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.