Undead Nightmare - Putting Down The Dead

This is the end. The end of Undead Nightmare, the end of Red Dead Redemption. Except for the fact that I do actually enjoy playing this game online with some buddies. I might post about that once and awhile. There will also be the final thoughts post that I like to do.

I believe I’ve mentioned that I really love my horse right? War is a better horse then Bucky, but that’s not fair to compare Bucky to a mythical creature. On my way to Reyes I encountered another mythical creature. This time is was Famine, another horse of the Apocalypse. I did tame Famine, but I instantly got off him and immediately grabbed War again. I rode all the way back to town just to hitch up War and make him my special mount. I would rather ride a horse that is on fire then one that is surrounded by flies. War also burns zombies, that’s a major plus.

I finally made it to Reyes and much to my expectations the guy had been turned into a zombie. I don’t get the choice to hogtie him, I have to kill him. I happily blew off his head with the butt of my rifle. Reyes had this coming for a looooooooooong time now. The guy was shallow and a glory hound. If you read the paper while playing as Jack in the main game you know that eventually becomes as bad of a tyrant as the man he deposed. He had been chasing some lady around and now that she was safe she decided to reveal the truth to John Marston.

Reyes learned of an ancient mask that would supposedly grant him invincibility, probably immortality too. The mask was coincidently below the very estate where Reyes was staying. Down he went into the tomb and he stole the mask, unleashing a curse that brought the dead back to life. The only way to lift the curse is to put the mask back. Sounds simple enough.

So down goes John Marston into this tomb with this lady in tow. She just has to come along for some strange reason. I wouldn’t mind so much except for the fact that SHE WOULDN’T SHUT UP!!! I so wanted to kill her by the time we reached the end. The entire time yammering on about “can a bad man have a good soul” or “you find yourself at the oddest of times”. Mystical fortune cookie crap that all ends up better in bed.

This is made even worse that John keeps claiming that he knows her from somewhere. I cannot remember running into this lady at all during the entire adventure. She might have been a nun that talked to the Mother Superior, but I don’t remember her.

The final dungeon (the only dungeon?) isn’t all that challenging either. I had so much ammo by this point that I was more than willing to burn through it. Plus, there’s no final boss of any sort. The last room has a few mobs spawn in it in close vicinity and there’s not a ton of room to maneuver, but they were easy enough to put down. I never once felt that I was in danger. Final fights should be full of danger and desperation, that’s what makes them worth the effort. When you overcome that final challenge you feel a sense of accomplishment. That was missing here.

John puts the mask back on the altar and nothing seems to happen. There’s no release of power or anything. The mask just sits there, doing nothing. After the lack of a final battle it’s disappointing, but at the same time it is very suitable to the story. The lady “mysteriously” vanishes (I peronally think she’s hiding behind a pillar) and reveals that her name is (need name), the goddess that Jack mentioned at the beginning of the game. I guess the mask was hers. She tells John to go home.

John does and there is his family still tied up. He releases them, they make a few quips, Jack takes a moment to whine about his dad leaving and the game ends.

Or does it?

A few months later John Marston is dead. But down in Mexico that creepy Seth Briars has snuck into the tomb. He was very happy with the undead and he wants them back. He steals the mask and runs away. It’s at this point that John Marston comes rising out of the grave as a zombie, but as a zombie with a soul. Apparently his family poured holy water on him when they buried him. That was very thoughtful, even if it was an accident.  I’m a little confused if they actually poured it on him or just buried him with it. Either way he’s not a brainless zombie. You also get Death, the final horse of the Apocalypse. I guess I need to find Pestilence, the third horse of the Apocalypse still.

I would think that at this point you can go running around and try to get the mask back from Seth, kind of like when Jack got to take out Agent Ross, but that’s not the case. Seth is nowhere to be found. It’s a bit of a letdown. You can run around and complete the various challenges, but there is no more story.

Final Thoughts are next.

Undead Nightmare - Zombies in Mexico

You know what really sucks about my game freezing. I had to it all again. I had to get the uniform again and ride the train again. I am so grateful for autosave though. If this was the only mission I had to redo then you won’t hear me complaining too much. It had been a while since I had saved normally.

