What a difference two and a half years make...

I first played Trauma Center: Second Opinion and Trauma Center: New Blood in May 2008, and I fucking loved them.  I just finished replaying both games, and I did not fucking love them anymore.  What happened in the interim that could have caused such a marked change?  What gives?

First, let's examine how I felt about the medical simulation series the first time I played it.  At the time, Trauma Center marked my first outing with the Nintendo Wii, a system I had previously written off as a gimmick.  Imagine my surprise, then, to find a Wii game that was not only fun to play, but also downright exhilarating. It turned the control scheme from an imbecilic gimmick to an immersive gem, requiring one to not only keep track of a million things at one time - the patient's vitals, the time remaining, the need to switch between half a dozen medical tools rapidly in the course of a single operation - but also requiring one's hands to reflex at practically inhuman speeds to keep up with it all.  Furthermore, the stories in these games were chock full of enough intrigue, terrorism, and medical-ethical conflicts to make Lost, 24, and Grey's Anatomy green with envy, respectively, and the characters were all discrete and likable enough to win me over.

Fast forward almost three years to my second playthrough of Trauma Center in preparation for the recently-released Trauma Team.  Now I'm thinking of the few dozen operations in Second Opinion, only about ten of them are actually any different.  Now I'm thinking the controls are pretty damn gimmicky, at best.  At worst, they don't even really work the way they're meant to.  Now I'm thinking the characters are about as flat, cliched, or retarded as they come (no, seriously, play New Blood as though Valerie Blaylock is mentally challenged and only passed medical school because of her superhuman operating speed; it makes it make so much more sense that anyone would put up with her bullshit).  Now I'm thinking these games just ain't as good.

And it doesn't really end there.  I recently tried to play Eternal Sonata, a game which I regretfully purchased at launch in November 2008 but didn't get around to until January 2011.  Four hours told me all I needed to know about that experience, particularly that it was going to be woefully repetitive, with a cast of stock JRPG characters: the Magical Girl, the Wiser Older Man, the Brash Young Hero, the Goofy Genius Child.  But I can't help but think if I'd played Eternal Sonata right when I bought it, apart from actually getting my sixty dollars' worth, I would have really enjoyed it.

Then there's God of War, a game I absolutely despised in 2005 for its brevity, weak dialogue, and poor characterization, but upon replaying it in late 2009, it stunned me with its haunting take on Greek mythology and its very focused portrayal of Kratos as an individual so far gone down the path of violent abandon he can hardly be called a man anymore.

And there's Grand Theft Auto, a series I couldn't be arsed to consider playing five years ago.  Now, its fourth numbered entry is a landmark in video game design.

All of these one-eighties are not merely the product of me playing better games with greater frequency in the latter half of the last decade.  If that were true, then I wouldn't have liked Trauma Center in the first place, because I can point to at least a dozen better games right from where I'm sitting that preceded Trauma Center in release.  Those games should have told me not to like Trauma Center, those bastards, but they didn't, so I can only conclude that, at the time, Trauma Center did genuinely have a place among their ranks.  And while I have changed a lot in the last five years, I don't think those changes really had much to do with video games.

Ultimately, I have to look at the state of video games today, and that state is Heavy Rain.  That state is Red Dead Redemption.  Hell, as much as I hate to admit it, that state is Mass Effect 2.  These games define the medium today and are shaping the medium for tomorrow, and none of them have their roots in Japanese cliches or in completely sequestering story from gameplay.  They have their roots in games with fresh, focused narratives; with living, breathing open worlds; and with systems of meaningful player input.  It's hard to go back and play a game with a cheap story that may as well come on a separate DVD for all it has to do with the gameplay and still think it's among the best and brightest video games have to offer when we know that video games have left that structure in their dust.

It's going to be even more fun writing this article again in five years, when the next video game paradigm shift occurs, and playing and liking Red Dead Redemption seems like a fool's errand.  Haha... hahaha... haaaa... like that will ever happen...

If the lone prairie looks anything like it does in Red Dead Redemption, then sure, bury me there.

