video game post ahoy
Since my LJ's been kind of a giant downer-fest lately (reasonably so, I think, but still), I'm going to talk about stuff that's not even remotely connected to Ivan's cancer or my job or my stupid class that just ended, because all of those things make me sad and/or cranky, and I'm tired of feeling sad and cranky all the time.
There's some good stuff on the horizon, at least? Nate's potentially closing on the house this Friday, which is something we're both kind of desperate for at this point. We've got our fingers crossed that everything will finally work out, and then we can paint and re-floor and ~*move*~ and everything will be SUNSHINE AND RAINBOWS AND AWESOMENESS THE END.
Also, ferrets. And possibly chickens. We're pretty keen on the idea of keeping chickens.
I've spent the last week playing the hell out of Red Dead Redemption, and sweet tapdancing christ, that there is an amazing game. AMAZING. It feels more like an interactive movie than a game to me, and it didn't take very long at all for me to get deeply invested in John Marston and his story. As with most Rockstar productions, you can make him a complete and utter bastard in the sandbox portions of the game, but I preferred to play him as a good guy and to my pleasant surprise the game allowed me to do so just about every step of the way. He's a wonderfully sympathetic antihero, rather similar to William Munny in Unforgiven -- he was a bad man once upon a time, a man who did very bad things and doesn't seem all that remorseful about it. But after the gang he ran with betrayed him and left him for dead, he and his wife settled down to live the straight life, one where they could do honest work and give their son the kind of life neither of them had.
What I love is that this isn't a conceit on Marston's part in the least. Even though they're struggling to make ends meet, he's genuinely committed to his little farm and wants to see it succeed, and he loves the bejeesus out of his family. Like, seriously. He LOVES them. In fact, his love for them drives the entire plot of the game. When some of the men he used to run with get too powerful and start causing trouble, federal justice agents decide that the best and easiest way to bring them in is to use one of the old gang members to do it -- in this case, one John Marston. The way they get Marston to go about cooperating with them? They fucking KIDNAP his family, and threaten to kill them unless he does what they want! AND they lecture him all the while about what a horrible person he used to be and how he should've known his past would catch up with him, how they're bringing law and order and civilization to the chaos of the dying old west.
Their hypocrisy, of course, is staggering. It's pretty damn obvious that the Marston family is struggling on its shitty little farm; Marston could've easily ridden a county over and held up a bank or two in order to get his family through the winter, or rustled some cows to get his homestead back on its feet. But he didn't, because even if he and Abigail were somewhat ambivalent about the criminal life they used to lead -- they grew up in it, so it was pretty much all they knew -- they wanted something better for their son. But to the feds, a criminal is always a criminal, and they truly don't see anything wrong with forcing Marston's hand through threats of violence against those he holds dear. The way they see it, he's still a murdering scumbag and his wife is a whore, and the son, well...with parents like that, he surely would've turned bad anyway.
What's amazing to me is just how sympathetic Marston is, especially given his past. When he talks about his family with Bonnie, you can see just how much he misses them, and as the game progresses and the agents continue to dangle the safe return of his loved ones in front of him like a particularly sadistic carrot, it's painful to see the buildup of rage and helplessness and despair in him. Marston does some bad things over the course of the game. Bad, bad things. And yet you feel for him, because every awful thing he does is because with all the blood on his hands already, he doesn't want the blood of his wife and son on them as well. There's a point in the game towards the end, when Marston has finally completed the last of the tasks the agents have set out for him and once again demands his family's safe return. The leader of the two agents, Agent Ross, remarks with cruel offhandedness that Abigail Marston was oh so tragically killed in a prison riot, so sorry, too bad...
And the look on John Marston's face. Oh my GOD. Moments like that are where the game's graphics really shine, because all you see on his face is a brief spasm of pain and utter despair before it's eclipsed with cold flat RAGE as he raises his gun so he can shoot Agent Ross right in the fucking face, even though he knows it's going to get him killed. In that moment, he doesn't give a rat's ass if they kill him or not, because whatever kind of man he was before, he's now the kind of man who would die for his family and would die avenging them if it came to it. Even at the cost of his own life, he will make them PAY.
