“Tom, are you free tomorrow night to saddle up with me?”
“What?”
“I mean, how do you feel about being Sundance to my Butch?”
“Er, I’ve told you before, Simon: no means no.”
“Red Dead Redemption co-op campaign, dummy. It’s out tomorrow and it’s, like, totally free. I have to write about it and I’d rather hustle with you than someone I don’t know who’s gonna shower me with non-ironic homophobic slurs every time I trip on a stirrup and miss a headshot.”
“You want me for my ironic homophobia? Is that even a thing?”
“Why don’t we ask your gay dad? Um… Look, I want you for your acerbic wit and cool hand, OK?”
This is a half-truth. Before writing about Red Dead Redemption’s online modes earlier this month, I posse’d up with Tom every night for a week as we sought to make a name for ourselves in the Wild West.
‘Red Dead Redemption: Outlaws to the End’ Screenshot 1
Complete a mission and you and your companions are scored on your performance, a total calculated from the various components of kills, revives, deaths and defences performed.
Turns out that name was, mainly, “bungling”. He would grow endlessly frustrated at the incompetence of his beginner-level horse. Being an only child, instead of persevering, levelling up and steadily unlocking more capable animals, he’d grow impatient. Then, every time his steed snagged a hoof on a rock, or threw him off when he drove it too hard (which was basically all of the time) he’d ceremoniously shoot it in the back of the head.
Horseless, he’d then continue toward our mission objective on foot, usually a ten-minute trek away, leaving me to charge ahead on horseback and do the bulk of the work before sidling up, dusty and out-of-breath, to claim his share of the EXP spoils.
So yeah. I want him for his companionship. The cool hand stuff is flattery. I’ve no idea if he can shoot straight. Apart, that is, from at point blank range into the neck of a beleaguered horse.
Tom is my neighbour. We play videogames together in that way that you play videogames with your neighbour when you’re 12 years old: full of the knock-on-their-door-after-school joy and innocence that’s usually lost in the acquisition of adult responsibility and too many games. Why am I telling you this? Because Tom is the best fun to play videogames with, regardless of whether we win against the other team, or earn achievement points doing so.
Red Dead Redemption’s single-player mode is the videogame equivalent of The Lone Ranger, a wide expanse of restrained potential in which to lose yourself, but lose yourself alone. Its online multiplayer is the Magnificent Seven (eight, if you manage to recruit a full posse), in which you saddle up with a clutch of strangers and terrorize the local bandits.
By contrast, the Outlaws to the End co-op campaign is Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. In this offshoot, who gives a tumbleweed if you get blasted to high noon heaven in the grand finale: all that matters is that you make some good memories peppered by slick one-liners along the way.
Sure, there’s a metric ton of experience points to be won levelling up your online character here. But if that’s your primary focus, you’re better off retreating to FarmVille. Co-op campaigns require more than the sum of their systems for success: they rely on a good companion with whom to co-operate. Get that wrong, and even the most robust framework will seem lacking. In short, if you want to have fun with this free add-on, you’re going to need a Tom.
Or three, to be precise, as each of Outlaws to the End’s six missions are playable with up to four team members. In fact, you’ll have a far easier time of it if you do manage to secure a full set of companions, as the difficulty doesn’t seem to scale according to your number. Indeed, there’s an achievement for completing a mission with just two posse members, an admission of the difficulty of the task if ever there was one.
Checkpoints in missions are merely there to respawn a downed companion who bled out before you could heal them. If you both expire before reaching the next one, you’ll need to start over from the beginning. Add to all this the fact that the AI shoots far sharper than elsewhere in the game, and the sheer numbers you’re up against ensure that only fools rush in.
“Tom, get back inside the gates.”
Ammunition, the fourth mission in the set. The Mexican Army has the town of Tesoro Azul under siege, and we’re in it. Surrounding the town are ten, fifteen Gatling gun turret emplacements and beyond them, high up on the cliffs, angry clusters of enemy artillery squint down, measuring their trajectories as in a game of giant horseshoes.
