Suddenly I realized that my Playstation 2 game collection is almost solely comprised of Japanese shit. So I went out and got Red Dead Revolver used at Rasputin Music for four dollars. Seriously, that place can’t be a legitimate business. Prices that low have to be the result of some shady doings going down behind the scenes.Anyway, RDR is a wild west shooter made by Rockstar. This is probably the most infamous game developer due to the copious amounts of questionable content in their games. You see that little R with the star, you just have to flip over the box and read the novel of parental warnings on the back. When I did this to RDR I was shocked to only find two things; blood and violence. That can’t be right, I thought. Sure enough, it wasn’t. Off the top of my head they forgot use of alcohol/tobacco, sexual themes and language.
In Red Dead Revolver you play as Red; a bounty hunter who’s parents were killed when he was twelve. The game is part sequence of events story and part bounty hunting where you take jobs. Each mission brings you closer to tracking down the consortium of bastards that killed your family. You get money for bounties which you use to buy guns, repair guns and buy extras like characters and levels you’ll never use in multiplayer versus. You also get money for every hit you make depending on the anatomical region, which is weird and a bit excessive. A headshot is actually worth eight dollars. By the end, you have so much money, you’re lighting your cigars with it.
When I first went through the tutorial, I was surprised that the way you shoot requires holding L1 to draw your weapon and pressing R1 to fire. Usually in PS2 shooters it’s hold R1 to draw and press X to fire. I wasn’t sure about this R and L thing at first but then I played it a little bit and it wasn’t so bad. Then I played it a little bit more and decided, no I was right the first time. It sucks. It’s fine for earlier levels where there are miniscule amounts of bad guys thrown at you at a slow pace. But when it gets intense and you’re just up against one continuous flood of enemies, you’re constantly holding that L1 button and let me tell you it really wears out your finger. You’ll get to the point where you’re strafing around shooting your gun off one second and then the next it’s holstered. Red’s like, “No, I’m done. Piss off.” You think something’s wrong with the game or the controller. Then you notice that your finger is actually too weak to hold the L1 down any longer.
You can take cover behind walls and objects and then lean around the side to shoot. This is a mixed bag. It’s nice to have something that shields you but you really don’t want to be glued to a wall when a handful of enemies storm around your cover. The funny thing is that when you surprise an enemy that’s glued to the wall, they are practically invincible until they actually leave their cover. *Then* you can kill them. The other thing that blows about cover is that when you’re against a wall you can’t dodge bullets. This seems like something you shouldn’t have to worry about when you take cover but if your hand is sticking out past the edge unprotected, it *will* get shot until you pull it back. But by the time you realize what’s happening, you’ve already lost half of your health just from getting shot in the fucking hand. Whenever you poke your head out to shoot, that will get shot too. Case and point, somehow you get shot a lot more hiding behind a wall than you do running around alone in a barren field. Never take cover.
The game’s gimmick is the “Dead Eye.” As you kill enemies, your dead eye meter fills up which basically equates to how long you get to use the ability. When you activate it, time slows down. Then you drag your crosshairs over the bad guys in sight. Little red targets appear all over them; as many as there are bullets in your gun. When you exit dead eye mode, you fire off a staccato of bullets which if executed well makes short work of them. In a way it’s kind of like bullet time but without the fancy John Woo acrobatics. This ability is however pretty useless for far away enemies and enemies that are moving, which is very annoying.
Another unique aspect to shooting is the duels. Okay, this is something I’ve never understood about the wild west mythos. Two guys face off, draw their guns and shoot each other. It’s the logistics that kill me. It’s not ten paces, turn and fire. It’s draw and shoot at any arbitrary moment. Obviously someone has to initiate. And if someone goes first, how is it fair, or at all an unbiased evaluation of who was the baddest. And what’s with quickdraw tournaments? Who the fuck would enter a tournament where basically everyone dies?
Anyway, there are parts in the game where a dueling sequence is initiated. You can be up against anywhere from one to three opponents, (which is pretty fucking ridiculous.) When this happened the first time, I was trying to read the tutorial which was coming up on screen. Damn this is complicated, I thought. This is the most complicated part of the game. Unfortunately I didn’t have enough time to fully comprehend it because the stupid tutorial was scrolling through automatically. Thanks a lot. After my unavoidable loss, I read the manual because it actually *lets* me read it. Dueling is basically just a manual dead eye mode. You press down and then up to grab and draw your weapon. Then time slows down. You drag your crosshairs over your opponent(s) The cursor turns red whenever you cross a part of the opponent’s anatomy that you can hit. The whole deal is to locate and tag as many spots as you can as fast as you can before your opponent fires on you. Sometimes, for whatever reason, you fail to draw your gun. I don’t know if it happens when you push up too fast or what but it’s really aggravating.