He doesn't end up shooting Ross, of course, because it turns out that Ross is even more of spectacular dickbag than you'd realized and he was just kidding around, but still -- I had a horrible feeling that the game was going to go precisely this route and kill off his family before he ever got back to them, because that seemed like a very deconstructionist Western movie thing to do and the game thus far had NOT been very kind to its good guys. But I was wrong! His family is alive! And let me tell you, the moment when he finally gets back to them was as satisfying as anything I'd experienced in a movie or book or tv show. His desire to keep them safe was his raison d'etre for every single thing he did in the whole damn game, and to have him finally get them back....
I'm not gonna lie, I teared up a little on the ride back to the homestead. When he got off his horse, calling for Abigail, for Jack, the expression of nervous excitement on his face...got me right in the heartstrings. And then. AND THEN. You get to interact with the family for a while! In retrospect, I should've been a little suspicious about the fact that character development was happening even after the game had "ended", but after everything Marston had been through it was just awesome to see him happy. The voice acting and graphics really shone here was well, because after seeing Marston hard and grizzled and miserable for the entire game, it was novel seeing the way his tone of voice and body language changed once he was relaxed and with his loved ones again. I loved getting to see him reconnect with Abigail, the way they teased each other and interacted with the sort of loving exasperation two people have when they've been together a while and know all of each others' quirks. And his efforts to regain Jack's trust. GUH. He's trying SO HARD to be a good father and it's clear he has no fucking clue what he's doing, and I kind of loved getting to see that. When they finally do get to a point where they're okay with each other, it's pretty goddamn heartwarming.
And now I want to talk about the climax of the game, or what I think the TRUE climax is, and seriously, there are some BIG GODDAMN SPOILERS HERE, I AM SO NOT KIDDING.
Like I said above, I should've known that the "end" of the game wasn't really the end. Given the tenor of everything that came before, there was no way that Marston was going to be allowed a happy ending. Shit, the agents themselves talked about how disgusted they were that John thought he could go off and have a normal, happy life after the things he'd done when he was part of Dutch's gang. Someone like him, they said, didn't DESERVE to settle down and be happy, because his debt to society had never been repaid. It's one of the reasons Agent Ross held him in such contempt, I think -- he couldn't believe that Marston had the balls to think he deserved a quiet, normal life just like everyone else. A world with John Marston in it is a world Ross can't abide, and so he sends in the army to take him out.
A fucking army!
As soon as Uncle was killed, I knew things weren't going to end well. And when Marston and Abigail and Jack holed up in the barn and Marston told them to escape out the back while he held off the army? Siiiiiinking feeling as to how things were going to go down. The moment he kissed his wife and told her how much he loved her, I knew he was a dead man.
I suppose it's a testament to the storytelling abilities of the Rockstar crew that even though I knew Marston was going to die, I still started sniffling when he stepped out of the barn to face the army amassed outside. It was because he'd gone through so much to get there, because -- no matter what Agent Ross thought -- he didn't deserve to die. It was because in stepping outside to face them down, he was making the ultimate sacrifice for his family, because he knew, without a doubt, that Ross was never, ever going to stop hunting him until he'd paid his dues in blood, and that if he'd tried to escape along with Abigail and Jack, the blood paid would be theirs. After everything they'd gone through, because of everything they'd gone through, he couldn't let that happen.
So he faced them down.
And they shot him dead.
At that point, I had to put the controller down because I was all-out sobbing, and I felt kind of like an idiot for bawling like that at a video game in the middle of our living room. Thank god I was the only one home.
(Even worse is when you suddenly flash to Jack and Abigail fleeing on the horse, and Abigail, upon hearing the roar of the guns, wretchedly cries that they need to go back, GO BACK, and you realize that not only are you controlling Jack instead of the now-murdered John, but you have to go back to the farm and find his bloody and battered dead body and it is AWFUL, IT IS SO FUCKING AWFUL AND ABIGAIL JUST BREAKS THE FUCK DOWN AND STARTS SOBBING OVER HER HUSBAND'S DEAD BODY and I had to walk away from the game for a while because I couldn't stop crying. Goddamn, Rockstar. You evil, brilliant fuckers.)
