RED DEAD REDEMPTION

Red Dead Redemption (Rockstar San Diego, 2010)
Published by: Rockstar Games, Inc.
Lead Designer: Christian Cantamessa – Art Department Director: Joshua Bass
Art Director: Daren Bader – Lead Artist: Nikola Trifunovic

Red Dead Redemption is made of two things, John Marston and the landscapes created by Rockstar San Diego’s Art Department. Gaming is only a trigger, creating a momentum that pushes the player through one of the best scenarios that ever graced our favourite medium. Rockstar’s coders scattered mountains and deserts, cities and canyons, american, mexican and native cultures on a blank map, being able to shake and mix them preserving what makes them unique in the process. Of course, fantasy-facts and clichés are hidden everywhere, homages to spaghetti western and the great american classics are in the recipe too, but we (the gamers) know how easy is to fail even with the best ingredients and that’s why we pay so much respect to this western epic.

This game seems to be born specifically for this blog. It’s rare to have a game with so utterly amazing visuals to portray. “Videogame photography“, “videogame tourism” or “virtual landscapes” definitions seem to perfectly fit to RDR structure and ambitions. So it’s a real pity that this game was ported only to present console generation, lacking higher resolutions and the antialiasing that a good PC could add to the wonderful visuals. If you wonder how I was able to grab these screenshots wihout a photo-mode or without a PC the answer lies here. But it’s not the whole story, RDR has a small secret I will reveal in a few seconds…

I don’t think many people noticed this fact, but if you stand still near some landmarks or cities for about 4-5 minutes a ‘screensaver’ will pop up, revealing a nice photographic cut of that area. Some pictures of my collection must thank this feature (that needs lots of patience and devotion for the best results) but I found a way to grab very personal and unique screenshots also by myself, jamming John Marston in some corners or against a tree, grabbing screenshots of the same quality and cut even without a free-camera option.

This collection will take a lot of time, but it’s my intention to cover the whole RDR map and storyline. Some pics you see in this page will pop-up only in the next weeks or months, just be patient and come back here once in a while to check if there are some updates, or, even better, choose one of these social options: