You're All Right, Girl.

[rionaleonhart]

Our cat Mabel has a habit of adopting soft toys and moving them around the flat. This means I recently turned around and found Rei's Banette lying on the floor of my bedroom.

Banette, if you're unfamiliar with this particular Pokémon, is canonically a cursed, murderous soft toy.

I was not very happy.


I worried at the start of Red Dead Redemption II that I wouldn't get along with this game. It's starting to click for me now, but it's not fun, if that makes sense. It's engaging and ambitious and immersive and beautiful, but it doesn't actually feel good to play. As a Wild West simulator, it does pretty well; as a game, it struggles.

Everything that isn't actual gameplay is great! It's very strange. I'm enjoying it, but I'm confused.

I love my horse dearly. At first, in the mission where you go to the stables and are forced to buy a horse, I went WAIT, WHAT, NO, I ALREADY HAVE A HORSE, DON'T FORCE ME TO - and then I inevitably fell in love with the horse I bought. Her name is Kay and she's a very good girl. Being able to stroke your horse at will is a great addition.

If I wanted to worry about keeping my videogame protagonists fed, though, I'd buy a Tamagotchi. And I wish there were a way to make Arthur hold on to the weapons you've equipped him with rather than shoving them enthusiastically into his saddlebag whenever he strays within two miles of his horse.

I'm also extremely bad at this game! At one point the police were looking for me and I tried to get away from the scene of my crime and rode Kay straight into a tree. I flew off my horse, my horse fell over, and the police came up and shot me while I was trying to recover.

I'm glad there are moments of humour. I think my favourite thing in the game so far is in the mission 'A Quiet Time', when you're gearing up for a bar fight and it immediately cuts to all of you dancing together. I also love that one of the missions is just shovelling manure.

I fuss over my horse a lot. I'll stroke her when I'm about to mount her or have just dismounted; I'll go to greet her in the morning when Arthur's just woken up. My housemates have started to express discomfort with the way Arthur coos over her and calls her a good girl. 'It sounds sexual.' I refuse to be deterred.

You can keep a handful of additional horses in the stables, so I still have my first horse, who's named Marcus after The 100's Kane. The other horse I have in the stable is Lady, an American Standardbred. I saw a guy trying to get a stone out of his horse's hoof on the side of the road, and the horse kicked him to death, and I went 'hey, free horse, I'm sure I absolutely will not regret this.' She kicked me a couple of times as well, but we're friends now.


On a different note entirely: today I tried to find out some information about newts and learnt they're a type of salamander and went 'wait, what' because somehow I have gone three decades believing that salamanders are fictional.

Comments

[wolfy_writing]

...that would absolutely be creepy with the stuffed animal, yes.

I love the whole saga of you and the horse! It sounds adorable!

...you thought salamanders were fictional?

[rionaleonhart]

I'm basically treating this game as a horse friendship simulator with a mysteriously non-horse-centric story bolted on.

Look, I correctly deduced there was no such thing as a creature that lived in fire! It's just that I assumed salamanders were entirely fictional, like phoenixes, rather than a real creature with fictionalised attributes.

(Please don't tell me phoenixes are real.)

[wolfy_writing]

That sounds like the best gameplay approach!

Man, I was so into salamanders when I was a kid. I wanted a pet one, but it would have involved complicated tanks. (I thought amphibian would have been the best thing to be, because you could be in the water as long as you wanted and still be on land!)

(Nope, just salamanders and dragons.)

[gool_duck]

You'll be delighted (I hope) with roadrunner birds being real

http://gallusrostromegalus.tumblr.com/post/180122178903/i-think-a-lot-of-people-hear-the-word-roadrunner

[rionaleonhart]

The world is so much more magical than I suspected!

[rosa_heartlily]

RDR2 is not a game I ever see myself playing. However, it's interesting reading your thoughts on it which are very different to those of my chat buddy - who happens to be male. Does gender make a difference to how one engages with a game? I think it might because some of the approaches I took in Detroit were very different to my work colleagues.

I wonder if there's a thesis in there...

[rionaleonhart]

Interesting! I'm curious about your friend's thoughts on it, now. I do have a male friend who has similar views to me - the actual gameplay isn't great and the dedication to realism kind of gets in the way - although he doesn't talk as non-stop about the horses as I do.