Spoiler Alert: This editorial contains plot spoilers.

One of my favorite games at E3 in 2008 was You're in the Movies. When it was revealed at Microsoft's media presentation I was charmed by the idea of a game taking an isolated set of actions and, by changing the aesthetic context, giving them new meaning. The arrangement of disconnected arm waving, facial gestures, and jogging into a semi-coherent narrative is very close to the center of what I've always thought games can do better than anything else. It's the experience of art made literal; giving new and unexpected meaning to something usually glanced past. Games typically use this model to affect difficulty. Simple actions become increasingly more difficult as more obstacles are built into levels. It's rare that a game advances by creating new emotional context for its repeated mechanics.

see deal Red Dead Redemption: Game of the Year Edition - PlayStation 3 $19.99 on Gamestop

Big+sky+country.+

Like all open world games, Red Dead Redemption is most convincingly about navigation. The game is at its best when it gets out of players' ways and lets them wander through a world that, in motion, is a beautiful reduction of nature. The sun is continually moving, broken by leafy branches one moment, dampened by gray clouds and falling snow the next. The sound of the The game is thoughtfully designed to a scale that ensures these subtle transitions are always noticeable. I'd set a waypoint on the map and trot off through the world, enjoying the non-competitive reward of a pretty picture controlled by my thumb's whimsy. It reminds me of Endless Ocean, in which the simple pleasure of moving through space and seeing it revealed in new angles is reward enough. In these moments the world is filled with thematic possibility, the terrible stress of trying to build an isolated civilization in the dusty wastes combined with a foreboding of the depravity it sometimes produces.When I stopped my horse to accept a mission, however, Redemption became a disastrous work of episodic gunplay and sarcasm. If you were to take out the navigation and string together all of the missions as a series of linearly connected levels it would be stultifying. The ruminative beauty and scale of Redemption's open world becomes obscuring and mechanically absurd in the dozens of missions that ask players to kill a set number of bandits. The right analog stick that is so wonderfully responsive when panning the camera around my horse becomes a hyper-sensitive white speck that requires a heavy auto-aim function just to make it manageable.The sauntering animations that make it easier to think of the cowboy in the screen as a living creature become nonsensical in the heat of combat. In almost every gunfight I'd find myself steering John Marston into a barrel or flower pot I hadn't seen with the camera facing the opposite way. I'd spend a second or more correcting the camera to see what was happening, wait another second to watch his walking animation finish so I could regain control and then aim him to where I'd wanted him to go in the first place, tapping on the sprint button to make it happen faster. Meanwhile, the screen fills with red as John absorbs enemy gunfire without a flinch. He can't stumble around a flower pot but he can take a rifle shot to the back and keep his feet.If you think these are cheap criticisms, I agree with you. Every game in the world has some glaring mechanical inconsistencies that can be discovered. It's not the sluggish animations or the nanny-ing auto-aim that really bother me; it's the lack of any emotional experience in the combat missions to draw me back from my momentary disbelief. The shooting missions, which, after a promising first hour of pastoral busy work, predominate the game and they are utterly robotic. The world where I can ride around in the desert looking at rabbits scamper on the horizon, stop to pick a rare flower, and then look up and watch a bulbous knot of rainclouds darken the sky cannot be the same place I stop periodically to kill seventeen banditos on behalf of a rapist and his corrupt soldiers. When a mechanical shortcoming adds complication to that unforgivable pretext, I reach a point where I no longer want to extend my suspension of disbelief to the people who've created this world.There's irony in that statement as nothing compels me to complete story missions. I'm free to play Redemption as a reflective wandering game for as long as I please. It's me who chooses to go back to Augistin Allende, Nigel West Dickens, and Harold MacDougal to ask what's next. It's something in my desire to keep the thread unspooling that makes me willing to endure the moral degradation of serving subhumans.I wanted to take part in the story. I knew when starting the game things would end poorly as they are bound to in any story whose title that contains the word "redemption." Redemption is a cynical story of failure, revenge, and its ultimate futility. It's also a story of heavy sarcasm (not irony), flaccid social stereotypes (a drunken Irishman, a corrupt Mexican colonel, a self-obsessed revolutionary poet, a stoic Indian, a pig-faced incompetent with a birth defect, a depraved "Yankee" intellectual), and pleasureless debauchery. Many of the main characters in the plot aren't meant to be humans but tools with which Rockstar can make a few dirty jokes.To its credit, there are more empathetic moments in Redemption than any other Rockstar game I loved discovering Zhou, the opium-addicted indentured servant from China longing to pay off his debt and return home to his true love. I was happy to reach the end of the game and discover John's wife was an ex-prostitute still prone to jealousy and deprecating jabs of intimacy. I liked the final turn of Dutch, an ageing outlaw who retreats into the snowy mountains and induces renegade Indians to join his directionless cause.