It's been hailed as the greatest console game ever, and the most significant western to be rolled out in decades, but Red Dead Redemption was a tricky project from the start.
Apparently the horses were tricky.
Red Dead Redemption is pretty much what you want to make of it. You can make the central character a good guy or a bad guy, depending on how you choose to play the game.
The makers say that by designing the game as a western, it liberated them from the moral constraints of games such as GTA, but that horses, cactus plants, and tumbleweed are much more difficult to render than fast cars, city blocks and hi-tech machine guns.
"The horses were the biggest challenge," one insider told us. "When we first started out, the horses just looked like big poodles poncing about, then we went back to the drawing board and our next attempt looked like an armadillo with Clint Eastwood on its back. Eventually we got what we wanted by hiring a proper horse and using motion capture techniques. But this wasn't without its drawbacks. The horse we used was suffering from flatulence - that really stank - and it shat a lot. There was shit everywhere. And the dumb shit pissed in at least two laptops. But we got there in the end."
Our gaming correspondent stated that the game truly was remarkable, his only criticism being that the tumbleweed resembled great big balls of matted pensioners' pubic hair.
But despite being banditos ourselves, we gave it 5 stars.
More as we get it.
