Sundown for Marsten

The end of Red Dead is a special thing. It completes the arc of John Marsten with a typical western elegance that most films set in the period would struggle to attain.
Yet it also opens up the world to post-story exploring in a way that changed my perspective of the game world.
The first thing I did after the ending was kill me some lawmen.

I don't know if the ending truly opens the way for a sequel but I'd be happy if they didn't go down that path.
Alas, gaming today lends itself to franchises but here's hoping that the maturity found in the narrative of RDR can also be discovered outside of the game medium in itself.

My gripes with the game are minor; the Mexico part of the arc is something that I felt should have been looked at more critically and restructured. The way you end that phase of the game also seems somewhat disjointed. Nevermind though because
it is well worth trudging through that middle sequence in order to taste the virility of the final stanza. What a ride.

As I have recently acquired a laptop, I have given myself to games that suit that platform, something a bit more casual, a bit more 'pick up put down'. So at the present I am gorging myself upon Plants vs Zombies (typical Popcap brilliance) and something I've been meaning to do forever, a replay of Baldur's Gate.

Baldur's Gate was something I almost stumbled across. I was in my early teen years when it came out. I didn't have a bevy of friends who were into fantasy or Dungeons and Dragons and so it emitted signals that my radar was not properly attuned to pick up. Diablo was the drug of choice among gamers in my knowing and when I did pick up Baldur's Gate, merely on it's boxart, I found it foglike in it's accessiblity. But it, and especially it's sequel, proved to be the experience that further formed my nascent ideas of gaming and the importance of story within gaming more than any other.

So I have made a Male Half Elven Mage/Thief named Arahain. He'll be something of a magic dueller, using longswords
and shortbows and lots of magic missile. I've put in a heap of mods from Gibberlings 3, The Sorcerer's Place and others particularly the mod called BGTutu, a program that imports the BG2 upgraded infinity engine into BG1 making it look more playable and presentable than the previous iteration.