A horn sounds and a cacophony of cannonball fire detonates. Bullets sting the air like wasp darts, pitting the stonework all around. The sky, a bruise of purple, is flecked with momentary streaks of red and yellow. A second later, the town gates groan on their hinges at the punch of air from a cannon ball’s thud on the courtyard. The rubble is stacked as high as the odds against us. It’s our twentieth attempt, at least. The atmosphere is tense. A Brokeback romance seems unlikely at this point.
“It’s gonna be fine,” he shouts. “I’ll take cover behind that burning cannon.”
“It’s literally never fine. Get back inside the gates. Please. If you get shot, I’m not coming out there again. I…”
“Gah. They got me. You totally distracted me with all your bitching. Where’s a horse to shoot when you need one. Um. Can you come get me? I’m just outside the gates. It’s definitely safe.”
This time, I’m playing as a soldier, the all-rounder whose Volcanic pistol is useful during the close-range first half of the battle, and whose mid-range rifle offers some hope of eliminating the Gatling gun operators should we make it to the hills. Tom is a Sniper, trading speed for headshot accuracy with his vintage scope. The Gunslinger class, touted for mid-range, seems less versatile than the Soldier, while the shotgun-wielding Miner has no hope in this scenario once outside the fortress gates. At least, we presume so. After each attempt, we blindly click through to play again: repetition is our strategy.
I make it to Tom and hammer the Y-button. The reviving pound my avatar performs on his chest looks curiously pure Modern Warfare, sans syringe. Tom rises to his feet, shaky.
“Right. Head for Eastern front. There don’t seem to be any Gatling guns there yet,” I command, emboldened with the power that comes from saving someone’s virtual life. “Go, go, go.”
“Um. Gimme a second… Never, Eat, Shredded, Wheat.”
You can read the rest of this feature over at Eurogamer here
“A work of art is precisely that which remains when you have run out of words to describe it” Stephen Fry, being awesome.
Leroy Stick, pseudonymous author of the Twitter account @BPGlobalPR, writes an open letter to brand ‘holders’ everywhere. Essential reading.
‘The US has discovered $1 trillion in untapped mineral deposits in Afghanistan’ Ahhhh. That makes a bit more sense then.
“That is, the John Marston we play is the man as imagined by his son, Jack.” I really like this interpretation of RDR.
Today’s soundtrack. Sam Amidon’s cover of R Kelly’s Relief. Pretty minus the twee.
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“Apple does not support Flash because it is so buggy. Whenever a Mac crashes more often than not it’s because of Flash. No one will be using Flash. The world is moving to HTML5.”
If the absence of Flash on iPhone and iPod Touch for three years and its current incompatibility with iPad left any room for doubt, then Steve Jobs’ recent tirade to employees made clear the depth of the Apple CEO’s ill-feeling toward Adobe’s ubiquitous media platform. But more than mere dissatisfaction with the internet’s most pervasive mode of serving multimedia content, including webgames, Jobs’ support of the new web standard, HTML5, shows Apple’s deeper, more aggressive goal: to bring about the downfall of Flash by shifting the very source of how we experience games and watch videos on the net.
But with a multimillion-dollar gaming industry built upon Flash foundations, what impact might Jobs’ plans have for the webgame developer? Does HTML5 really offer the features and functionality that contemporary, ever more ambitious webgames require? And if not, then will new platforms such as Unity provide the cornerstones of gaming’s future on the web, even as they too are threatened with being shut out of Apple’s product range? We asked some of the internet’s leading game developers and distributors to find out.
Paul Preece is developer of Desktop Tower Defense, perhaps Flash gaming’s biggest success story and the only videogame to kick start an entirely new genre in the past decade. He feels as though the debate is largely hot air: “Of course, Flash should never have been required to play video on the web in the first place. But game developers were fortunate that it was needed, as it allowed a sophisticated development platform to be distributed to 99 per cent of computers by piggybacking on the coat tails of video support. Web-based games wouldn’t be anywhere near as pervasive as they are now if HTML had supported video back in 2005 when YouTube launched. Now that Flash has established its own momentum as the default games platform for the web it will not be affected much by video support moving from the Flash plugin to the browser. The debate is a red-herring in relation to webgames.”