So I re-did the train mission and this time I successfully made it into Mexico. There’s not a lot to do here it seems. Sure there are towns to save but that’s the easy part. I went to do a Stranger mission and found Mr. Landon Ricketts. I’m not horribly surprised that he’s still alive; I just felt that he was badly used at this point. In the main game he just kinda vanished. It’s only a little better here. He rambles on about how bad things are and how he’s never seen anything like it in his life, all in that calm demeanor of his. Then he asks John to bring him something that will attract the undead and some dynamite. Well that would be Mr. West Dickens’ tonic and some… dynamite, I already have both, but apparently I’m contractually obligated to wait a few hours. So I freed some towns.

When I get back Mr. Ricketts puts the dynamite in the bottle of tonic and calls it good. But he does this like its some big to-do. He has to be all careful and scientific-like. I don’t see why he can’t just shove the dynamite in the bottle and call it good. This is just sad. And that’s the only reason he showed up, to give John Marston a bottle of tonic with dynamite shoved in it. You don’t get to kill zombies together or rescue some poor innocent soul. The greatest gunman in legend snows up just to stick dynamite in some snake oil. Very. Lame.

I decided after that to go do the main story mission. These missions deal with the Mother Superior of a nearby abbey. This lady is pretty cool overall and I really like her. She has a good head on her shoulders for a nun. She’s also the only new mission giver in the entire game. Well, there was that girl back at the beginning of the game, the one who had John burn her uncle Mordecai, but I don’t count her.

The Mother Superior missions are simple enough; free the abbey, then bring her a zombie to test on, and burn a graveyard (I got to kill De Santa again! Nice!). The zombie was hard to bring back, I kept getting attacked by wolves and that made it hard to get him on my horse. She eventually determines that the zombification is a disease of the soul. John gets holy water, another throwable item that I will never use.

The Mother Superior eventually points John to one Abraham Reyes as a potential cause of all of these problems. I decide to liberate all of the remaining towns first. I get the trophy Spinning Plates for my effort. Yea…?

Undead Nightmare - Frozen Solid

 So I’ve added ads to the site. Figured I could try to make a little extra off of them. Please click on them and maybe I could use the money to buy a few more games. It would be appreciated.

 So bounties are back, just in the new form of “missing person”. Works like it sounds, a person cannot be found so Mr. Marston takes down their poster and goes and looks for that person. The goal is to bring them back alive. You get some ammo out of it, but I got bored really quickly and moved on. I had to find my way into Mexico.

Mr. West Dickens informs John of a military train that is heading to Mexico. He also tells John where some Army deserters are located and that maybe John can get a uniform form them. Getting the uniform is pretty straight forward. Save the soldiers from a zombie horde and they gladly turn over a uniform. Boy does John look spiffy in his new getup, just like a Boy Scout.

Next stop is the train. Nobody at the train questions John’s arrival, but they all gladly take his help, especially since the train is being overrun by zombies. I wish my Blunderbuss worked. There’s a long section of killing zombies while you’re on it. I liked nailing the Retcher zombies with headshots and watching them explode while they took out surrounding zombies. That’s good stuff and a useful tactic that I’ll make use of later.

Now the Mexicans got smart, they put a large roadblock on the tracks trying to keep people from crossing the border. Mexico appears to be where all of this started so it only makes sense to try to keep it from spreading, too bad that plan failed. Swarmed by more zombies that soldier all run away leaving John to do this himself. His plan is to just smash the train through the roadblock. I would have done the same thing.

I tried to get my horse on the train, but he wouldn’t jump high enough to make it. It had me very, very sad. I was pretty sure that I wouldn’t lose him, but I still wanted to bring him with me on the train. He’s an awesome horse.

So off we went to smash through some roadblocks. So off w3 wAnt to sma\@sh through some roadblockssss. S* of^f w% went to smash thr0(ugh soeπ ro=@dblocks. So oϡf    Ϣ3 w3%t t… sЂ®®sh thr\\ѽѽh ᴚᴓme r^aᴆlᴔcks.

What the hell? Why is it just sitting there? It froze? My game FROZE?! SONOFA…..!

Undead Nightmare - My Horse Matters

You do NOT kill my horse. Ever! Especially not a horse as awesome as War. I love War and many people died because of his death. Fine it was only one person who died, but the jerk deserved it. There are these “doctors” that are in the wilderness. They want John to bring them a “live” zombie. These “doctors” have machine-guns in their camp and they are using them when you first show up. I didn’t know this and poor War ran right in front of the machine-gun. He died. Then I killed the doctor in revenge. Since I love this horse so much though, I reset my game and got my horse back. Sure I lost an hour’s worth of playtime, but it was worth it.

