There’s times where I don’t think about a purchase at all. It’s bought the moment it’s announced, already; there’s been an allocation of resources. Sometimes, a game doesn’t need to be announced in order for me to have prepared a place for it. Red Dead Redemption 2 fits into that category. The most recent trailer, offered for your use here:

was mostly a menu of features, which I would have been perfectly happy learning about when I was playing the game. I never thought it was going to lack for features. The main thing for me is that it’s gonna look like that. I want to put that new upper tier of consoles to fucking work on a game like this.

I typically reach a point in any open world game where I start to do A Whole Lot Of Nothin’, I’m not mad at it, but I start just intersecting with all these systems and finding my own game. Occasionally I find a throughline back into the narrative proper this way, but not usually. I’ve pushed that plate away and now I’m simply prowling the salad bar directly. I spent a lot of time in Red Dead’s online mode, because even though there wasn’t a lot to do there necessarily, there was a lot to be. You could talk to your friends in an old timey way. Since then, I’ve invested an incredible amount of time fantasizing about what the online could be like if it was something they chose to take as seriously as they have with Grand Theft Auto Online. It’s possible that I’m in the minority there, maybe that’s a purely Jerry proposition and doesn’t warrant a true investment. But I definitely want to homestead and rob coaches slash trains in a collective fashion and if they want to invest seven figures into letting me do that I would not resent it.

Don’t forget, if you’re local: I’ve got a few physical copies of LEXCALIBUR I’ll be bringing to my reading at THIS SATURDAY at University Book Store. Here, why don’t I put it all in a kind of lozenge:

Lexcalibur Reading

Saturday, August 18th

University Book Store

4326 University Way NE

Seattle, WA 98105

5pm



Yes! Very tidy.

(CW)TB out.