Iestyn Lloyd, a freelance Flash and Unity developer from Brighton who was lead coder on the BAFTA award-winning Channel 4 Flash game Bow Street Runner, agrees, with scepticism about the basic functionality of HTML5 in comparison to the current generation of game-friendly plugins. “Games made in HTML5 can currently be compared to games being made in Flash about four years ago. As more browsers support HTML5, and as JavaScript engines increase in speed, and developers start experimenting with making games with HTML5, we might see more advanced games being made, but this will likely take a few years.
“Right now, for development of 2D web games, Flash is still the preferred option. Moreover, the main advantage of Flash is that if the user has the plugin, they can see the content. There’s no need to worry about cross-browser, cross-platform compatibility: it just works. HTML5 is too new to judge how it’s going to be used for the development of games. For technologically savvy people, it’s easy enough to upgrade your browser to the latest version. But for the masses, they are likely to have a slow browser that doesn’t support HTML5 for some time. So if there is a shift, it’s not going to surface for years.”
You can read the rest of this feature over at Edge Online here
The slide puzzle: crutch of every tired, lazy or creatively bankrupt game designer. Used to bulk out countless adventure games, these pictorial conundrums – in which you slide tiles one by one around a bordered play area while attempting to arrange them to create a picture – predate videogames by some margin. And yet there’s gold in these simple clichés for the talented contemporary designer to uncover, as their occasional appearances in the Professor Layton series have demonstrated, with some cute twists on the antiquated formula.
Rooms: The Main Building goes one step further by attempting to build an entire game around the slide puzzle template, one complete with its own narrative, characters and film noir ambiance. Not only that, but its Korean designers layer new mechanics on top of the core slide puzzle system, multiplying its complexity in an effort to, presumably, match its aspiration to a full-scale DS release. Ambitious? Yes. Successful? No.
Those who abhor this micro-genre will relate to protagonist Mr X, who finds himself literally trapped within the puzzles, desperate to escape their transient confines. The primary aim in each puzzle is to guide Mr X to the exit door, contained within one of the slide tiles. To do this you’ll need to slide the tiles around the board in order to create walkways for Mr X to traverse.
Some tiles have walls on one side or a solid ceiling or floor, preventing access to the adjacent tile. Others contain ladders allowing you to climb up into the tile above. Each puzzle is solved by manoeuvring tiles in such a way as to allow Mr X to make his way to the exit point, the solution arrived at either by a process of trial and error or careful planning, depending on your approach and mentality.
You can read the rest of this review over at Eurogamer here
There’s being down and out in the Wild West, and there’s being down and out in the Wild West. John Marston, the protagonist around whom Red Dead Redemption’s story revolves, may start the game wounded and homeless, but he is still a man with a purpose, a few friends, a handsome face and, most importantly, a narrative trajectory to climb up and out of poverty.
Conversely, the first time you set hoof in the multiplayer States, your character is an undesirable picked randomly from a clutch of lowly vagabonds, militiamen or Mexicans, your transport a plodding donkey, and your only weapon a rusty six-shooter. There’s little doubt that now you are at dusty rock bottom.
But with destitution comes a rare type of freedom. While progressing through the single-player campaign is a case of patiently following the breadcrumb trail of capital letters laid down for you by Dan Houser and the other scriptwriters, here you really are left to your own devices, presented with a clutch of places and tasks to engage in, but with no promise of success beyond that of your own skill and ability. In that sense, Red Dead Redemption’s multiplayer is where the game’s real open world exists. When playing as John Marston you are only ever free to tell Rockstar’s story; here, for the first time, you are free to write your own.
Neither approach – the set narrative or the free-form playpen – is wrong, of course. But as one of our concerns with the single-player game was that, in this world of endless horizons, freedom was curiously curtailed, to see the other half of the whole does makes Rockstar’s vision seem more balanced and rounded.
Unfortunately, we weren’t able to test Red Dead Redemption’s multiplayer in the version of the game supplied for our review – hence this revisit. System link was available, but Rockstar’s frugal dissemination of carefully protected copies of the game meant there was only one in our possession. Besides, the reality is that there are some things you just can’t know until they fully exist. “As hopefully you can appreciate… there are unfortunately a few things that only really rear their heads once the game is on public servers and lots of players are online,” wrote Rockstar last week concerning the bugs that have crawled out of their code since the game went live. Well, indeed.
You can read the rest of this review over at Eurogamer here