With all of the graveyards cleared out I went back and talked to Seth. Seth is really happy that the dead are roaming the Earth. It has made his life far more enjoyable. Personally I think the guy is just out of his mind. He’s having a creepy little undead party at his place and he’s hitting on two zombie chicks. Seth swallows the glass eye to prove that the eye has nothing to do with it. He does tell John that the problem is Aztec, or Inca or something along those lines, basically he says go down to Mexico. I will, but not until I deal with the other mission string in New Austin.

But first I have to watch a film director/producer guy get eaten by zombies. Moron.

The next set of mission strings has to deal with Mr. Nigel West Dickens, a character that I have never liked and this doesn’t make him any better. He’s holed up with Ft. Mercer, a perpetual safe zone, trying to peddle his “tonic” as a way to save yourself from the zombie plague. I hate crap like that. People are scared, lost, and confused and somebody tries to take advantage of that. Well it turns out that West Dickens’ “tonic” actually attracts zombies instead of repels them. Could be useful, but I rarely use thrown weapons. They take too long to use.

West Dickens sends me off on some wild goose chase to collect some plants for him. Hooray for gathering weeds. And these stupid weeds aren’t even close together! One set is in the Tall Trees area not far from John’s farm, the other set is Gaptooth Ridge on the eastern side of New Austin. What a load of crap that is. Supposedly these plants will allow West Dickens to fix his tonic. As far as I can tell it just makes the stuff more potent and more zombies are attracted to it. That’s the use of this stuff, you throw it on the ground and wait for zombies to come check it out, and then you shoot them all, or maybe use dynamite or something. I’ve never used the stuff.

Then West Dickens sends John out for some scrap parts since he feels that John is woefully under armed. John agrees and brings back the scraps to receive a Blunderbuss. The Blunderbuss is a fine , yet dangerous weapon to use. It has a long reload time but it uses unconventional ammo: undead parts. Or at least it would, except that mine broke and stopped working, FOR THE REST OF THE GAME!

Undead Nightmare - Short Round

No, I'm not making an Indiana Jones joke.

Have I talked about the map? The map is green, like snot green. And it has red water on it. I’m guessing it’s supposed to look like blood and the red and green color scheme should make you think of evil things. Instead I just of a bad Christmas were the colors have all faded and all of the presents are re-gifted fruitcake that you gave out last year. And fruitcake can be very tasty if made right.

Still have those days where I run around and I accomplish nothing story wise. Heck I don’t even get Stranger missions done sometimes. This play session wasn’t exactly that, I did clear a graveyard. That’s a quest given to John by Seth, so that would be story related then.

I didn’t recognize the boss zombie this time. Whenever a boss zombie appears they say something, but they are really hard to understand. The line they say is related to how they were in life. Like Alice moaning about her “special day”, all she wanted in life was to get married to Peter Turner but fate apparently had other plans for them. But I have no idea what this guy said.

I then cleared out another town. That leaves only one town on my map that needs to be saved, unless there are more hiding. I ran into a zombie that spits at you. It launches this massive green lugie and then they explode when you kill them. That is just nasty.

Was it really that light of a gaming session? I guess so.

Undead Nightmare - Townfolk

I was clearing out Coot’s cemetery. I finally figured out exactly how cemetery’s work. You have to burn a set number of coffins and then clear out the cemetery of the remaining undead. I find it easiest to burn all of the coffins first before even engaging the undead. Eventually a “boss zombie” will appear. When the boss appears pay attention to the name on the headstone, there are a lot of throwbacks to the main game. Like when Alice, the old lady who wanted to get married, crawled out of her grave. It brought a smile to my face knowing I got to put her back in the ground. She really should have just gotten on with her life.

Cemetery cleared I moved on to Armadillo. Now I ended up clearing this town of everybody. When I was trying to clear out the zombies one of the survivors was riding around on horseback. Eventually he got trapped and pulled off his horse by the zombie mob. Bad news is I was heading for the same group of zombies on the back of War. War ran over the zombies and the survivor and this counted as injuring the survivor. So now every other survivor in Armadillo was attacking John instead of the zombies. I was pleasantly surprised that I was able to kill off the zombies and then the survivors without dying. I swear I kept finding more survivors too and they never stopped shooting at me.

