Red Dead

You Got Zombies in My Western!

HIGH Seeing your favorite characters react to the zombie apocalypse is pretty interesting.

LOW Clearing out another graveyard or saving yet another town...

WTF The zombie hoe-down. 'Nuff said.

Spoiler Alert!

I liked Red Dead Redemption. I want to throw that out there first, since a lot of what I'm about to say will probably make it seem as if I didn't like it. This is the first game in the Rockstar open-world family that I've been motivated to finish, mainly because of both the engrossing recreation of the (admittedly fictional) Old West and the character of John Marston.

I've been trying to push forward in Red Dead Redemption, but after putting a few hours into it, it still hasn't grabbed me. Great graphics, plenty of content, blah blah blah… I think the thing for me is that I'm a big story guy. Stories and characters matter to me, and if a game gets off on the wrong foot then it takes a lot for me to stay with it. I know a lot of people say that Redemption really pays off in the end, but it just starts so poorly that I can't find the motivation to continue.

In the days before you plugged an ethernet cable in the back of your console, letting a glitch of this nature slip through QA would have been a public relations disaster on an epic scale, and would have incurred the wrath of the entire gaming community. At Konami, someone's head would have had to roll. Apologies would have been publicly made. Free stuff would have been sent out as a way of saying sorry. These days, it's barely a blip on anyone's radar—and of those that do notice, half of them don't seem to care.

One of my favorite games this year is Rockstar's Red Dead Redemption—a sandbox title that takes the gameplay and irreverent humor of Grand Theft Auto and shifts it to the old west. Rather than carjacking, players spend their time rustling cattle, ripping people off horses, and deciding whether to be an avenging angel or black-hatted bad guy.

Since the title has no real horror element at all (aside from a supporting character who loves the dead a little too much…), I never got to post about Red Dead Redemption here. That changes now, with the debut of the official trailer for Undead Nightmare, a new downloadable add-on that finds main character John Marston trying to find a cure for the zombie outbreak sweeping across the frontier.

The Legend of John Marston

HIGH Taking down the Bollard Twins gang in a running gunfight in Pike's Basin.

LOW A late mission using a surprisingly ineffective car-mounted Browning machine gun in poor visibility.

WTF I went through all that crap with the grave robber just so he could dance like a lunatic in Fort Mercer?

Game Description: Red Dead Redemption is an open-world, third-person, action-adventure game set at the tail end of the American West West era. Action takes place in the first few years of the twentieth century and revolves around the choices that the protagonist, former outlaw John Marston, is forced to make due to his blemished past. The game features a morality system assigning honor and fame points generated through the player's choices. It also features Wild West themed mini-games, new targeting and cover systems, extensive horse riding abilities, a wealth of period specific weapons and more than 40 huntable animals.