Red Dead Redemption Trailer

Here at NDG we don't spend a lot of time and energy (doing anything?) focusing on games that have yet to be released. We eschew responsibility to "break stories", or "make news",  or "take bribes" and have, all very intentionally and with great philosophical grounding, taken the stance to leave the maintenance of the game-hype-industrial-complex up to the forum hawks and news sites; the leaders in the inter-gallactic plot to turn gaming into a list of future promises, pics of Halo 3 collectors toys and stale "specs": graphics, features, control schemes, etc. 

Despite this, I was unable to avoid the first official trailer to Red Dead Redemption - a sequel to Red Dead Revolver -currently in production by Rockstar San Diego. While all Rockstar games have been relatively professionally produced, and more or less unique (at least in style and execution, if not in premise,) it has always seemed that the GTA series held a special place in their... budget. With the release of GTA IV last summer, this trend appeared only more glaring. What GTA IV made even more obvious however, was that Rockstar is no fucking slouch and GTA IV was no Missile Defense System and as a result, you may have heard, Grand Theft Auto IV made enormous amounts of money ($300 million on the first day, $800 million in the first week, and with current sales figures at somewhere over a billion.) Judging from the trailer to Red Dead Redemption, Rockstar has apparently thrown a bunch of those dollars at their  new "Sandbox" style take on the Red Dead series, and in doing, look poised to change this "GTA and the rest" character. More importantly however, Red Dead Redemption looks as hot as a panfried flapjack.

So what makes Red Dead Redemption look so good? The graphics, which are so legs open in the trailer, are very impressive, but honestly, lots of games look great these days. The gallant cinematic feel is nice for a trailer, but we all know we aren't going to be getting Western Gear Solid VI or Final Tumbleweed XXXIV.  What makes Red Dead Redemption seem so promising is the hope of a game world half as richly conceived and ecstatically executed as GTA IV, with a bow legged, hunched-back ambling gate, a subtle snarl and a slow drawl - the pace of freedom, boredom and Morrowind; the pace of stories by the camp fire, chewin' on straw, and walkin' a horse to water. Red Dead Redemption proposes to breath the air of the fantasy of the American frontier West, and from the looks of this trailer, you'll hear a low crackle at the back of its' throat from the hard years in the dusty desert. Gruff, quiet, tense, and terse - this trailer is sweet.

I don't think this answers the question it poses.

I don't know who the Birdman is. I do know, however, that if he got 30 minutes a game he'd be really, really fantasy relevant.

Countdown: AJX's all-time fav Genesis games (15)

Number fifteen:
Sword of Vermilion



A trivial, slipshod, rehash of all the cliches from Dragon Warrior on; an amalgam of the crudest story-telling techniques featuring some of the least-affecting dialogue ever written; a game stuck in the period before 16-bit roleplaying games became art, Sword of Vermilion is a somewhat bizarre game-- technically questionable, but fascinating in the way that clunky medieval paintings of sword wielding jesuses are fascinating. It has a commitment to real-time action that would later be re-introduced to role-playing games and tagged years later as innovative, but it is also a mess of cluttered, quaint, and counter-intuitive menus. Getting treasure out of a treasure chest involves not only opening an ugly menu and then scrolling (which, as always is accompanied by an awful chirping sound effect) down to to the "open" option, but, having opened the chest, you must then re-open the menu, and then-scroll (more of that awful tone) down to "take," at which point you get a cheery little tune and a message like: "you opened the chest, and there was a candle inside!" Also, my first ever favorite RPG. You'd be mostly blameless for taking a tone not-dissimilar to that of our esteemed video-game reviewing colleague about the game:



Or, you can take a little trip through history. Shall we?

