I like that RDR2 has that Chinatown in Saint Denis, the New Orleans standin. It’s one of those Rockstar-as-Scorcese’s-heir “hey here’s a cool bit of American history you didn’t know” moments that yeah, even Gulf Coast port cities would’ve had one in this period, AND implicitly preempts any “hey, online players using Asian character models are anachronistic”, with just like one block and a single merchant worth of background design

Been thinking back over the RDR2 single-player campaign.

Something that jumped out at me – Rockstar games always had a strong sense of time and place but they used to filter that through preexisting movies about the setting and now they take on that first-order role and treat history directly, and that’s a big change

GTA3 was New York crime as filtered through Coppola and Scorcese and other gangster movies; Vice City was Scarface and Miami Vice. San Andreas lifted its aesthetics from gangsta rap and Hughes brothers movies. Even RDR1 leaned heavy on Peckinpah and spaghetti westerns

(Bully, I suppose, comes off as an entry in the British “school days” novel genre from someone who grew up in Trainspotting-era Manchester, transposed to the United States)

But starting with GTA4 it feels like they decided to try to grab the zeitgeist barehanded and honestly? I’m not sure it works. 4’s “modern New York, with immigrants shaped by post-Soviet chaos” is a real thing, but not really a resonant thing. In 5 Franklin’s lament that people still have an image of south LA as mid-90s ghetto while it’s solidly lower-middle-class and climbing is accurate but doesn’t really build into something; Trevor and Michael could be a metacommentary on the two traditional threads in Rockstar vidya - anarchic violence and domesticated interior plot - if you squint, but you have to squint.

I noticed this thinking of how RDR2 checked off so many boxes on “what was happening in late-19th cen America as the frontier closed” - you’ve got your Chinese workers building a railroad over here, your reintegration of the unchastened South over here, your resource magnates consolidating here, your German immigration important to the Great Plains here, your native tribes (who integrated freemen after emancipation) being moved on again from first-wave reservations here…

It’s probably newer (or more easily missed) to people w/o my interest in American history, and more subtle and better done than a lot of contemporary AAA stuff – in a lot of cases there’s a parallelism to Arthur and his band that’s used to play with things, one mission sequence is retrieving things for a dispossessed old man and it really leans into his self-pity and what he’s lost but the final twist is he was a slavecatcher and Arthur’s righteously angry, y’know his band idealizes freedom; and anyway a bit later you’re mourning the good old days of freedom… to be a bandit… in between breaking lives for economic reasons and capturing fugitives… it’s like “oh, hm”

But still for all that it’s box checking - yeah, we fit that in, and it just builds up into a pile, and I think it could’ve made a good revisionist Western out of any one of those things instead

(Well it does have heist movie pacing, like GTAV did, that’s something)

(alt.: it’s plenty Scorcese, just later indulgent Gangs of New York/The Aviator Scorcese)

kontextmaschine:

Red Dead Redemption 2 has been such a polished jewel of what AAA open-world narratives can be, but just now there’s this adult-female-as-young-male casting (for young Jack Marston, the post-epilogue PC of RDR1) — a classic voice acting scenario — somehow done more infuriatingly bad than old Capcom “maybe you, the master of unlocking” lines with no direction at all

this was the fishing mission, for a bit after this I was like “you know, RDR1 had that the awkward subtext about John and Abigail was how they were committed to this domestic thing after back in the day every guy in the gang had a turn”

and they weren’t even touching on that so I was like “huh are they retconning it” but then there was the “introduce sniper rifles” mission and in a passing ride-to conversation Albert (this game’s PC) ripped John up over it in a way that was kind of a critique of him as a protagonist that then immediately got flipped around in a way that like

• presented self-awareness at the narrative level

• and meta-narrative

• and how they tied into 2010 and 2018 narratives of masculinity

• while throwing a series lore screwball?

• in like 6 lines

Man I missed Rockstar, you could tell they were like 2/3 done GTAV when they had to rush it before their target console generation expired

(even then, they delivered Did Somebody Say Yoga?)