class don’t obstruct players very much and individuals can forego the core system entirely just to rely on health cures and tonics alike, meaning it’s a survival/simulation system carefully planned out so certain kinds of players don’t actually have to engage with the systems at all. the most egregious offender for the audience, then, is time investment, for which my rebuttal is nothing so eloquent: just that it’s barely a significant one. there’s something genuinely fascinating about this undercurrent of somewhat strained response to an AAA production making the slightest of efforts to cultivate a stricter set of systems for immersion only to be met with the claim that it goes against the basic appeal of games, something which i at least find consistently prescriptive, contradictory, and totally self-interested. that breath of the wilds approach to open world design predates this is probably at least somewhat contributory - after all its priorities are to filter reality and freedom through more sharply accented and cohesive game design, far from the totalizing rigidity of rockstars work – but it’s not a case of one needing to mimic the other when it’s simpler to state that the contrasting titles just have different priorities. all this is to say that RDR2 is really missing something without some kind of hardcore mode, which would have probably increased my personal enjoyment exponentially and led to a tighter game.

secondly, the complaints regarding mission design are reductive and downplay a much, much broader foundational problem. there are a lot more missions that i actually liked compared to the usual rockstar fare this time, in part because character dialogue is mostly serviceable and not grating, but also because several of them are content to serve characterization or to convey some kind of tailored experience. all the best missions bring the combat to a halt rather than a crescendo. serve on a mission alongside hosea, for instance, and the odds are unlikely you’ll end up drawing your revolver. likewise certain missions are focused entirely on camaraderie, narrative, or some other kind of unique quality. this works really well in spite of the game’s tendency to anchor the proceedings to the mechanically dull yet market-proven gunslinging. it’s unfortunate to center so much of this game around combat when the shooting rarely, if ever, registers as more than serviceable; pulling the trigger feels great, but its repetition, lack of intimate level or encounter design, and oddly weighted aiming reticule underscore a game in need of some kind of revision. strangely enough there are many options for mixing melee approaches and gunslinging in a manner that feels close to appealing but is never leaned on because it’s just not efficient, paired nicely with level design, or geared towards survivability. likewise, the scores of ammunition types and combative crafting options feels redundant in the face of the simplicity of the ol’ reliable revolver and repeater, the lack of genuine ammunition limitation (you’re always able to stock more ammo than you could ever reasonably need) and every enemy’s total vulnerability to precise aim.

but the fact that there are genuinely enjoyable missions that focus more on the game’s verisimilitude is indicative of my chief takeaway from RDR2: all of my favourite components of the game managed to make me finally understand the appeal of the rockstar portfolio, and all of my least favourite components reminded me that i was playing a rockstar game, with a formula and brand reputation that now serves as a millstone around the neck obstructing genuine innovation or risk. for one thing, it was absolutely lost on me until RDR2 that these are open world games which are concerned with a loose sense of role playing but don’t much care for the implementation of stats, skill trees, abilities, or what have you. because these systems are handled with more care than in the past, i found there to be genuine pleasure in this complete reprieve from the mechanical, with an emphasis towards simply just existing and being. without the admittedly illusory constraints of the core systems or the time investment required from its activities, i may not have stopped to have felt any of it – it would have been every bit as inconsequential as GTA. but RDR2 demands to be soaked in. its landscapes really are vast and gorgeous. the permutations of the weather can lead to some dazzling displays; tracking and hunting down the legendary wolf at the cotorra springs during a thunderstorm is imagery permanently seared into my brain even after dozens upon dozens of hours of play.

however well-intentioned it is though, this emphasis on simulation betrays a tendency towards excess that is profoundly damaging and saddles RDR2 with a lot of detritus where a sharper lens would have benefitted its approach to simulation. this is especially bad when considering that a good deal of these extraneous elements are where the crunch surrounding RDR2’s development is most inextricably felt. broader discourse often struggles to find a way to discuss bad labour practices without either treating it as a footnote in the history of an otherwise ‘good’ title (thereby excising its role in production completely) or only writing about it from a pro-labour critical stance, but RDR2 makes my work in reconciling these threads easy: it’s just too sweeping in scope for its own good, and it’s difficult to see how mismanagement and crunch resulted in a better game. after years of these scathing reports and discussions, it’s hard not to let out a grim chuckle when you reach the game’s epilogue, which opens up an entire state in RDR2, only to realize that all this landmass has zero main narrative context. new austin and the grizzlies are massive regions, perhaps not pointless in their inclusion per se, but the campaign has difficulties integrating them yet leaves them present in their totality. it’s a wealth of untamed land included for its own sake.

