I Don't Understand Midnight Launches

Recently Grand Theft Auto 5 got released and the release of this game is easily one of the biggest things to happen in gaming this year.  The amount of hype people have for this game is astounding and while I don't share quite the same amount of excitement, I am looking forward to eventually picking it up and playing it through.

So I'm not here to pass judgement on the quality of the game but I really don't understand this whole midnight release stuff.  I went to a midnight release once, for Modern Warfare 2, and it was shit.  I went down to the local GAME store with my buddies from university and we were surrounded on all sides by idiots and there was a thick smell of weed in the air, it was most unpleasant.  Even then when I eventually got it home I thought that I couldn't really enjoy it all that much because I was tired so I ended up playing it in the morning anyway and if I was going to do that I didn't need to go to the midnight release at all.

It's not like the stores are going to run out of pre order copies anyway, they realise how much of these big title games they need to get in and how many orders they need to meet so it's not like your pre order is just going to vanish over the course of 2 hours at midnight and they aren't going to sell it off either if the store is any good.

Also GTA5 was released on a Tuesday which makes the whole thing even more confusing to me.  Sure, if it's a Friday midnight release at least you can stay up all night and recover on Saturday, but surely a great deal of people who went to go grab GTA as early as possible have jobs or school or some kind of mid week responsibility?  So wouldn't that mean one wouldn't have all that much time to play it anyway?  I don't get why these people can't just wait a few days or whatever and then really sink their teeth into it.  With a game with this much hype you'd think that's what people would want to do.

Still, who am I to judge? I'm sure there were plenty of happy customers that day and a great majority are enjoying the game right now.  For me, if GTA5 turns out to be anything like GTA4 I'm going to be underwhelmed and disappointed but like I said, no judgement until I have a copy.

Red Dead Redemption

I was so wrong about this game, so damn wrong, and that doesn't happen very often.  Red Dead Redemption is a game that was sitting in my backlog for a long time, mostly ignored because anyone that I talked to about it just said "oh, it's like GTA with horses".  That to me meant it's probably pretty fuckin' good, but not THAT good, so it got shelved for other titles.

God. Damn.  I wish I played it at release and not listen to 5 word reviews from friends.  This game, is probably one of the best games I have had the joy of playing.  The gameplay is pretty much what you would expect from a Rockstar sandbox game, apart from the setting it's nothing all that different in terms of gameplay, but they really REALLY outdid themselves when it came to the story.

There might be spoilers from this point, so if you care about spoilers for a game released in 2010, I'd suggest you go fuckin' play it right now.

The game follows John Marston, wild west superhero on his quest to get his family back from the government by bringing members of his old outlaw gang to justice.  The core story is nice and simple, but you meet so many characters that will just throw spanners into the mix that it stops being as black and white as you might think pretty early on.

I could write for pages about why each individual character was so good, but I'll sum it up by saying that what Rockstar did here, better than any recent game I have played, is make me invested in the story.  I actually cared about John Marstons family about as much as he did. I mean he (and by he I mean me) was busting his ass so bad for them you couldn't help but sympathise. 

One of the best things this game does though is making the player hate the "bad guys".  The villains in this game are all really good but the ones that fuck you over, you REALLY want to get back at.  It feels so good when you're doing a mission and the objective says something like "kill that fucknut", you get hyped so damn hard.

The ending is also really fucking good, with the final scene having me shouting at the TV in disbelief.  I would describe it to you, but you really need to experience it as a whole for the full effect, but it's REALLY good.

There isn't enough space in one post for all my gushing, but mark my words you'll hear me gush about this again in the future.  Guess I didn't spoil anything after all, which is good, so now you can go play it if you haven't already! Get to it!