I’ve been playing Red Dead Redemption on my Xbox here and there when I get a bit of free time, and it has grabbed my imagination more than I had expected. It was an iffy buy for me, as I haven’t really liked Rockstar’s Grand Theft Auto series, and early previews just screamed “GTA on horses!”.
What’s suprising is that it’s really the other way around. GTA is really RDR with buildings, traffic laws, pedestrians, and other obstacles. People like to play up the drugs, guns, and sex, but the real appeal is the freedom. The best part of GTA is just driving around, doing whatever comes to mind. The fact that I had to deal with actual traffic in a game always rankled. Sure, you don’t have to obey the laws (so long as you can deal with the police attention) but you still can’t drive down a street without swerving to miss all the cars and walls and poles that will bring you to a sudden halt, laws or no.
The beauty of RDR is that you can just run around under the open sky. I know, insert “get off your ass and go out in the real outside” admonition here, but I don’t live in the southwest in 1910, don’t own a horse, am uneasy around guns, and really wouldn’t be taken seriously in a cowboy getup. Also, people wouldn’t ask for my help thanks to my skills at the above. Modern video gaming has always had an element of escapism, even as we slog through the gritty brown “realism” of your Modern Warfares and the pseudo-New York of GTA IV, and I think the GTA formula of giving you the room and tools to find a good time for yourself has finally found a home in the open landscape of the frontier West.
