2 Day’s until a year! Today’s game is Red Dead Redemption 1. The Last of Us was initially planned for today, but the crashing kept getting on my nerves that i decided to step back for a sec. I’m going to try and look into a fix because i’m really enjoying but those freezes seem particularly horrendous today for some reason. I still was in the mood for a narrative heavy game though and i had recently picked this up so i went, “what the hell?” and installed it since it was small and would take less than an hour.
I have to say, i’m glad i picked up on discount. Not worth the intial price, but god damn it’s not a bad port at all. It’s gorgeous and features a pretty decent selection of graphics options. And i’d argue it looks better than the original version unless you’re fond of the crunchy 720p. Like, damn, this is a Xbox 360 game? I don’t think they changed much graphically besides a few tweaks and extra options, so fuck does this look good. It runs well too. I’m at 1440p and it runs at a stable 60fps for me with FSR at Native Resolution. I did have some stuttering the longer the game went on though, which is odd because i remember Red Dead 2 having the exact same problem on Steam Deck/my gaming rig. I wonder if it’s a issue with the Rockstar launcher and Proton?
When i played the first one, i was young enough for a lot of things to go over my head. So playing this again, especially after 2 i’m picking up on a lot of things. Like for example the same Motif in American Venom from Red Dead 2 plays during this same mission. Which is a cool detail that i’m glad they added in two. It must have been so cool to remember this song from the first one and then finish 2 and hear that Motif. I’m just a sucker for Motif’s in general though.
I got to experience the absolute joy of this game’s physics engine too. When doing one of the Wagon missions i hit a rabbit or a rock or something and watched the wagon flip into the air before hitting the ground like nothing happened. It’s amazing. I wish i got a clip of it just to share because it was hilarious.
Finally, during the first mission, at the very very beginning, do you see that guy there? The one behind John? I accidentally pointed my gun at him and he ran off. When i got on my horse i caught up to him and he got absolutely railed by a train. He falls to the side, and then just walks it off like nothing happened. God this game has an hilarious physics engine. I loved Red Dead 2’s but god there’s some sort of magic in this one or something.
When I first bought Red Dead Redemption (well over a decade ago, for the Xbox 360), I got it exclusively for the “Undead Nightmare” expansion pack. I love zombie games, and setting it in the Wild West? That’s a unique twist I hadn’t seen yet.
However, I didn’t want to just jump right into the zombie gameplay. I wanted to be intimately familiar with the world and its lore first, so I could squeeze all the enjoyment out of the zombie expansion. I wanted to know all the townsfolk, so when I had to blow someone’s brains out, I’d understand their relationship to the main character and how emotionally impactful that choice was.
Suffice to say, I was so anxious to get to the zombie expansion that I rushed through the entire game in maybe 2 evenings. I didn’t really enjoy my playthrough because I was just trying to get it over with as quickly as I could.
When I finally got to the zombie expansion, I didn’t really enjoy it that much. It was at that moment I realized that the original game was far more fun than the zombie expansion. But I had rushed it and wasted my whole experience.
Last year, I finally got around to playing through the game again and I made sure to slow down and really enjoy it. It’s such a fantastic story. I played the Undead Nightmare expansion afterwards and made a post about it here for Halloween month. That, too, was more fun than I remembered.
Now I need to finally play Red Dead Redemption 2. I’ve owned it for years, but I always get bored maybe an hour into the gameplay. They put so much effort into making it as realistic and complex as possible that I just get distracted and lose the plot. RDR1 was a more straightforward plot and kept me engaged, but I keep losing focus on the sequel. I need to force myself to sit still and power through it sometime. #ADHDproblems
I blasted through RDR1 because I wanted to play RDR2. Coming straight from RDR1 to RDR2 I felt the gameplay much slower pace than the first which put me off at first. I came back to it multiple times but it’s such a long story. I play it once in a while, but it will take me a couple of years before I finish it haha… especially now since I’m hooked on WoW Classic.
I feel you with the plot lol. I had a save all the way in Chapter 5 of the second game and lost it, and just kept picking it up and putting it back down again (which i do for a lot of things looking back). It took a whole new prescription for me to power through it