this is especially frustrating because the game’s structure is suggestive of, strangely enough, sly cooper. the van der linde gang moves further and further away from the west over the course of the game into new and uncharted territory and in each chapter, comes to grips with the surrounding locales trying to pinpoint where the next great score or heist may present itself. every time seems like a small reinvention. the atmosphere at camp changes, new dialogues present themselves, new opportunities, and the narrative is content to settle on one small pocket of the world rather than its sum. perhaps it’s not the rockstar modus operandi but when i realized this was the game’s impetus, i thought it would have been a fantastic way to try something different, for a change – to focus on a small number of higher density regions with a bit less sprawl. i think at least part of why i feel this way is because the narrative is not one bit committed to its stakes. they want you to feel like an outlaw on the run, the law at your heels, the world shrinking around you, and your freedoms slowly being siphoned away, and yet there’s no tangible consequence in RDR2’s worldstate for sticking around valentine, strawberry, or rhodes – three towns that you wreak significant havoc in – like there is for even daring to return to blackwater, the site of a massacre which kickstarts the events of the game proper. obviously the ability to return to blackwater would break the story on its hinges, which is treated as such, but it’s hard to say why any other town gets a free pass.

anyways i find it somewhat ironic that after a journey replete with as many peaks and valleys as the old west it's modeled on, it's the comparatively muted epilogue which is still holding my attention and adoration. the first game's epilogue was, similarly, a striking coda to a wildly uneven experience. after screeching to a halt for its final act, RDR1's culminating grace notes center around a hollow, self-gratifying act of vengeance which succinctly underscored the alienation & ennui of the world you were left stranded in. it was a weirdly audacious swing for rockstar to take in 2010 - to explicate the ever-present emptiness and artificiality of their worlds as part and parcel of RDR1's thematic intent – but in spite of my dislike of the rest of the title, i found that it resonated with me.

RDR2 has a somewhat similar ace up its sleeve. following the game's highest point of intensity, the player (now with john marston taking the reins instead of arthur morgan) is thrust into a narrative scenario ill at ease with the game's prior formal language, seemingly begging at all turns for the player to put up their guns. every triumph in the epilogue chapters won by means of gunslinging bravado is, as a result, sharply dissonant; the score is often explosive, almost mythic in the way that it recalls RDR1, but there's a sort of uncanniness present because, in leveraging its prequel status, one has total clarity as to where this path eventually leads. like in RDR1, the throughline here is still one of inevitability.

complimenting this is the epilogue's equal amount of focus afforded towards john struggling to acclimate to the simple pleasures of domesticity. a natural extension of john’s unexpectedly genius characterization in RDR2’s narrative up to this point as arthur’s perpetually irresponsible and imprudent little brother, this focus on smaller-scale character study allows for his character to be more fleshed-out than he ever was in RDR1. similarly, the missions present in the epilogue are afforded more variance than anywhere else in the main game, taking the title’s previously established simulation elements and bringing them to the forefront of the proceedings. taking your wife out for a nice day in the town is probably my favourite mission in the game - it felt tender in a way that i have never once come to expect from these titles.

it's a taut novella that honestly represents some of rockstars finest work, so naturally it's only accessible after some 40-70 hours of ho hum debauchery and mediocrity. no reason to waste more time on this so let’s carve through the more important bullet points quickly. arthur is a wonderful protagonist, likely the best rockstar has conceptualized for how he compliments the structure of these games. he’s someone who isn’t a lone wolf nor a second-in-command, but rather a mover and shaker who is third in the hierarchy and remains blinded by both loyalty, cynicism, and self-hatred. it’s a reasonable enough marriage between the game’s pressing narrative demands and the freedom to act that a rockstar title is built on, disregarding the horrid implementation of a trite morality system. all the little flourishes animating his character are excellent – the journal he writes in quickly became one of my favourite features of the game. roger clark’s performance alone is enough to carry the game’s writing when it sags, which it often does – clemens point and guarma are terrible chapters. side quests are also largely bad, save for a few that present themselves in the beaver hollow chapter - up until this point they are rife with the kind of desperate attempts at juvenile humour rockstar built their empire on. it’s less good that so much of arthur’s arc is connected to the game’s worst characters in dutch and micah. rockstar’s writers just do not have the capacity and talent to bring the vision of a charismatic leader to life in dutch – they want you to believe in the slow-brewing ruination of the gang and dutch’s descent into despotism but the reality is he starts the game off as an insecure, inept, and frayed captain and only gets much, much worse as the game chugs along. micah is just despicable and not in a compelling way, an active thorn in everyone’s side who no one likes and whose presence makes everything worse. reading about the van der linde gang’s initially noble exploits in-game and contrasting it with an early mission where micah kills almost everyone in a town to retrieve his revolvers is actively comical and it never really stops gnawing at one’s mind. just registers as a total impossibility that not one person in the gang considers this guy an active liability to continued survival. i think he’s someone who can be salvaged since he’s already an inverse to arthur and implicitly serves as a foil to john but not enough work was done to make these elements of the character grounded or believable. cartoon villain level depravity, dude sucks.

the rest of the characters range broadly from underused & underwritten to charming in a quaint way. arthur and john are the highlights, i liked charles and uncle, the rest...mixed bag of successes and failures. javier and bill are more well-realized than their RDR1 incarnations, but most of their character work is tucked away in optional & hidden scenes. sadie is one of the few other characters to be given narrative prominence towards the end, and she kind of really sucks. the list goes on. despite this, lingering in camp is so easily one of the game's strongest draws - wandering around and seeing hundreds upon hundreds of little randomized interactions is a delight, and there's no doubt in my mind that i still missed scores of them.

those more inclined to cynicism probably won't be able to reconcile any of this game's messy threads, and its strengths will likely be eclipsed by its tendencies towards waste as well as its tactless emulation of prestige drama, but for a time i found my own pleasure in the illusion of the west. i think i felt enthralled by it realizing that this was the closest to a great experience rockstar had in them, knowing that they're only likely to regress from here on. rockstar has an unfortunate habit of only being able to conceptualize one’s relationship to their environment if it’s predicated on danger, but at its best RDR2 is able to overcome this, however briefly it might last.

