Red Dead Redemption and the Q*bert Problem

 Last night I played Red Dead Redemption, which is a fancy cinematic video game about Ye Olde West and outlaws and gunfights and whatnot. There are horses. It's pretty amazing, in the way that all these new games are. I've watched a friend play Heavy Rain and Alan Wake, and watching him play was sort of like watching a crap   old movie on TV—you could sort of just sit through it, and it wasn't terrible, it just is what it is. We could carry on a conversation and drink beer while he was playing, and I didn't mind not playing the games myself. But then last night I was at one of those target-shooting pigroasts I go to, and I got a chance to actually play RDR, so I did, and here's my problem:

 Remember Q*bert? Yeah, probably not. Q*bert was an arcade game back in the early 1980s, before you were born. Q*bert was this little character like a ball with eyes and legs and a tube for a nose, and the point of the game was to jump him all over a pyramid of cubes (whilst avoiding snakes!) and when you turned all the cubes a different color, then you got some more cubes to jump on. But if you just took Q*bert to the edge of the pyramid and jumped him off, he would fall, making an awesome bombs-away kind of noise, and then there was a very satisfying SPLAT when he landed wherever he landed, somewhere down below and out of sight. I never got past level one of Q*bert because I loved to hear him splat, and I would put in my quarter and jump him to the edge of the pyramid and send him over the edge, over and over again, until I realized how many quarters I was wasting and then went off to play, like, Tempest or something. 

 With Red Dead Redemption, I have the Q*bert Problem. I'm tearing along in a horse-drawn wagon race on a twisty mountain road, and I realize I can just drive the damned wagon over the edge of a cliff and watch my character fly out and the horse fall and the wagon split apart ... And then I'm back in the wagon race, and there's a different cliff to fall off of, and this time everything lands in a river. It is really astonishing that someone figured out all the possible scenarios for wagons going off cliffs in this one race, and animated each one differently—I mean, it really is amazing. I know that crashing off the cliff isn't supposed to be the point of the game, but if they only had John Marston make that Q*bert noise when I sent him off the edge, Red Dead Redemption would be the best game ever.

Thanks for reading my blogpost this time, and may God bless.

Comments

[michael]

i give this post a 10/10

[KM]

Man does it suck having no money right now, RDR sounds great. I had q*bert for the MSX but for some reason the game was called Humphrey, licensing issues I guess. Five minutes to load it from the cassette then hours of playing it.

[Anthony]

Firecracker,
On a nostalgia related side note - check out The Arcade Flyer Archive - http://www.arcadeflyers.com/?page=home

[bartleby]

On the Odessey machine we had it was possible to position the paddles in such a way that the ball would bounce back and forth presumably forever. My younger brother was opposed to doing this on principle for reasons I could not understand. After I explained to him that it was solid state and the only moving parts were the knobs which were not in use when the videogame was in this state, and thus it could not "wear out" he continued inisting that there was some bad thing that could happen. Wherever that Odessey console is now, unless it's been submerged in water or run over by a bus, given a new set of cables it would probably still be good for an infinity of blip bouncing.

[Joshua]

Well, the designers didn't animate every single transition. They use something called a physics engine to map how both the various entities react to each other - the calculations made by the physics engine are mapped up with the 3d models of the character, the horse, the buggy, etc.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soft_body_dynamics

[Listener Funfzimmer Wohnung]

"Well, the designers didn't animate every single transition. They use something called a physics engine to map how both the various entities react to each other - the calculations made by the physics engine are mapped up with the 3d models of the character, the horse, the buggy, etc.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soft_body_dynamics

Posted by: Joshua | May 24, 2010 at 02:54 PM"
------

Buzzkill.

[Paler Ether]

I have this same problem with racing games set in scenic areas that give nice, long animations when the car goes over a cliff. It is so much more satisfying to careen down the hillside in slow motion, breaking off trees as I go, than to stay on the otherwise boring track.

[Kenzo (lastever.org / kenzodb.com)]

+1 for Q*Bert sounds!
"Q*Bert Bach Terror": MP3 stream or download

(From Ken's Last Ever Radio Extravaganza 9/24/00: "Elsewhere")

[Kenzo (lastever.org / kenzodb.com)]

Argh, wrong download link. Corrected MP3 download

[James]

Part of that planning is obviously helping the immersive-ness of the game. It's those little touches that make Red Dead such a great game, and show that Rockstar is paying attention. Also I loved Qbert!

[Game Worlds]

Played Red redemption on Ipad games app.. really enjoyed on playing on Apple IOS.