Even if the port is fine, it’s not the remake or even the remaster that we were all hoping for. 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. 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. 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 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. 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. 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. Rockstar has a curious relationship with its own history. Sub-par … San Andreas, from Grand Theft Auto The Trilogy: Definitive Edition. I have been looking forward to playing it again. 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 remember hating the feds with every fibre of my being, and unexpectedly hating some of Marston’s former outlaw friends just as much. 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 played Red Dead Redemption the summer after I graduated university, mainlining the whole thing in three days. Few games boast a single moment that compares to it. 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. The first game is tauter, its crafted set-pieces more memorable. It is indisputably a landmark game, less ambitious but also less self-indulgent than its 2018 sequel. 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.
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