I can’t get enough of Red Dead Redemption. It’s like Grand Theft Auto, but with likable characters. There is one thing, well aside from the Wild West setting, that greatly distinguishes this game from the company’s flagship series. And that would be the Bandana.
For the record, I think the Bandana is the best thing ever for role playing your character. Now, instead of good or evil, we also have good people who do evil things, and evil people who do good things.
“Mommy, who’s that black hatted man helping grandma across the street?”
“I don’t know, son, but his eyes chill me to the bone.”
As previously stated, I almost always play good guys in morality games. But I often wonder what would happen if I did the bad thing. In Fable 2, there was a Contraption of Death that you could sacrifice people to, I believe there was an achievement for it if you killed your spouse by it (or at least I’ll tell myself in hindsight), so I took my first husband in the game, the one I’d grown tired of hearing, and killed him using it. The animation was kind of a let down, but the worst thing was that my path to haloness was immediately halted and I instantly sprouted mini-horns. Lame!
If I’d had the Bandana, though, I could have sat around sacrificing the world and still keep my holiness in tact.
What the Bandana does is bring gray to the whole black and white morality scale system. Sometimes good people do bad things. They don’t instantly become villains because of it, and often times they’re for heroic reasons, or accidental button presses if you’ve played any Black Isle games. But with video game morality, it’s often pure black or pure white. You’re either the lover of angels or the killer of children. Now you can do both… to both.
Early on there’s a mission where you have to steal a horse from a deputy to create a diversion so a crazy gravedigger can speak to his ex-partner. I was forced to do the mission so that the story could continue, but at the same time, I was building a relationship to a certain law-abiding marshal that I didn’t want to taint with bad honor. So what do I do? Pull out the trusty Bandana and *poof*. Nobody knows that my duster wearing hero is actually doing something illegal. Although I still had to pay the bounty on my head, which is weird. How would they know who it was when I came to pay it off? Should I wear the Bandana to prove my identity?
Eh, who cares, my honor is still on its way up the scale. And since I didn’t hurt anyone on the mission, I got a fifty point bonus.
All thanks to my trusty Bandana *ting*.
An aside: My horse got ate by a pack of cougars. It made me sad. What’s worse, after I killed those filthy monsters, I went to skin them and accidentally skinned my poor dead horse.
Marston almost puked. I agreed.
Now I can’t bring myself to sell the horse meat. It just sits in my pack on the new horse. I feel it’s a suitable warning for the new mount.
Don’t get fucking eaten by the mountain lions!
God I love this game.