Anyway. You resume playing as Jack, three years later, and in the grand tradition of Inigo Montoya you can hunt down Agent Ross and kill him for murdering your father. But it's weird...while I did experience a visceral satisfaction in bringing the bastard down, I felt sort of hollow after. For all of Marston's efforts to give Jack a normal life so he wouldn't fall into a life of crime and killing, Jack still goes off and becomes a killer anyway. I think you can argue that it's a fundamentally different sort of killing, at least by the logic of the game -- when bringing cattle back from Bonnie's ranch, John and Jack have a conversation about justified vs. unjustified killing, and I think we're supposed to think of Ross's death as the justified sort -- but since we didn't get to see those three years between Marston's death and Jack's avenging of it, I don't think it was as satisfying as it could've been. After all, we're not killing Ross because we feel sorry for Jack; we're killing Ross because we got attached to John and want the fucker to pay for murdering him in cold blood. Jack is the means to that end, but since we don't know what impact his father's death had on him, it definitely belongs to the "telling vs. showing" school of character development.
I'm probably going to shoot for 100% completion, because I like that sort of thing, but I can't say I actively enjoy playing as Jack, not the way I enjoyed playing as John. I was able to get attached to John Marston in a way that I don't think I'll ever get attached to Jack, because over the course of the game you get to know the man and his demons and why it made such beautiful and painful sense for him to die even though he'd finally managed to get things right. Unless there's some really amazing DLC on the way, I doubt we'll ever achieve that kind of connection with Jack. John Marston had a story, and you got to help him along the way. Jack Marston, on the other hand, is pretty much a direct proxy for the player, and you can create a story for him rather than accompany him through one. There's nothing objectively wrong with this -- I think it's just a different style of play that encourages a different sort of character/player connection.
I actually have a lot more I want to say about the ending, but I think I'll save it for a different post. This one got way bigger than I intended, and I feel a pressing need to watch Deadwood for a bit.
There's some good stuff on the horizon, at least? Nate's potentially closing on the house this Friday, which is something we're both kind of desperate for at this point. We've got our fingers crossed that everything will finally work out, and then we can paint and re-floor and ~*move*~ and everything will be SUNSHINE AND RAINBOWS AND AWESOMENESS THE END.
Also, ferrets. And possibly chickens. We're pretty keen on the idea of keeping chickens.
I've spent the last week playing the hell out of Red Dead Redemption, and sweet tapdancing christ, that there is an amazing game. AMAZING. It feels more like an interactive movie than a game to me, and it didn't take very long at all for me to get deeply invested in John Marston and his story. As with most Rockstar productions, you can make him a complete and utter bastard in the sandbox portions of the game, but I preferred to play him as a good guy and to my pleasant surprise the game allowed me to do so just about every step of the way. He's a wonderfully sympathetic antihero, rather similar to William Munny in Unforgiven -- he was a bad man once upon a time, a man who did very bad things and doesn't seem all that remorseful about it. But after the gang he ran with betrayed him and left him for dead, he and his wife settled down to live the straight life, one where they could do honest work and give their son the kind of life neither of them had.
What I love is that this isn't a conceit on Marston's part in the least. Even though they're struggling to make ends meet, he's genuinely committed to his little farm and wants to see it succeed, and he loves the bejeesus out of his family. Like, seriously. He LOVES them. In fact, his love for them drives the entire plot of the game. When some of the men he used to run with get too powerful and start causing trouble, federal justice agents decide that the best and easiest way to bring them in is to use one of the old gang members to do it -- in this case, one John Marston. The way they get Marston to go about cooperating with them? They fucking KIDNAP his family, and threaten to kill them unless he does what they want! AND they lecture him all the while about what a horrible person he used to be and how he should've known his past would catch up with him, how they're bringing law and order and civilization to the chaos of the dying old west.
