I’m loving Red Dead right now. Here’s everything I hate about it.

Dutch

Dutch is the guy from Deadwood. I haven’t got to the part where they actually tell you what happened on the boat, but it’s alluded to that he killed a woman. This is why we’re all hiding in the snow and can’t go to Blackwater.

This seems pretty stupid considering the amount of women I’ve killed. I killed 50 people breaking some prick out of jail.

I think the story would have made more sense if he was a paedophile, and had molested a kid on the boat. Something more terrible, something that we don’t do every 30 seconds in the game.

Icons

I’m sitting 5 feet away from a 65 inch TV. The icons on the minimap are so tiny. How are people playing on smaller TVs? Does it make the icons bigger? Does the £90 version come with sofa binoculars?

Eating

Any kind of eating or drinking is really punishing. You have a few choices.

The real world stuff. Waiting for the stew at the camp, eating in a saloon, making a camp fire and cooking something. All a load of shit that you’ll do once because a mission made you and never do it again. Too much trouble.

The pie menu. Open it, switch right with one of the trigger buttons (your muscle memory will kick in after 6 hours), then press the direction that you want, them contort your fingers into switching between them with whatever trigger you’re not holding. Stare blankly at the icons waiting for something to happen. Try to figure out why it didn’t do what you wanted it to (horse moving? was doing something else?), try again until it does it.

The satchel. Press right on the dpad, choose what you want to eat. Automatically closes the satchel menu and does an action for 5 seconds. Doesn’t re-open the satchel menu. Would be a much nicer experience if you could go into this menu and instantly apply stuff here without closing the menu – at the cost of seeing Arthur lift his hand to his mouth.

Honour

I’m a bad guy. At my best I only kill police and other gang members. If spend my days off doing chores for people and giving money to blind guys that’ll make me a good guy.

Fuck that. If you flag me down and ask me for help I’m going to stab you to death and loot the $2 you were going to give me for spending 25 minutes doing something for you. I’m going to kick every chicken and dog to death.

I’m not going to do anything unless it benefits me.

Rules

Some kids in Saint Denis called me an old prick or something, so I chased them and started getting robbed. So I ran away and the three guys with guns chased me. I figured I’d like the police handle it, so lead them to the nearest police guy, who tried to shoot them but they killed him.

So I lead them to a police station, and they killed all the police there too.

So I threw a knife at one of them. Four different witnesses saw this and reported the crime. Within 30 seconds I had red dots on the minimap coming at me from every direction, which ended in me cowering behind a boat for 15 minutes and eventually drowning.

This is a reoccurring theme. The game doesn’t tell you if it’s going to be okay to kill people, there’s no way to test that condition. You’ll either be fucked or not fucked. Then they throw in a trigger control to help you accidentally fire a shot at random.

Poker

Playing poker is still horribly slow. Make skip instantly skip, not slowly fade out while playing the thing you’re skipping in the background. I just want to play cards.

Controls

The game keeps taking the controller off me. Forcing me to walk, forcing me off my horse, changing what guns I’m carrying.

I want to ride my horse through the camp and knock people over and kill them. Yeah you can say game over – and it’ll be my fault, but I want to be able to do it. I don’t want to walk outside an invisible trigger so I can run to get my horse.

If running at this part of the missions will cause someone to notice me and fuck the mission up, I want walking to avoid that to be my choice.

If I stumble into a woman in the middle of town I want to pick her up and say sorry. I don’t want to automatically start choking her to death.