I did a mission for the Marshall in Armadillo. Nice to see he’s still alive, I really liked the guy. He was one of the more grounded, normal people in the game. Firm grasp on reality. Marshall asks John to find his deputies, Eli and Jonah. First stop was the general store where I met the most hate filled man alive, Herbert Moon. This guy hates everyone, Jews, Natives, Catholics, Homosexuals, “Colored Folk” (his words). The list goes on a bit and as John eventually points out he’s never met a Jew, but he’s judged them evil based off some bizarre twisted sense of history.

Now Herbert runs the general store in town and he seemed to be going about his business as usual, which doesn’t make sense in a zombie infested town. He was carrying some crates outside complaining to John that this used to be a decent country until the Jew, Catholic, Homosexuals showed up and ruined it. I must say, John had quite a smug look on his face when the zombies arrived to eat this guy. It was a happy day.

I did eventually find Eli and Jonah, after I killed another two more town survivors who wouldn’t stop shooting at me. I wasn’t all that shocked to learn that they had turned into zombies and were trying to eat each other. So John had to put them down and then go and tell the Marshall the news. Can’t really call it sad news though, those two were idiots.

I took out another graveyard. Good old Peter Turner showed up there. He was the other half of the story for the old lady who wanted to get married. Hopefully they’re together in death now. But I now demand that Jenny show up and get turned into a zombie by her ability to do absolutely nothing to save herself.

Saved a couple more towns. I’m running into these big, burly zombies now that like to rush John and bowl him over. I’ve taken a quick dislike to them. I’m also getting tired of the Torch. It just takes way too long to take out zombies with. I had to go back to Manzanita and re-save that town. I’m just glad that you can still quick travel to a town that has been re-overrun.

Undead Nightmare - Mythical Creatures

I would like to point out that no one in the game has used the word “zombie” yet. They’ve been called crazies, undead, the apocalypse, but not zombie.

Loaded up the game again and did some more town liberating. I really need to make a plan. Going up to Dutch’s camp last was a pretty stupid move. I was nearly to Thieves Landing and then I had to go all the way back up to clear the area out. I think it’s time to plot a course or something.

After some town rescues I found myself down at the McFarlane’s Ranch. This place was also overrun with Zombies. A Stranger mission popped up once I entered the Ranch and it couldn’t be accepted until the Ranch was zombie free. So John did his civic duty and cleared the place out. Once the zombies were gone Bonnie comes running out of the house happy to see John alive.

Bonnie tries to get her father to come and say hi to John but won’t respond. Mr. McFarlane has been rounding up zombies and putting them in the barn and he hasn’t been heard from since yesterday. Yeah…that doesn’t bode to well. John volunteers to look for the guy and it’s into the barn he goes. This time it’s filled with zombies instead of being on fire.

Filled might be the wrong word, there are only 4 and they’re really easy to snipe. Once on the ground floor John’s worst feelings are realized. Mr. McFarlane has turned into a zombie. Once again John puts him down and then has to go tell Bonnie the sad news. Maybe I could have hogtied him for a slightly happier outcome…

Once that was cleared I went in search of Seth. I found Seth down by the river playing cards, with a zombie. I shouldn’t be too surprised that Seth is getting along just fine with the undead, he always liked them better then the living anyways. John asks about the glass eye but Seth doesn’t have any answers. He sends John to burn more graveyards. I left Seth to (hopefully) get eaten by his zombie. Crazy old man.

And that was when it happened. I was riding to the graveyard when I received a message that a “mythical creature” had appeared in the area. So I went and investigated. Now I’ve been bummed that I didn’t get Bucky back at the start of this game. You would think that reading the old save file and transferring some data would have been easy, but all of that is about to go away. The mythical creature was a flaming horse. I figured it was a Nightmare. A horse with its hooves and mane on fire and I went out to capture it. The breaking mini-game is still as easy as ever and when I had captured this horse it turns out not to be a Nightmare, but War, one of the horses of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. I actually thought that War was the rider and the horse was named Ruin… Darksiders has told me wrong apparently.

But this horse is awesome. You ride over zombies and they catch on fire. War can still get stuck in a crowd so you have to be careful with him, but he looks sweet. I love this horse. Sorry Bucky.