Red Dead Redemption - Xbox 360, PS3

[SIZE="5"]Red Dead Redemption[/SIZE]



You know when it comes to cowboys and the old west I always thought it was pretty ***. Maybe it was the bad experiences I had with Brokeback Mountain. Honestly the only person I ever thought looked good in a cowboy hat was Bret Michaels. Then came Red Dead Redemption on it’s sparkling gold stallion to teach me the old west wasn’t just about *** cowboys and stereotypical Tennessee accent.

You play the role of John Marston. John was once a violent outlaw in the old west who for some reason, could be coincidence, John sounds a lot like Billy Ray Cyrus. Seriously, I always kept thinking he’d grab a guitar at the end of a mission and sing Achy Breaky Heart. The government took him away from his wife and kids to try and sort him out straight. They make a deal, if John can kill all of his old gang mates then his family will be set free. So given without a choice John goes to find an old gang friend Bill Williamson. However Bill doesn’t take to kindly and shoots John, wounding him. John wakes up at a ranch. He finds out that the ranch’s owner, Bonnie MacFarlane, helped him in his time of need. John being the good soul he is wants to pay her back. So he tries to multi task, repay Bonnie by helping the ranch and trying to kill Bill. The story is pretty intense, most of the story is actually told on your way to where the mission takes place. You can skip that but I didn’t, it helps flesh out the story more and makes things more interesting.


John Marston is pretty much Billy Ray Cyrus, or what Billy Ray Cyrus thinks of himself.

How to describe the controls… Oh yeah it’s pretty much Grand Theft Auto 4. A to sprint, X to jump, Y to ride mounts. I’m going to go out and say it, this game is GTA4 in Western Times. No kidding, it plays and actually feels like GTA4. It’s sort of like I bought GTA4 about 100 years ago if that makes sense. It is a good control scheme I’ll admit but it just shows how lazy Rockstar can be. Oh they is one thing that’s new, Dead Eye. Dead Eye is essentially Bullet Time. You press it, everything slows down, you target what you need to shoot and press fire and boom. I’ll admit it’s really useful, it helps get out of situations that going gun crazy like an angry CoD player isn’t good enough for.

The world environment, how to put it simple, Orgasmic. I mean wow. It’s beautiful. Rockstar really have outdone themselves on this one. The area is vast, the weather conditions are perfect, I feel as if Rockstar paid close attention to every detail to give an amazing feel. If you actually travelled back in time to 1911, that’s not even good enough against Red Dead Redemptions environment. Most times I play this game I just wonder around looking at how well Rockstar have done with it. It’s like Avatar, if it didn’t suck. It really take the old western theme and turns it into something magical.


John Marston will scissor kick a ***** if he has too

As well as doing main missions and side quests there’s also many side activities to do. There’s:
Standoffs:
You and a stranger duel each other. Here you must use you Dead Eye to try a shoot you opponent before he shoots you. Pretty simple but I swear throughout the whole game you’ll do it once. The only time I did a standoff was about halfway through the game, and it was a tutorial so I won instantly. Bit of a shame, looked kind of fun
Gambling:
Here you play a nice card game to win money. These card games can be Poker, Blackjack or Liar’s Dice. I swear you’ll never found a better in-game card game system anywhere, not even online poker is as good as how this game pulls it off. It gives you a good fast paced gameplay that makes the experience a lot better than it’s money’s worth.
Bounty Hunts:
You can take bounty hunter missions to each some nice cash. Though my first time doing this was annoying. The bounty was around with a gang of bandits, once I killed all the bandit’s the bounty ran away. I chased him to the other end of the damn map until I finally lassoed and hogtied him down (more money if the bounty is alive). I was riding my way with the guy on the back of my horses and more bandits show up, they kill my bounty and then **** off. I could of got $20 more if he was alive, I was so pissed off. Don’t do this kids and you’ll surely be raking in money

So far I’ve given nothing but praise. There are a couple of things I do have to complain about. One thing I didn’t like was how some little tiny side quests literally come out at random. For instance I was just roaming around the prairie then A old man shouted “Hey mister, help!” that out of the blue bandits start shooting me. It was all so random I wasn’t prepared for it. I wasn’t quick enough to get off my horse and whip out my gun. It was just really unpredictable. I suppose it’s also a good thing as well as you have to be alert. Not just staring at your horse’s GPS System all day. Another thing is the interface is a bit too small for my liking. I sometimes needed a magnifying glass to read some of the dialogue and help bubbles. It’s nothing major and it’s probably updatable (wink, wink, nudge, nudge, Rockstar)

Online mode is fun. But like I say it’s pretty much GTA4’s online. I mainly go on it for free roaming with others which is always a blast. Other game modes are pretty good too. Capture the Flag modes, Gold Rush the “take one thing and place here then repeat” game and Grab the bag, which is Gold Rush but with one item for everyone to fight over. I seriously recommend Free Roam for your social fun. But what I like about the online multiplayer is the fact it’s just a nice little touch in the game. It is no way near as good as single player, which is good as it doesn’t need multiplayer to hold the game up with, like a certain fish I know. It’s like what they did with Half Life. Onlines good, but it doesn’t take the magic away from the single player.

