Red Dead Redemption - Horse and Kitty

I’ve had the same horse nearly the entire game. This isn’t like Grand Theft Auto where I could grab a car and successfully smash it up 3 seconds later. Horses are tough and they can take a beating. My horse is a palomino whom I’ve dubbed Bucky. He’s a Kentucky Saddler, and as I understand it, one of the better horses in the game. He’s been my companion for a long time and he’s even come back from the dead for me. A cougar once killed my horse, he came out of nowhere and one-shotted poor Bucky. I then killed the cougar and then I skinned Bucky. Sold off his hide and everything. What kind of a monster am I? Then I just whistled and he came running back to me. I love this horse. 

I’ve actually gotten mad when I couldn’t find my horse or use my horse. Like when Mr. West-Dickens entered Mr. Marston in a horse race, I ended up on a Paint! Where was Bucky during this race? I didn’t want this stupid Paint horse. I wanted my palomino back. You don’t come between a man and his horse. Unless it’s that Stranger mission where the guy wants his horse back for perverse reasons, then you’re free to intervene. 

Animals in this game have been very interesting. I can’t stand dealing with cougars. They are tough customers. They can kill your horse in one shot and they can drop Mr. Marston in two. Good use of your Dead Eye can be a major life saver with cougars. The best incident I’ve ever seen with a cougar though dealt with a train. I was on my way to capture a bounty when suddenly this brown blob bolted by me. I couldn’t figure out what it was at first. Eventually I realized that it was a cougar. I followed the cougar since I try to take them down whenever possible. Suddenly the cougar stopped at some train tracks. The cougar just politely sat there while the train when by. I guess it liked to count the cars or something.

As soon as the train passed the cougar bolted across the tracks and killed some innocent bystander. So the cougar literally waited for the train to pass before it took out its intended target. What a polite little kitty. I then shot, killed, and skinned the cougar. I’m pretty sure he had it coming.

Red Dead Redemption - Stranger Comes A Callin'

So I’ve been plowing right along through the game. I’ve talked about the amount of stuff there is to do in Red Dead Redemption and this time I’m going to talk a little bit about Strangers. In Red Dead, Strangers are people you’ll encounter who have little side missions for you to do. They differ from the random encounters in that once you finish with a Stranger, you’ll never encounter them again. Strangers give you some odd little things to do that’s for sure. But one of them really pissed me off.

I was riding around on my way from the McFarlane Ranch to the town of Armadillo. On my way I encountered a Stranger. This Stranger used a drowsing rod to find water. He had claimed to have found some on this old man’s land and he thought it would be a great idea if I went and talked to the guy about it. So I rode over to the old man and made him an offer. The old man would sell me his land for $200. I was a little short so I went back to Armadillo and took on a bounty mission.

After a quick bounty catch I went back to the old guy. I want to make this very clear that I paid the old man $200. The problem was that I acquired my rope recently so I was having fun hog tying everything, so I hog tied the old man and left. When I got back to the Stranger he got mad because there was blood on the deed and that I didn’t have to kill the old guy. I DIDN’T KILL THE OLD MAN! I left him alive. Sure he was hogtied, but he was alive when I left him. If there was blood on the deed it wasn’t form the old man. Stupid jerk.

I’ve done quite a few of these Stranger missions by now. Most of them have been pretty entertaining, especially the one where I had to gather flowers. There was this old guy who wanted to make a bouquet for his wife. Mr. Marston, being the nice guy that he decided to help. First off, I don’t know how this old guy was going to gather all these flowers. The three types of flowers that he wanted were all over the dumb map. That old guy probably would have died before he collected them all. 

I did laugh though when I gave him the flowers. He takes you home to meet his wife. Boy what a sight she is, all dead and rotting sitting in that rocking chair of hers. Poor old guy just can’t let go though. It’s kinda cute in a sad, pathetic kind of way.

I’ve done a ton more of these missions. The actor thing was funny, but confusing. I’ve mentioned before that my TV isn’t the biggest so that makes things hard to read with these newer consoles. I had to convince this actor to go back to his director/producer guy. The actor had convinced himself that he was a real wild-west gunslinger. I put that to bed pretty quickly when I shot him in the arm during a duel. But then I thought the mission objective was to bring the guy back, so I hogtied him.

Turns out that wasn’t the objective, I actually just had to take myself back to the director/producer guy. But the hogtying went down outside of a Marshall’s station. Pretty quickly I had a bounty on my head. But I still stuck the dumb actor on the back of my horse and took the guy back to the director as quickly as possible. I didn’t get any bonus points and worse, I had a bounty on my head. I keep wondering if I get my bounty high enough if bounty hunters will come after me. I do plenty of bounty missions though and the law always takes my bounty out of my payment.