You actually get to play as several different characters as the story progresses, which is interesting. Except for when you play as General Diego. Not that it’s not interesting but that level is horrible. General Diego is one of the bad guys. In the one level that you control him you are supposed to fight Yankee forces on the other side of this bridge like that one scene in the Good the Bad and the Ugly. Shit’s exploding all around you and you can’t see from the smoke and debris in the air. The North side’s cannons are constantly firing, sometimes at you, so you have to just keep running. Although that doesn’t even work. They predict where you’re running and they put a lead on you. You have to do serpentine. Unfortunately you can’t focus on that because there are a bunch of assholes running around and shooting you too. You try to take cover under the bridge to take out the men but somehow the cannonballs get you anyway. When you get hit it takes you a while to get back up again and by the time you do, another cannonball is already inches from your face. The only level checkpoint is too far into the level which means you get to do the first half over and over and over.
Come to think of it, pretty much anything involving Diego sucks. Fort Diego is also a pain in the ass because you basically get to the end of the level and then die. The intensive trial and error part is conveniently located at the very end and the only way you get to do another trial is to play the whole level again… then die again. Rinse and repeat. The whole thing is that you’re supposed to get up to this gatling gun and take out the guys using it. (And yes, it takes a long time to get there.) Now once you capture a giant gun, what’s probably your next course of action? *Use* the giant gun! The courtyard below you is full of enemies. Why not cater them with a buffet of led sandwiches? The problem is that once you get on the gun you start getting shot a hell of a lot, (even more than if you were behind cover.) And occasionally someone will sneak up behind you while you’re using it. Also the gun is a piece of horse shit. It swivels around radically out of control, making it nearly impossible to train it on anything. And even when you do, the bullets have about as much stopping power as the old revolver that you started the game with. So compare that with the gatling gun from Darkwatch. That thing was slow but once you got it centered you could rest assured that anything behind your crosshairs was going to be vaporized into red mist. But point being, you go for the gatling gun, it gets you killed without fail. Don’t ask me why you’d go out completely unprotected into the courtyard filled with enemies that already have a bead on you, but that’s what you do. You spend like three or for minutes killing enemy after enemy only to have them continually respawn and only after the allotted amount of time has been wasted can you progress to the boss fight and receive a checkpoint. What a crock of shit.
Among the other levels that suck is the bar fight level. There are no guns. Just fists and bottles. For some reason you’re trying to protect the three saloon girls that run aimlessly through the bar. (What the hell did they ever do for you?) If two of them get knocked out, you lose. The fight is well, perfectly random. There are about a dozen fighters all punching each other and/or saloon girls. The combat is terrible. (Think fist fight with Silent Hill controls, terrible.) It takes half an hour to move the camera to where you want it and by that time you’ve been thrown across the room by someone and have to adjust it again. After being tossed four times in a row, you’ll begin to think that that’s the only thing they know how to do. And the process takes so long, you wish there was a fast forward button just so you can get back on your feet again. Sometimes you’ll be standing a good ten paces away from an enemy and you’ll just suddenly gravitate or teleport into their hands so that they can throw you. Everyone runs around chaotically making it extremely difficult to actually engage anyone. They all have WAY TOO MANY hit points. Ideally you want to work one of the assholes into a corner where they can’t escape and then just wail on them for three minutes until eventually they don’t get back up again. The level is hard but thank God it’s short… or at least simple.
The last level is the assault on the mayor’s mansion… and it’s a fucking nightmare. I’m not sure if it’s a blessing or a curse that your two friends Jack and Annie are with you. Sure, they shoot guns but Jack has a tendency to get himself killed which is an automatic game over and Annie has a tendency to kill you, which is also a game over obviously. Easily the worst part of the whole level is when Jack has to pick the lock on the front door of the mansion. You have to hold off an enemy tsunami of unbelievable proportions for three minutes while he sits there defenseless. Why are we even picking the lock in the first place? I bet ten to one we could just kick the door in and if not, just jam a fucking stick of dynamite in the keyhole.
It wouldn’t be so bad if all of the enemies were just regular guys but there are also guys dressed as generals who have their own names and life bars. I think they’re all on drugs or something because they have super human strength. It takes like three to four pointblank headshots to bring one down. That will never happen though because they don’t walk in a straight line for longer than a fourth of a second. They jump around like an acrobat and sprint up flights of stairs backwards doing 75 miles per hour. If you don’t kill them quick, (which obviously you won’t) another one will show up and then you have two. Then you get another one and you’ve got three plus half a dozen regular guys and then you’re just fucked.
Once you beat a level, you get rated on things like accuracy and damage taken. Passing the level automatically unlocks something but if you get a high enough overall rating you get a second unlock. You have the option to continue to the next level, replay the last level or quit. Chances are that the only reason you’d want to replay the level right then and there is because you want a higher score to unlock the second thing. If you don’t play it again right then and there, you don’t get to play it ever again unless you play through the whole game again. Seriously now, what is this? No level select = Bullshit
Red Dead Redemption is out in May. Looks awesome.