CONCLUSION

If I could sum up this game in one word it would be; Authentic. Rockstar really did put a lot of effort into this game to make it the best goddamn old western experience possible, and I’ll admit they’ve pulled it off perfectly. If you ever wanted to know what it was like to be in western times and you just happened to have £40.00 and you’re at a game shop, get this. You surely won’t regret it.

+ Great Storyline
+ Beautiful, jaw dropping environments
+ Closest thing you’ll ever get to the old west in a video game
+ Plenty to do to fill time
- Needs to sort it’s interface out a tad

8.5

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[SIZE="5"]Red Hot Chili Peppers—Blood Sugar Sex Magik (1991)[/SIZE]

For some reason I have this recurring theme on MB where I keep finding myself in conversations about the album Blood Sugar Sex Magik by the Red Hot Chili Peppers. I don't know why I do this exactly since I've never been a fan of this album. But anyway during the most recent one of these discussions I started thinking, you know I haven't listened to this album in at least fifteen years and don't really know it all that well, maybe I should give it another chance, after all my tastes have changed a hell of a lot since it came out. So last night that's what I did, I downloaded the album and listened to it straight through, trying to keep an open mind about it. I'll save you the suspense and let you know right now that it didn't win me over but it was a fun experiment and I did find some gems along the way. Everything between the first and last paragraphs of this review is basically just my reactions as I listened to the album, it's not intended very seriously but hopefully it's somewhat entertaining. Here's what I wrote as I listened, cleaned up just a bit to be more readable:

The album starts off strong. "Power of Equality" is a pretty good song that could have worked well on Mother's Milk. I'm digging it. Unfortunately after that things immediately get very disappointing. The tempos slow way down, wanky guitar solos rear their ugly heads and Anthony Kiedis starts thinking he's a good singer a little too often. This pattern persists until "Suck My Kiss" which has more of a resemblance to their older material but frankly sounds like the kind of song they would've left on the cutting room floor on their previous albums. Next a godawful ballad in the form of "I Could Have Lied". Then we move on to "Mellowship in B Major" which isn't bad and has decent groove to it but would still only qualify as a middle-of-the-road song on one of their previous albums. I was happy to hear a little funk bleed it's way into "The Righteous and the Wicked" but let's face it, this song is filler.

Finally, after a long trip through a musical desert we arrive at a good song: "Give It Away". What's great about this song this it's actually fairly different from their older stuff but it's still a really good song. This is how you do it guys! This is how you change your sound without abandoning the things that made your music enjoyable in the first place. More of this please! And then, amazingly, they do deliver again. "Blood Sugar Sex Magik" sounds absolutely nothing like earlier Chili Peppers and is a good song for it. Maybe not the best thing they've ever done but I like the smoldering energy it has to it.

Ha-ha, but looks like I got my hopes up for nothing because here's "Under the Bridge", a cheesy-*** ballad that would fit in better on an Extreme album than a Chili Peppers album. "Naked in the Rain" should save the day though, right? I mean, on paper it has all the makings of a great Chili Peppers song: hardcore popping and slapping from Flea, driving beat, guitar that actually works with the groove instead of over it. Sadly it doesn't really work out because (a) Kiedis turns in one of the worst vocal performances of his career and (b) John Frusciante starts masturbating all over the song toward the end.

But Blood Sugar Sex Magik still has a few tricks up its sleeve and it employs them in rapid succession with the next three songs. The first of them, "Apache Rose Peacock", sounds kind of like a throwback to the Freaky Styley era. Not quite up to par with their best stuff but pretty fun and I dig the horns even though they're so inexplicably low in the mix. And, damn, "The Greeting Song" is really good too! Even the weak vocals and the guitar solo can't hold this one back. This is the level of energy I like to see these guys putting out. This trio of energetic songs is completed with "My Lovely Man", the weakest of the bunch. Not horrible, but not great either, it probably would've made a better B-side.

The album ends with two weirdish songs that seem a little bit tacked on. First is the long, boring "Sir Psycho Sexy". Yeah, it's funky with its juicy fart bass but it's a really dull kind of funky and ***** how long can you draw out the ending of a song. The other song, the final song on the album, is a cover of a Robert Johnson song "They're Red Hot" and finds the band sounding almost like Squirrel Nut Zippers for a minute. It's really short but quite good so fortunately the album ends on an high note.

So like I said in my opening paragraph, Blood Sugar Sex Magik didn't exactly win me over but I'm glad I gave it a second chance after all these years. I discovered a couple songs I've been missing out on for one thing. Also, listening to it now I find that one thing I do appreciate about it is it's variety. There can be little doubt that at the time of it's release it was by far their most eclectic sounding album and even though it doesn't really work for me I appreciate the fact that they were trying to branch out with this one. I suppose it would be unrealistic to think they'd want or be able to keep going with the youthful style of their first four albums, it was pretty much inevitable that they'd either slow down or just break up.[/QUOTE]

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