Late to the Party - Red Dead Redemption

I understand that it's been a while since this game was released, but, well you know how it goes sometimes.  A game comes out and you decide to wait on it for a while and then a Game of the Year Edition is announced and you decide to wait for that and decide to wait for it to drop in price and sometimes you then wait for it to be gifted to you and basically there's a lot of waiting.  It happens.  And then sometimes you get it for Christmas and don't play it til almost the end of January because you suddenly have an urge to play a game that doesn't feature Winter in the slightest because you're in Winter and it's fucking cold, but it's nice because you like Winter, but it's still cold and cold is kind of bad and you try and warm up but playing games with Winter in them kind of doesn't help.  Even though you're not expecting something good, you pop in a game about being a cowboy in the desert because at least it's in a hot environment.

Then you discover, hey, this game actually -is- fun!

That has been my experience with Red Dead Redemption over the past couple days in which I've plugged in quite a few hours.  The bulk of it probably spent running around and hunting animals because oh man, hunting.  It's only when I run across it with a deeper mechanic than Tomb Raider offered - something closer to Far Cry 3 - that I realize how much I actually enjoy it despite the inherent 'issue' with it in that I'm not hunting for absolute necessity and/or survival, but for skins and such to sell.  But it's digital animals, so I don't -really- have to care too much about it.  No more than the people that I shoot, lasso, hogtie and drag around whilst on horseback are only digital people, thus I don't have to really care about them either.  It's just silliness in the desert.

As such, since I've spent the majority of the game dicking around, there's not a whole lot I can say about the game itself.  The story is something that's there, Marston is not the greatest character, but he's alright, and the mechanics are definitely from a Rockstar game, for better or worse.  I mostly just wanted to say that it's actually fun since I heavily doubted it beforehand - it was released close enough to IV that I worried it would be a bit stiff like IV was, not to mention the bad ideas from TLaD - and that I'm quite enjoying it.  And it is doing -something- for the perception of maintaining heat and such.  I mean, a space heater is probably doing the most of the heating task, but still.  Every little bit helps when your daily high temperature just barely breaks double digits Fahrenheit.

I kinda wish that the 'main encounter' would just happen already, I'm tired of doing side jobs for these ungrateful bastards