Oh well, that’s just another day in New Austin.

Red Dead Redemption - Maybe A Little Too Much

I haven’t finished Dynasty Warriors 7 yet. I’m still working on Conquest mode but I only play that with my wife so it will take a little bit. In the meantime I’ve jumped back to Red Dead Redemption. I know Dynasty Warriors 7 interrupted Red Dead in the first place, but I’m not abandoning it. I’ll probably talk about Dynasty Warriors again at some point in the future.

The game is finally starting to grow on me. After that insanely boring and long opening I finally got to do stuff and boy is there a lot to do in this game. Maybe too much. I don’t see the point of herding cattle or roping horses. They just seem like time killers. Heck, most of the game is a massive time killer. I’ve played for two hours before and have accomplished nothing story wise. I’ve killed numerous animals, ran over nuns, watched a cartoon, captured bounties, shot sheriffs, raided gang hideouts, tried to slice my fingers off, and rescued countless civilians. There’s just that much to do.

But I find that I can’t pass up these opportunities. If I kill an animal I have to stop and skin it (why does it show blood splattering on my screen?). If I find a random encounter I have to help ( I find it funny that the sheriff will shoot prisoners who have escaped if you bring them back alive).  That’s just the way this game goes. I don’t like playing cards or dice though, but I’ve never been big into that kind of thing. It’s not like I really need the money, I always seem to have enough for my needs.

I don’t find myself using a lot of the weapons in this game. I’ll use a rifle on a regular basis. Pistol is mainly used for disarming enemies. I use the rope on the occasion as well, but not much else. I always have enough ammo and I get that from the people that I kill. The Dead Eye ability is getting trickier to use as well. It started off fairly simple. You press in on R3 and things slow down. You can then carefully place shots on your target. Then it started placing x’s on my targets. This allowed me to hit a target quickly with multiple shots, problem was I couldn’t control where the x would go. I’ve started shooting civilians at this point and it’s not on purpose.

This game is probably the best use of the Euphoria engine that I’ve ever seen. Granted the last game I remember using this engine was the Force Unleashed and that had some hilariously bad results. I once had two stormtroopers running at me. The second one clipped the first stormtroopers shoulder. The first stormtrooper then fell over a box and proceeded to convulse endlessly until he died. Since his feet couldn’t touch the ground the engine didn’t  know how to stand the poor guy back up. Thankfully Read Dead Redemption doesn’t have that problem. Characters are pretty good about finding their footing again, then they proceed to attack me. Normally because I’m the guy who knocked them down and normally I did with my horse. I them proceed to kill them and take a loss to my honor.

There’s one thing about games like Red Dead Redemption with the whole moral choice meter, I tend to play the good guy. It’s really easy to be jerk. When I did my second playthrough on Fable I decided to be a bad guy. I think it took 4 hours to be as evil as possible, I had horns, my eyes glowed red, there were flies buzzing around me. Sure I could kill everyone, but there was not challenge in it. Red Dead Redemption is the same way, being a good guy takes effort, being bad is easy. So I take the more challenging road. Plus, it seems to fit the character better.

John Marston seems like a guy with morals. I don’t get the impression that he would just because he can. He needs a reason, sure it might be a petty reason, but that’s the impression that I get.

Dynasty Warriors 7 - Where The Meat Is At

Conquest mode is the true game for Dynasty Warriors 7. This is where you get personal missions for every character, unlock their big weapons, unlock animal companions, and play multiplayer. Since this is the mode that every character is active in I accept it as the real game and Story mode as the side game. This brings up another pet-peeve of mine, online modes, but I’ll save that for later.

In Conquest mode you are given a map of China broken up into small hexagons (or are the pentagons?) Each hexagon is either a mission or a city. Cities are where you buy gear or animals, take tests, build bonds with other officers, or learn weapon skills. 

For the most part you can choose any character you want in this mode. Most of the missions are “dream scenarios” and have no impact on the actual story. Scattered about you’ll find missions for each character in the game. Completing a characters mission will unlock that character and give you wallpapers for the loading screen. So now I finally know how to unlock every character! Why did they bury them in this weird Conquest mode? 

For all that Conquest is the real game there’s not much to talk about. I keep changing characters because I can. It’s nice that the characters can have personal conversations with people they know. I laughed when Cao Pi had to fight his wife Zhen Ji. She greatly lamented her death at her beloved’s hands. But actions like that don’t seem to have any real consequences.

You can build bonds with other officers by helping them out during a mission. I assume if you have a strong bond you’ll get something good, but all of my bonds suck at the moment. You can also talk to a random officer in town and that will strengthen your bond with them.