Their hypocrisy, of course, is staggering. It's pretty damn obvious that the Marston family is struggling on its shitty little farm; Marston could've easily ridden a county over and held up a bank or two in order to get his family through the winter, or rustled some cows to get his homestead back on its feet. But he didn't, because even if he and Abigail were somewhat ambivalent about the criminal life they used to lead -- they grew up in it, so it was pretty much all they knew -- they wanted something better for their son. But to the feds, a criminal is always a criminal, and they truly don't see anything wrong with forcing Marston's hand through threats of violence against those he holds dear. The way they see it, he's still a murdering scumbag and his wife is a whore, and the son, well...with parents like that, he surely would've turned bad anyway.
What's amazing to me is just how sympathetic Marston is, especially given his past. When he talks about his family with Bonnie, you can see just how much he misses them, and as the game progresses and the agents continue to dangle the safe return of his loved ones in front of him like a particularly sadistic carrot, it's painful to see the buildup of rage and helplessness and despair in him. Marston does some bad things over the course of the game. Bad, bad things. And yet you feel for him, because every awful thing he does is because with all the blood on his hands already, he doesn't want the blood of his wife and son on them as well. There's a point in the game towards the end, when Marston has finally completed the last of the tasks the agents have set out for him and once again demands his family's safe return. The leader of the two agents, Agent Ross, remarks with cruel offhandedness that Abigail Marston was oh so tragically killed in a prison riot, so sorry, too bad...
And the look on John Marston's face. Oh my GOD. Moments like that are where the game's graphics really shine, because all you see on his face is a brief spasm of pain and utter despair before it's eclipsed with cold flat RAGE as he raises his gun so he can shoot Agent Ross right in the fucking face, even though he knows it's going to get him killed. In that moment, he doesn't give a rat's ass if they kill him or not, because whatever kind of man he was before, he's now the kind of man who would die for his family and would die avenging them if it came to it. Even at the cost of his own life, he will make them PAY.
He doesn't end up shooting Ross, of course, because it turns out that Ross is even more of spectacular dickbag than you'd realized and he was just kidding around, but still -- I had a horrible feeling that the game was going to go precisely this route and kill off his family before he ever got back to them, because that seemed like a very deconstructionist Western movie thing to do and the game thus far had NOT been very kind to its good guys. But I was wrong! His family is alive! And let me tell you, the moment when he finally gets back to them was as satisfying as anything I'd experienced in a movie or book or tv show. His desire to keep them safe was his raison d'etre for every single thing he did in the whole damn game, and to have him finally get them back....
I'm not gonna lie, I teared up a little on the ride back to the homestead. When he got off his horse, calling for Abigail, for Jack, the expression of nervous excitement on his face...got me right in the heartstrings. And then. AND THEN. You get to interact with the family for a while! In retrospect, I should've been a little suspicious about the fact that character development was happening even after the game had "ended", but after everything Marston had been through it was just awesome to see him happy. The voice acting and graphics really shone here was well, because after seeing Marston hard and grizzled and miserable for the entire game, it was novel seeing the way his tone of voice and body language changed once he was relaxed and with his loved ones again. I loved getting to see him reconnect with Abigail, the way they teased each other and interacted with the sort of loving exasperation two people have when they've been together a while and know all of each others' quirks. And his efforts to regain Jack's trust. GUH. He's trying SO HARD to be a good father and it's clear he has no fucking clue what he's doing, and I kind of loved getting to see that. When they finally do get to a point where they're okay with each other, it's pretty goddamn heartwarming.
And now I want to talk about the climax of the game, or what I think the TRUE climax is, and seriously, there are some BIG GODDAMN SPOILERS HERE, I AM SO NOT KIDDING.
