This is the last of four debates surrounding our final choice for 2010's game of the year. All four will run this week. The winner will be announced Monday.”In another universe, they made a box containing Red Dead Redemption that's just for me. The front is familiar. The back, though, boasts the kind of bullet points I might demand of a great video game:-Respects Your Intelligence (Because it doesn't bore me with some easy and obvious replica IWC 9538-01 Ladie's watch macho super-hero of a main character.)-Is Beautiful (Because why make a video game Western that doesn't have the best sunsets, tumbleweeds, wild horses and shot-off hats I ever saw in a game?)-Is Fun To Control Even When You Wouldn't Expect It To Be (Like when you're tracking a cannibal, talking to a man who might be the devil, shooting birds, or herding cattle during a lightning storm.)
-Has Negative Space (Since the wonder of the American West is magnified by its immense size, and therefore, when made into a video game, should be a place of grand vistas, slow gallops, and long trails at the end of which may lurk either grizzlies or civilization.)Red Dead Redemption let me pretend I was in a place that was once real. It nearly replica IWC 3736-03 Ladie's watch overwhelmed me with the deft manner in which its plain core gameplay was put in service of many unusual and interesting activities. Its characters weren't just memorable. Their behaviors were fascinating: the tension of romantic affection stifled into friendship; the stubborn clinging to past glories; etc.
The game's developers at Rockstar created a work rich with the results of great decisions: they were right to trust its players to find its treasures by scrutinizing its landscape; right to interrupt the game's instrumental soundtrack occasionally with a stirring song; right to end John Marston's story not when expected but only after we got to see what could become of a weary outlaw who pined for a wife and son long unseen.There was no replica IWC 1970's WoMen's watch game in 2010 as beautiful and as full of such smartly-crafted adventures loud and quiet, grand and quaint as Red Dead Redemtpion. It was the best video game of 2010.Luke Plunkett's ReplyWe're so used to video games being derivative works of fiction that we almost take it for granted. We simply assume that because a game is basing itself on an established genre in another medium - in this case cinema's Westerns - that the world you're about to enter is going to be somehow lesser because of it.
