Games

Read Dead Revolver

Publisher: Rockstar Games
Platform: PS2, X-Box
Genre: Western
Rating: All Ages

We all love Ennio Morricone right? But can anybody really put their hand on their heart and say they’ve watched ANY spaghetti western more than twice in their whole lives?

Unless you live in one of those space/time continuum bubbles that NASA is spending billions developing, those movies are TOO LONG for anybody. Even if they’re short they feel LONG. Like unexpected fingernails in your bum, they’re surprisingly and unexpectedly long. Am I making myself clear?

So when I heard that Rockstar Games was making a spaghetti western game I feared the worst. Y’know, I’ve got a very short attention span and sometimes I can’t even get to the end of a paragraph without totally losing my thread and wondering whether I’m hungry or not. Shall I get some crisps? I dunno. The shop is nearby and I’ve got £1.58 in my pocket and that’s more than enough for a couple of packets. I always feel guilty about getting crisps though. I need to lose my belly because I’m going to see my girlfriend in America soon and I don’t want her to think I’m letting myself go. It’s a constant worry.

Umm? Oh yeah. Does Rockstar Games make the best games for hair-brained casual gamers like me? I think it probably does. When I say “casual” I mean my PS2 is borrowed from somebody else and it took me two years to get to the end of Grand Theft Auto 3 and I didn’t even complete 40 per cent of the side missions or collect more than 21 of the secret packages and that’s why I was worried that a spaghetti western game would just be too much for my mollycoddled brain to handle.

Before Rockstar got hold of this game, the rumour was that the original developers had made the game really boring and it looked like the whole project was going to be a gay disaster. Thankfully, Rockstar spent billions on it and made the game ultra exciting so it plays like a dream.

The pitch is: you play as Red Harlow, a cowboy whose parents were killed for gold by some evil Mexican cowboy gangsters. The original developers had made all the Mexicans three feet tall with giant handlebar moustaches, but, keen to be seen as the progressive video game company, Rockstar changed it so the only racial stereotypes that appear in the game are that the Mexicans move quite slowly, speak without opening their mouths and have 18 kids each (the last statistic I just made up).

The main thing is that Red Dead Revolver is an ultra-fun, easy to pick-up-and-put-down first person arcade shooter with more emphasis on GOOD TIMES than something like the totally over-rated Transformers game which gets more and more annoying the more I think about it.

There’s also a great feature called Dead Eye Mode‚ where you hold down R2, the game slips into slo-mo and you can place as many as 15 multiple targets on your enemies. Then when you slip back into real-time you bust off 15 lightning fast shots and everybody dies really fucking fast. It’s one of the most satisfying kill modes I’ve ever seen in a game. You can literally blow people to fucking bits of skull and bone.

As well as shooting fucking dudes on foot, you can also ride on a horse, do hand-to-hand combat in dusty saloon bars, throw cowboys from balconies and explode them with magic snake oil. If there’d been a scene where you simultaneously get to wear a pink union suit and spit tobacco down a bordello owner’s voluminous cleavage while digging your spurs into a barrel of moonshine then we’d give this a million points out of five, but as it is it only gets top marks.