It’s my birthday today, and Rockstar has been kind enough to rerelease its 2010 western opus Red Dead Redemption on PlayStation 4 and Nintendo Switch (out tomorrow), as a slightly late birthday gift. It is indisputably a landmark game, less ambitious but also less self-indulgent than its 2018 sequel. The first game is tauter, its crafted set-pieces more memorable. Everyone who’s played it remembers that moment when you cross the border into Mexico, and José González starts to play as the sun rises. Few games boast a single moment that compares to it.
I played Red Dead Redemption the summer after I graduated university, mainlining the whole thing in three days. I remember getting inordinately attached to my horse, the vast desert expanses, the encroaching inevitability of its shock ending at John Marston’s farmhouse, which I saw coming but still gasped at. I remember hating the feds with every fibre of my being, and unexpectedly hating some of Marston’s former outlaw friends just as much. It was a game with no real winners – still unusual at the time – and took the same bleak view of humanity’s essential moral depravity as the Grand Theft Auto series, but with fewer off-colour jokes and more moments of fleeting beauty. I have been looking forward to playing it again.
However, as there almost always is when it comes to video game rereleases, there has been discourse. This is not, as fans had hoped, a ground-up remake of Red Dead Redemption – something akin to Naughty Dog’s perfectionist efforts on The Last of Us Part I, which brought the original game up to the stellar technological standards of the second. What we’re getting instead is a straight port, not even an upgrade. Given that there have been rumours about an RDR rerelease for years, it’s understandable that people were expecting more than this.
Rockstar has a curious relationship with its own history. It was responsible for several of the most important games of the 2000s and 2010s, yet the “definitive edition” rerelease of GTA III, Vice City and San Andreas in 2021 was a total embarrassment. The games were actively worse than the originals, unpleasant to play and an external studio’s attempts at bringing primitive early 2000s 3D graphics into the high-definition era resulted in, among other things, a nut being erroneously remastered into a wheel. The studio apologised for the state of Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy and vowed to improve it, but the games were still in a sub-par state when they were released on Steam earlier this year.
Why would Rockstar, famed for its attention to detail, not take its history into its own hands? Why wouldn’t it lavish these classic games with the same care and attention that, say, Nintendo, Capcom and Naughty Dog have been applying to their back catalogues? It’s not as if it doesn’t have the money – and 2013’s GTA V has been lovingly updated and upgraded for every new console in the past 10 years. The impression is that only a golden-goose game like GTA V is worth the effort in the eyes of Take-Two Interactive, Rockstar’s parent company.
Rockstar hasn’t sent out advance codes for Red Dead Redemption, so I can’t tell you if the port is good or not – though after spending years dealing with the GTA Trilogy debacle, you would hope lessons have been learned. Even if the port is fine, it’s not the remake or even the remaster that we were all hoping for. It might seem as if game studios can’t win when it comes to rereleasing old games – remember the upset over The Last of Us Part I’s £70 price tag? – but I would much rather pay full price to see a significant game brought to its fullest potential (see Shadow of the Colossus, Demon’s Souls, Metroid Prime and Resident Evil 4) than pay less for a port – especially when there are a new generation of players who won’t remember the first time around.
What to play
There are a few interesting games out this week, among them European swashbuckling action game En Garde and an intriguing-looking RPG about building an occult library, Book of Hours. This Friday sees the release of Bomb Rush Cyberfunk, a heavily Jet Set Radio-inspired action game that perfectly recaptures that early-00s graffiti-breakdance-and-rollerskates brand of urban cool. You bomb around New Amsterdam on a skateboard, BMX bike or skates, engaging in some enjoyable vandalism. I can’t take my eyes off it.
Available on: PC, Nintendo Switch (other platforms coming soon)
Approximate playtime: TBC
What to read
The Pokémon World Championships have wrapped up in Yokohama, Japan, where they went all-out on dressing the city up – there was a re-creation of Pokémon Red and Blue’s SS Anne in the harbour. It did not pass entirely without controversy, as several players were disqualified for using hacked Pokémon (a tactic that pro players sometimes use to save time training up a team).
Netflix is now streaming its catalogue of video games in a limited beta test. Most of the streamer’s (very good) game catalogue is designed for phones, but playing Oxenfree II on a TV would be better.
Baldur’s Gate 3 is an absolutely gigantic hit, and also the highest-rated PC game of all time on Metacritic. This is a year of enormous games: between Zelda TOTK, Starfield, Baldur’s Gate, Final Fantasy XVI and Diablo, how are we supposed to have time for anything else?!
The author of a book about the history of Tetris is suing the Tetris Company and Apple over its Tetris film, which, he alleges, re-creates the story as told in his book.
What to click
Stray Gods: The Roleplaying Musical review – a mythical gig where you shape the songs
Dordogne review – storybook game paints misty watercolour memories
Sword of the Sea channels surfing, spirituality and Shadow of the Colossus
Levelling up: how Gabrielle Zevin’s gaming novel became the book of the summer
Dungeons of Hinterberg: a game of hack ’n’ slash ’n’ schnitzels in the Austrian Alps
Dating at the end of the world: in Eternights, even the apocalypse can’t stand in the way of love
Question Block
Reader Ben steps up with this week’s question:
“I’m a linguist who researches dialect variation in English and I’m fascinated by dialect and accent variation in culture. I found Disco Elysium used accents amazingly to give its characters life and depth (there’s even an academic article on this). What are some of the best (or worst) accents you’ve heard utilised in video games?”
I remain appalled by the “Scottish” accent players were subjected to when they began the classic strategy game Age of Empires II, which opened with a William Wallace campaign (“We Scoddish have a rrrrabble of untrained soldiers!”). I was sufficiently offended by it 20 years later to insist, during an interview with the studio that remade Age of Empires II in 2019, that they fix it. In fairness, they did.
As for good use of accents, though: FromSoft’s games have always surprised me with the quality and authenticity of their voice casting and acting, populating their fantasy worlds with regional English, Scottish and Welsh-sounding characters who don’t make you want to cringe yourself inside out. Assassin’s Creed, meanwhile, no matter what its historical setting, veers so often between laughably awful and actually-quite-good that it’s frankly disorienting.
If you’ve got a question for Question Block – or anything else to say about the newsletter – hit reply or email us on pushingbuttons@theguardian.com