As I ran laps around Perley elementary's big, barren field behind the playground every day after school I balanced my fatigue and buoyed my squat fourth-grader legs along with thoughts that every lap around the vast lot was one more penciled "x" in a box on a cross country club fill-out sheet, each filled box building on the last, springing forward on the page from left to right, onward and onward as I rounded the monkey bars and went back out for more. Surely there was some goal, some reward, some t-shirt you could win for running the most laps, but I don't remember it. The goal was always just to get farther, get more points. I was determined, and the thought of going farther excited me, and that was all there was.
Having only been old enough to be in awe of my brother as his 80's twitch skills got him all the way through Shinobi on the master system I only came into my own as a video game player with a bit of an inferiority complex. I knew that I would never be able to score as many points as my brother as my quick-fingered and guitar-soloing brother. In order to prevail in the same way he had prevailed, then, I'd need another way around. Steadily earned experience points would come to replace the hi-scores I'd known. Sword of Vermilion, with it's simple boss sequences and not-quite-action combat style (link to battles) was perfect for me because it could be beaten with the same sheer force of will and patience that propelled me around the field at cross country practice. Thus, it was the first non-disney-sponsored game that stubby-fingered and stubby-legged me could be comfortable with and good enough at to call my own.



At the time I didn't know what I was getting into. But, imagining the sun setting over Vermilion's Malaga, big-shouldered and kingly and beside my queen, I had a home in a kingdom not far from that beaten-down Perley grounds. There were rewards for those untold laps and dungeon crawl toils, I suppose, but they were mostly in my head.

"How it is that we have come to do as we do" Vol. 1: Exile III: Ruined World

Exile III: Ruined World

I

Here I was, a child of twelve. Brendan and I sat to the side of a newly finished, still mostly empty basement playing Exile III: Ruined World on my family's new 200 meghertz pentium computer made by NEC; a machine that my father exclaimed to me when he first bought it a year before,

"You know what I just bought? A 200 megahertz Pentium computer! Can you believe that?

"That's fast?" I asked.

I knew how fast that was - fast enough to play any game I wanted. I lived for those moments, and so do most PC gamers still; the time when you can finally accept the Graphics-Messiah into your heart, and live a fulfilled life as a gamer.

I have memories from about the same time in my life of my father driving me to church in Worcester Massachusetts on Tuesday for choir practice, myself a boy soprano in an Episcopal boys choir, my dad, casually spelling mine and my carpool friend's name in hexademical representation of ASCII.

So here I was, semi-secretly sequestered in my basement with my best bud Brendan, sitting on swivle chairs in wet bathing suites and wrapped in too-large beach towels, sweating pubescently in the dry air-conditioned air while the summer which we had just briefly visited to earn our disappearance to the underground, awaited just a few feet above us.

At a time when japanese-cut-scene-polygonal-fetishism ruled the console RPG world, and the relative relief of the sprite and isometric graphics of the Baldur's Gate clan and Fallout 2 had just begun to be advertised heavily in PC gamer magazines, Exile III looked truly horrible.

None the less, on my families new blazingly fast "rig", we played only a light smattering of the PC gaming world's biggest brightest graphical beasts, Quake II and so forth and so on.

--

The game screen in the entire Exile series is a small rectangle, about 1/5th the size of any desktop. There are no cut scenes, and only slim traces of audio garnered from a few low-bit public domain sound libraries. There is no music to speak of, save for a few bars during a fan-art style title screen.

If an art historian were to guess the age of origin of the Exile III graphics, they might spot it as pre-medieval religious art, hyroglyphs, or even cave drawings.

Art Historian

"Thousands of years ago," they would explain, "mankind hadn't discovered the craft of visually representing three-dimensions on a two-dimensional surface," taking long pauses to studder and move their hands about, "so they took creative liberties to get the point across."

But mankind named Jeff Vogel still didn't know how to solve that problem in 1997 and still doesn't today.

II

Sitting there in the stale underground air, Brendan and I were about to purchase a house. We had played for probably six hours that day. Later that night he would sleep over, and we would wake up extra early the next day to play for another six. My parents would look down on this behavior.

"Why don't you guys go outside again? Haven't you had enough of that game?",
and his parents would have his head for it.

But we loved Exile III, and we were about to purchase a home together.