Everyone called Red Dead Redemption, before it came out, "Grand Theft Auto IV in the Wild West". The thing about Grand Theft Auto IV is that it may be the most impressive feat a game developer has ever pulled off. Actually, if you count Episodes from Liberty City, it's the most impressive feat a game developer has ever pulled off three times. Calling Red Dead Redemption "Grand Theft Auto IV in the Wild West" sets a flatteringly high bar for Red Dead Redemption, but it also raises a troubling question: how in a lifetime of sweet fucks is that going to work? GTA4 is a living, breathing recreation of present-day New York City, the likes of which did not exist in the untamed American West, not in geographic size, not in population size, not in city structure, not in transportation, not in weaponry, not in communication infrastructure. If this game is just a reskin of that game, then it will make no sense.

Thankfully, everyone was wrong. It's not just a reskin. The first thing GTA4 veterans will notice about RDR is how small it is in comparison. The biggest town in RDR is smaller than the smallest neighborhood in GTA4. The second thing they'll notice is how uninteresting traveling from Point A to Point B is in comparison. You don't get to listen to "Strange Times" by the Black Keys while you're on horseback. You don't get to dodge pedestrians, telephone poles, and other cars. You rarely have to shake pursuing cops. It may sound like I'm saying this game is boring, but it's not. All these differences work! That is perhaps why I love this game so goddamn much. The setting asked the developers to change the way they do things, and they accommodated, even though the way they do things previously yielded one of the best video games to date.

And don't get me wrong, there is a lot of fun to be had in this game world. Hunt a grizzly bear. Shoot the rope from which some innocent woman is being hung. Break a rare wild horse. Lasso and hogtie a wagon thief. Play blackjack. Duel some drunken bystander. Honestly, if there's anything quintessentially Western, this game has it, and it's fun. And again, it adds mounds of quality and believability to the setting.

In ways that GTA4 was not, RDR is beautiful. Something about riding a dark horse up a snowy slope while the sun rises directly ahead, its rays piercing the spaces between the needles of the pine trees around you is breathtaking. Standing on a clifftop in Mexico overlooking a vast desert, moonlit and barren, is awesome. Catching a herd of buffalo grazing a golden plain while storm clouds gather overhead, faint flashes of lightning flickering in the sky, is wondrous. Being charged by a bear and activating the slow-motion, bullet-time-esque Dead Eye mode just as the bear rears up, begins to roar, and swipes at you with its claw, letting you know just how fucking massive it is and just how fucking dead you're about to be, is terrific. Accidental beauty is... well... a thing of beauty. It's one of the things that made Flower so great; rare is the moment that the player must encounter something beautiful. Instead, the encounter is usually the product of being in the right place at the right time with all the right elements doing all the right things. Like all things fleeting, these moments of accidental beauty in Red Dead Redemption are to be cherished.

The game is not without its flaws, however. Particularly, it has bugs aplenty.  John Marston tries to throw a woman off her horse and steal it. Instead, he simply mounts the horse without removing the woman. What results is some Frankenmarston with four arms, two heads, and a skirt. John Marston attempts to pull the reins to stop his horse in the middle of a city street. Instead of stopping, the horse and John teleport repeatedly to the end of the street and the camera pulls back rapidly. In a gunfight, one of the enemies was invisible. No good.

Still, that said, the story is enjoyable. John Marston is hardly a relatable character; he's violent and stupid as sin, and is only humanized by his family. Me? I'm not violent, stupid, or married. I'm nothing like John Marston. It's refreshing to find games that are less concerned about putting the player directly in the game via silent protagonist or character creation system or moral choice and more concerned about depicting a character's growth from start to finish via interesting dialogue and actual character traits and choices. With John Marston, Rockstar Games joins a slew of other developers in spitting on the grave of the ambiguous JPRG hero, in all his tough yet emo, haunted yet unflinchingly good, wise yet teenaged glory, and his friend, the nameless, faceless, voiceless WRPG hero.

Is this my favorite non-MGS game of the console generation? Probably. It's better than Assassin's Creed II, and she's my darling. Grand Theft Auto IV is undoubtedly a better game, but I'm a sucker for unfamiliar settings that are depicted with great detail and accuracy.