Like I said above, I should've known that the "end" of the game wasn't really the end. Given the tenor of everything that came before, there was no way that Marston was going to be allowed a happy ending. Shit, the agents themselves talked about how disgusted they were that John thought he could go off and have a normal, happy life after the things he'd done when he was part of Dutch's gang. Someone like him, they said, didn't DESERVE to settle down and be happy, because his debt to society had never been repaid. It's one of the reasons Agent Ross held him in such contempt, I think -- he couldn't believe that Marston had the balls to think he deserved a quiet, normal life just like everyone else. A world with John Marston in it is a world Ross can't abide, and so he sends in the army to take him out.
A fucking army!
As soon as Uncle was killed, I knew things weren't going to end well. And when Marston and Abigail and Jack holed up in the barn and Marston told them to escape out the back while he held off the army? Siiiiiinking feeling as to how things were going to go down. The moment he kissed his wife and told her how much he loved her, I knew he was a dead man.
I suppose it's a testament to the storytelling abilities of the Rockstar crew that even though I knew Marston was going to die, I still started sniffling when he stepped out of the barn to face the army amassed outside. It was because he'd gone through so much to get there, because -- no matter what Agent Ross thought -- he didn't deserve to die. It was because in stepping outside to face them down, he was making the ultimate sacrifice for his family, because he knew, without a doubt, that Ross was never, ever going to stop hunting him until he'd paid his dues in blood, and that if he'd tried to escape along with Abigail and Jack, the blood paid would be theirs. After everything they'd gone through, because of everything they'd gone through, he couldn't let that happen.
So he faced them down.
And they shot him dead.
At that point, I had to put the controller down because I was all-out sobbing, and I felt kind of like an idiot for bawling like that at a video game in the middle of our living room. Thank god I was the only one home.
(Even worse is when you suddenly flash to Jack and Abigail fleeing on the horse, and Abigail, upon hearing the roar of the guns, wretchedly cries that they need to go back, GO BACK, and you realize that not only are you controlling Jack instead of the now-murdered John, but you have to go back to the farm and find his bloody and battered dead body and it is AWFUL, IT IS SO FUCKING AWFUL AND ABIGAIL JUST BREAKS THE FUCK DOWN AND STARTS SOBBING OVER HER HUSBAND'S DEAD BODY and I had to walk away from the game for a while because I couldn't stop crying. Goddamn, Rockstar. You evil, brilliant fuckers.)
Anyway. You resume playing as Jack, three years later, and in the grand tradition of Inigo Montoya you can hunt down Agent Ross and kill him for murdering your father. But it's weird...while I did experience a visceral satisfaction in bringing the bastard down, I felt sort of hollow after. For all of Marston's efforts to give Jack a normal life so he wouldn't fall into a life of crime and killing, Jack still goes off and becomes a killer anyway. I think you can argue that it's a fundamentally different sort of killing, at least by the logic of the game -- when bringing cattle back from Bonnie's ranch, John and Jack have a conversation about justified vs. unjustified killing, and I think we're supposed to think of Ross's death as the justified sort -- but since we didn't get to see those three years between Marston's death and Jack's avenging of it, I don't think it was as satisfying as it could've been. After all, we're not killing Ross because we feel sorry for Jack; we're killing Ross because we got attached to John and want the fucker to pay for murdering him in cold blood. Jack is the means to that end, but since we don't know what impact his father's death had on him, it definitely belongs to the "telling vs. showing" school of character development.
I'm probably going to shoot for 100% completion, because I like that sort of thing, but I can't say I actively enjoy playing as Jack, not the way I enjoyed playing as John. I was able to get attached to John Marston in a way that I don't think I'll ever get attached to Jack, because over the course of the game you get to know the man and his demons and why it made such beautiful and painful sense for him to die even though he'd finally managed to get things right. Unless there's some really amazing DLC on the way, I doubt we'll ever achieve that kind of connection with Jack. John Marston had a story, and you got to help him along the way. Jack Marston, on the other hand, is pretty much a direct proxy for the player, and you can create a story for him rather than accompany him through one. There's nothing objectively wrong with this -- I think it's just a different style of play that encourages a different sort of character/player connection.
I actually have a lot more I want to say about the ending, but I think I'll save it for a different post. This one got way bigger than I intended, and I feel a pressing need to watch Deadwood for a bit.