We had saved up money as I remember, for quite a long time. It was fairly expensive, the house was, and when we finally payed for it, got the key and went there, it was like no feeling I had ever had in a game. Accomplishment. A sense of place, of belonging, of meaning for these little collections of visible pixels that we had given so much emphasis to in our short lives. Huddled up in towels on office swivel chairs in my newly finished basement, we had shared in the imagination of a world to which we belonged, and from this house, had found some semblance of permanence in our shared fantasy. What I remember most though, despite the accomplishment of home ownership, was that once we went in our house, we were stymied from exploring the whole of our domain by a magical barrier which none in our party could dispel. A secret room in our own house thusly stayed secret indefinitely. Inside our own house. We were not the masters of the universe. The universe did not bend to us. It extended beyond our success; it did not want it or celebrate it, the Exile universe existed for its' own ends it seemed, and there was no possibility more exciting than this.

Happy Belated Birthday!

Whose?

Thank you, Spencer Hawes

Your near-triple-double in that sad little, late march game against the sixers meant a lot to me. Forever, I'll remember--in the same way middle school history books remember the battles of Lexington and Concord--your step-back jumper in the fourth quarter as the shot that saved my ass.



However well my first fantasy basketball season had been going, it was your second-half breakout in the very last Sunday game at the very end of the first week of the playoffs that brought me back. Larry Hughes (Aka, tatoo'd Judas Iscariot) had done his best to deceive me. For slender reasons Yao missed a game. For no reason at all Tim Duncan missed a game. For my own unreasonable need to feel clever, newly healthy Danny Granger stayed on the bench, missing all of the week's games. All of this after the very symbol of my success, Devin Harris, got injured on the eve of playoffs. So, with the time running down on Sunday night, after all the other results were in, down 3-5, after you'd had a disgraceful start in a fiasco of a team performance, I found your game streaming on the internet in time for the second half and prayed.

Then, Spencer, you seven foot patron saint of post moves, you did it. Slashing past the same Samuel Dalembert I'd dropped you for, you scored with a running hook. I cursed you for making a beautiful touch pass instead of taking the three that'dve won it. Then, after taking a breather at the beginning of the fourth that wore away at my nerves, you hit that one, otherwise insignificant jumper and though your team lost anyway, I was saved.

NBA Spencer Hawes Draft 2007 No. 10
Uploaded by Grdgez

It's too bad that the "political debates" Stu alludes to at the end of the clip exist because, Spencer Hawes, you are a 20-year-old millionare republican, but (in as much a display of my affection as anything) I'll forgive you that tonight and forever.

how it is that we have come to do as we do

I'll be straight with you. There has not been and may never be a true genesis party. The tyrannical will and evangelical vim for 16-bit revolution (the consummation of which, I suppose, would be the Genesis party) has been sapped by some combination of me n DLHB having a job, not having a job, the modern condition, basketball, and the technological superiority of the Xbox 360 over our old and cherished order of games.
Every day, DLHB, gets up at 3:30 AM, and with a meager breakfast in his belly walks out into weather cold enough to kill a man, takes a train to a bus to a train to a ten-mile walk uphill to a train to one last final walk/leap/crouching punch/jumpkick through a particularly unfriendly suburb until at 10 he arrives to his thankless work.


Me, I'm less burdened by the troubles of reality so much as I am entirely apart from the human race. In trying to write the Fallout 3 review which would unify the nodumbgames theory of past and present video games, I have lost my way. I could go on and on about this condition, but suffice it to say, in order to save money on rent I've moved into a stasis pod:



These are the troubles, the excuses, and not the real dirt at all; for that, I apologize. What you, dear reader, want to know is not why we are rutted but how we, nodumbgames, will deliver "the goods." Well, I'm glad you mentioned that! Unified theories are still to come, but in the meantime I thought I'd shore some fragments against my ruins and go back to glorifying the past. The exactitudes of our current joys and dissappointments can only really be made sense of through an understanding of where we come from, of what kind of games we stand for, etc. So, I'd like to propose a series of posts with the theme: "how it is that we have come to do as we do." Genesis games may only be the half of it (the other half are late 90's computer RPG's: Fallout, Baldur's Gate, Planescape: torment), but they're the half I'm going to give thanks and praise to for a while. So, prepare yourself for a list of my favorite genesis games of all time.