Sorrow and the Old West

I wanted to finish Red Dead Redemption sooner rather than later. So a couple of days ago while I was hanging out with my good friend, I decided it was high time I sat down and started my final push to the end. I loaded the game onto my 360 hard drive, and started the old girl up.

Something wasn’t right.

The load screen said something akin to a welcome, almost as if I was starting the game from the beginning. ‘But I was in Mexico’, raced through my mind again and again as the little revolver chamber loaded the game. ‘I just forgot the name of the last mission is all, everything is going to be fine,’ I reassured myself when the screen faded to black. ‘Everything is going to be fine.’

I was wrong. I wasn’t in Mexico; I was walking off the boat in Blackwater. I was at the very start of the game. Everything was not fine.

‘Okay, calm down. Just load your game from the load window, it probably loaded someone else’s file is all. Everything is fine, don’t worry about it.’ So I pause the game, and load up file 2 (the same save slot I have used since I was a kid playing A Link to the Past on my SNES. Always slot 2). Same name, same mission, same disappointment.

It is not like Red Dead is a bad game, far from it. The story is amazing, and the dialog is easily the best I have ever heard in a video game: it’s well written, and superbly executed. The world of Red Dead is interesting, and riding around the country side in search of adventure was/is always a joy. Yet with such a large game, I feel so daunted to have to replay the hours, and hours, and hours I had logged before just to get back to where I left off. Hours and hours to get back to the point where I still have hours and hours to go until the end does not sound like something I feel like doing at the moment; I already have my grind with the recent release of The Firelands, WoW’s new content patch, and my ever growing collection of games.

This is the reason why I do not like people playing my stuff when I am not there. I know it sounds rude, but this is not the first time something like this has happened. Saving over someone’s file is sacrilege, and one would think that Rockstar would have finally (after years) fixed their terrible save system; no one liked it in Grand Theft Auto 3, why does it keep being reused?

One day I will return to the west. And one day, I will finish what I started. Not today, and sure as hell not tomorrow, but one day.