I’m playing Conquest in multiplayer mode with my wife. Let me just say that she does not care about the story for any of these missions. She always grabs the same guy, Xiahou Dun, jumps on her horse and slaughters everything as quickly as possible while I’m actually trying to complete mission objectives. I constantly have to tell her where not to go. It doesn’t help any the arrow for her character is RED on the map. Enemy soldiers are also red dots on the map so it’s very easy for her to get lost. The designer who came up with that idea should be shot.  Maybe a bigger TV would help…

We’ve been playing on normal, but things seemed way too easy so I cranked up the difficulty to expert. The change is pretty drastic. We easily slaughtered all enemies in our path on normal mode, but we found ourselves easily slaughtered on expert. I knew things would be different and that we would need to be more careful, but this seemed like over kill. I just wanted the battles to last a little longer. Instead the opposite happened and we found ourselves quickly killed on every map we attempted. I changed the difficulty back to normal. We’ll keep it there for a little while longer.

It looks like we’re roughly a quarter of the way through Conquest and I’m having fun overall. Unlocking characters is nice but there’s no real desire to play them now. It almost feels like I’m just unlocking skins for the same character. The ex attack and musou help, but only a little. They made a lot of weapons for this game, so why not assign them to a specific character. I don’t need twelve characters that use the basic sword or spear. At least make their move sets unique. Make them feel special; it can really help push forward the drive to play.

Dynasty Warriors 7 - Jin To The End.

Jin, pronounced jean. They’re new. Normally Dynasty Warriors stops before it reaches this kingdom. In an attempt to add something new to the series Tecmo-Koei (or is it Koei-Tecmo?) introduced the fourth kingdom of the land of Jin. The story of Jin is really the story of the Sima clan and their rise to power.

Personally I would have preferred if this kingdom was cut and we got personalized weapons and stories for all the remaining characters. Odds are Jin is here to stay, so I’ll deal. But introducing Jin creates another problem for me. All of the original three kingdoms tell the same story they’ve always told. Why not stretch their stories to deal with Jin? Why stop Shu at Wu Zhang Plains? Shu is a major opponent of Jin so tell the story from the Shu side as well. But that’s not the case. We don’t get to know how pathetic Liu Shan really is. Or how much Wu has crumbled since we don’t get their side of the story. It’s just sad. This also leaves a large amount of characters untouched story wise. You never really Xing Cai or any of the other “next generation” characters.

So Wei is growing weak and the people are calling for change. Sima Yi, the great Wei strategist, eventually rises up and takes control. It’s interesting that he’s in charge but his never deposes the Wei emperor. Heck, the Wei emperor isn’t deposed until the story is over.  So Jin doesn’t really exist until the end credits.

Most of the story is about Wei’s inner turmoil during this time. Occasionally Shu makes an attack on Wei (you’ll be sick of the work benevolence by the end of the game) and then Wu will randomly show up. Wu’s attacks always seem forced. It has this “we can’t forget about Wu” feeling going for it. Doesn’t help that Wu only seems to have one unique general left, Ding Feng.

It isn’t until Sima Yi’s youngest son, Sima Zhao, takes power that the story finally moves forward. And boy is it a long story. The whole time I was wondering when Jin would conquer somebody and take control. The story takes forever to reach that point and when it does, it goes by very quickly.

Aside from the inner turmoil of Wei, Jin mainly deals with Shu. In fact that’s where the story ends. Jin conquers Shu in a very boring battle. At least they got Liu Shan’s surrender right. The guy pretty much gave up once his castle was surrounded even though he could have turned the tide of battle if he really put some effort into it. Once that battle is over the game ends. Wu crumples during the end cinematic. I guess they just weren’t worth the time to deal with.

Jin introduces a 8 new characters, even though Xiahou Ba IS NOT A JIN OFFICER! The guy defects to Shu early on in the Jin story and he stays there the entire time. That makes him as much a Jin officer as much as Guan Yu is a Wei officer for the time he spent serving Cao Cao. The rest of the officers are pretty neat. I really liked Deng Ai and the chick, Wang Yuanji. Guo Huai is a very bad running joke and Zhuge Dan you have to kill. The kingdom left an impression on me. Can’t say whether it was good or bad, it was a bit of both really. Hopefully they’ll be more interesting in the next game.

Conquest is up next

Dynasty Warriors 7 - Wei To Go

Is my network back up yet? Yes the network intrusion is a very bad thing for Sony, heck, for everyone involved. But I just want my network back up. I was going to buy a game and I’ve been enjoying some online play with Red Dead Redemption. Sony promised it would be back up this week, so where is it?

But I’m still talking about Dynasty Warriors 7. It’s time to discuss the “bad guys” of the series, the kingdom of Wei. Wei is under the command of Cao Cao, the Hero of Chaos. Cao Cao’s conquest is described as bloody and violent. His ultimate goal though seems to be to unite the people and to teach them how to take care of their selves. It’s a good and worthy goal. It’s got that whole “If you give a man a fish he’ll ear for a day, but if you teach him to fish he’ll eat for a lifetime” mentality to it. I like that angle.

Wei’s story moves at a decent pace. Eventually Cao Cao suffers a major setback. He seems to lose all of his spirit. I can safely say I wasn’t interested that much. Probably because I had to keep playing as Xu Zhu and I hate that massive tub of lard. I wanted to play as Cao Ren, who I’ve always enjoyed as a character.

Xu Zhu I loathe with a passion. I’ve never like the character of the “simple fat guy who’s as strong as an ox, but has the heart of a child.” If Xu Zhu has the heart of a child then it’s because he ate it. The lame air-plowing scene with Dian Wei just made me hate the character more, especially since Dian Wei died the next mission. I actually like Dian Wei. I would say that every character in the game is superior to Xu Zhu. Unfortunately he played a major part in Wei so they can’t get rid of him, unlike poor Pang De who was only in one game.

I would say that Wei has the most colorful cast of characters in it. I’m not sure if this works in its favor but it does give it a more unique feeling. But this is also the reason Wei’s always been my least favorite of the kingdoms. I’m not sold on the eclectic mix.  Wei is also one big setup for the kingdom of Jin now, since Jin grows out of Wei.

Heck, the last group of missions that you play as Shu has you fighting Jin officers, even though you’re fighting against Wei. It’s just a sad state to see Wei in.

After Cao Cao dies Cao Pi takes over. I’ve always liked Cao Pi since his introduction in Dynasty Warriors 5, but he doesn’t do much in this game. This is another problem I have with the game.  But I’ll cover that next time when I talk about the kingdom of Jin.

Dynasty Warriors 7 - Wu To You.

Still alive, believe it or not. I know it’s been a while, again. It seems that I might be in more of a position to get back to a regular update schedule. At least once, maybe twice a day, at least for a little while. I still want to take about Dynasty Warriors 7 some more. That will take up the next 4 posts I believe. Then I’ll be back on to Red Dead Redemption. I have plenty of options on where to go from there. I might even have time to do some of the rants that I’ve been wanting to do. For now, back to Dynasty Warriors.

After I completed the kingdom of Shu I moved on to the kingdome of Wu. Wu’s always felt like the third wheel in this conflict. They’re not depicted as good or bad, they just are. They’re a kingdom that it seems likes to a good fight. The do play a large part in the conflict between Shu and Wei since whoever has Wu on their side typically comes out victorious.

Wu used to have my favorite female character in it. Sun Shang Xang. Sadly they overhauled her in Dynasty Warriors 6 and she lost that tomboy attitude that I liked. Now she’s just another dainty girl out to prove how tough she is in the world of men. Meh, not interested.

The Wu kingdom goes through three rulers during it’s storyline. First is Sun Jian. You never really get to know this guy. He seems proud of his family and then he dies. No big loss. I remember when he would hang around through the entire game. I believe that was called Dynasty Warrios 4. He was also voiced by the excellent Steven j. Blum back then.
Next is Sun Ce. I’ve always liked Sun Ce and there’s no exception here. He’s a fun guy and he seems to inspire the people around him. His death comes to quickly for me, and it comes about in a rather bizarre fashion. Apparently some back guy forces him to deal with the ghosts of his past and then drops a load of archers on him.
Finally we reach Sun Quan and I’m not sure how to pronounce his name anymore. I always that is was pronounced like it was spelled, but in this game is seems to be pronounced Twan. Lots of name corrections in Dynasty Warriors 7. Characters I’ve known for a long time suddenly have odd names.

Quan iis a twat. He comes off as backstabbing and double-dealing.He sends his sister off to marry Liu Bei of Shu, then he turns around and attacks and kills the Shu Officer Guan Yu, even though he knows this this will bring down Shu’s wrath on his country.

That’s the way this guy works. He’s constantly changing sides. But he doesn’t care. As long as he keeps his family and friends safe he’s fine with changing side on a whim. I used to enjoy Wu’s wild card status in the game. Not so much anymore. Sure Quan is fighting for his family. But Liu Bei is trying to create a lan of virtue. Cao Cao is trying to strengthen the people, to teach them to care for themselves. Sun Quan is only protecting his family. It just seems small by comparison.

Next up is Wei.