Unlike what you might hear out there, this game is not dated at all. Proof being that there are games being made on the same structure (albeit with a tutorial) and still get to be indie hits (ATOM, Underail etc) enjoyed by a wider audience.

To avoid any anoyance while trying to play this game, consult with the pcgamingwiki page for the latest way to wriggle past any technical issues, for the actual tutorial read the PDF or printed manual, because that's where the tutorial is for this game (there is no in-game tutorial whatsoever).

But yeah, with the caveats out of the way, this is a gem, a true pre baldur's gate CRPG that stood defiantly against its own publisher and the videogame market of its own time. Make no mistake this is a game about strife and was made on an enviroment that is weirdly comparable to what you see in the game.

The game is short, for a rpg, getting close to 30h on a full run with most side content done (not counting for all special random encounters). The thing here is how tight it feels, everything leads to something, with it's mysteries being very rewarding to uncover, it is a sad game, with the dark humor reliving some of the pains you can feel while playing it. Good stuff! Play it before watching any spoilers.

This was not my first Fallout experience, but it is probably my favorite overall. It's really difficult to pick a favorite between Fallout, Fallout 2, and New Vegas. However, I've always found myself drawn towards the first game for a multitude of reasons. The first is I believe the first Fallout has the best overall story and progression of any of the games. While there's not a plentitude of factions like in New Vegas, there are still many different choices to be made that will greatly impact the sort of ending you get in this game. I also feel that the main antagonist in this game is the most unique and interesting one's I have ever seen, Fallout or otherwise. While it definitely doesn't feel as smooth to play anymore, this game is a true classic, and deserves the time of day for any RPG or CRPG fan. If you've never played either of the two CRPG Fallout games, I would definitely give them a chance.

the writing in this game is just

"WOAH THERE MR. BADASS MCSWAGOTRON! HOW YA DOIN WITH THAT BITCHIN NEW MISSION EH????? HOW BOUT THOSE SEXY NEW GUNS?????? AHAHA ANYWAYS MY WIFE LEFT ME BUT THATS BESIDES THE POINT, WE GOTTA GO KILL THAT ULTRA BONER NAMED HANDSOME JACK! ANYWAYS, I GOTTA GO, MY MICROWAVED BURRITOS ARE DONE! FUCK EM UP MR. AWESOMESAUCE!"


hire me randy and then treat me like shit

an appalling, self-righteous, insecure act of apologia for a generation of emotionally distant fathers that characterises motherly love and affection as smothering, manipulative, and toxic, whilst characterising casual emotional neglect and abuse as Good, Actually.

god of war 4 is just as sexist as the earlier games in the series, it's just more crypto about it, and the vast swathes of people taken in by this completely surface-level nuance baffles me to a degree not seen since DmC: Devil May Cry was hailed as the "more mature" reboot that series needed despite the existence of a literal sniper-rifle abortion scene and the fact that every single female character in it was called "whore" ad nauseum.

the "one take" gimmick is just that: a total gimmick, adding absolutely nothing to the story and in many ways detracting from it. the staccato nature of this journey, of going up and down the same mountain and teleporting all over the place is only made more absurd by the camera framing this as an uninterrupted trek which it clearly is not.

also it plays like ass and you fight the same boss twenty times. i hope you like that animation of kratos slamming a big pillar down on an ogre because you're going to see it an awful lot.

EDIT: removed a shitty joke.

a game that so thoroughly misunderstands what is dangerous about Big Tech and is so determined to be an edgy story about a cool vigilante Taking Shit Back or whatever that it would almost be funny if it wasn’t also so aggressively mean spirited at every possible turn. Grand Theft Auto’s younger, more cowardly cousin; every bit as dumb and cruel but at least not as smug about it. The fact that the gameplay is as bottom of the barrel dull as any video game I’ve ever played is the icing on the cake

absolutely hates women and denies them any personhood at all but simultaneously tries to be a critique of impotent men who hate women and deny them their personhood

IT FAILS REAL BAD!!!

A real shame because some of the satoshi kon-esque psychological imagery can be fun and the puzzle gamplay is devious and interesting.

The transphobic stuff is just repulsive and sad. The fact that this game was branded as some dark and cerebral adult drama that analyzes relationship dynamics is a pathetic joke. There's less nuance here than a Two and a Half Men episode.