The Old West Won't Stay Dead

Since the copy of Red Dead Redemption I purchase was the Game of the Year edition, it also came with the Undead Nightmare, what would that be - downloadable content? bonus content? - on a separate disk. So I've been working through that since I finished the storyline of the main game. I'm still playing RDR, but at this stage, it's mostly about completing little challenges. Right now I'm trying to pull off the "pay off a $5,000 bounty with a pardon letter" achievement. It's been slow, not because I keep ding or getting arrested, but I'm having to kill a lot of people to get anywhere. I tried hijacking a train, but it didn't get me anywhere.

Undead Nightmare was set somewhere in between John Marston completing his work for the feds and the actual end of the main game. Something has caused the dead to rise everywhere. John's wife and son are quickly infected, but John's able to hogite them so they aren't a threat to others or themselves. After that, as you might expect, he's off to try and find the source of all this and put a stop to it, in the hopes his family will revert to themselves.

The gameplay is  the same, though the details are different. Towns can still serve as save points, but not until you've cleared them of zombies and rendered them safe - for the time being. The towns come under attack again eventually, and you have to go back to help clear them out again. I'm not sure if a town with eventually fall entirely if you ignore its plight, because I usually try to get there as soon as I can. They added the ability to fast travel from one save point to another, which is really handy if you don't want to traverse the perilous wilderness again. Live bears are trouble enough, I don't need any hassle from undead bears.

There aren't any opportunities to earn money, but money isn't important any longer, ammunition is. Ammo was in short supply early in the game, but the farther I progressed, the less of a problem it became. When you clear a town, there's always at least one cache of ammo, if not two or three. If I spent a lot of time roaming the countryside, or made it a point to kill all the undead you see, that would be a drain on my resources. The corpses of the undead are not nearly as reliable when it comes to finding loot as the the dead you find in the main game. Which is why I stopped doing that. Unless I had a specific mission to carry out, I didn't roam, and I don't kill any more undead than I can avoid. After all, some of those people might revert along with John's family. Or they might just be animated corpses, but I can't tell the difference from riding by on a horse. It fits nicely with my take on Marston's personality. He doesn't kill wantonly, but if you stand between him and helping his family, you will die.

I'm a little disappointed I didn't get to enjoy killing Da Santa again, but that cemetery in Sepulcro was really getting on my nerves by the time he dragged himself out of the ground, so I shot him the once and moved to the next shambling corpse. Eh, I emptied six rounds into his head in the regular game, that was probably sufficient revenge for what was a stunningly unsurprising betrayal.

One little thing they added to the game concerns the horses. Sometimes, when you whistle for a horse, the one that comes running is undead. They're faster, stronger, but a little willful. On the whole, I'd rather have a live horse. I use railways as shortcuts frequently, and the last thing I need when hightailing it across some trestle is a horse that's likely to swerve right over the edge without warning. The addition of the Horses of the Apocalypse was a nice touch, though they behave like ordinary horses. Why War is scared of some scraggly undead wolf, I have no idea, but there it is. It's still a cool enough idea that I had to try, even given the fact that lassoing horses was easily my least favorite part of the regular game. The upshot is, practice made perfect, or more accurately, I figured out what I was screwing up, and so I'm much better at horse wrangling now.

Hmm, maybe horse thievery would dial up the bounty in the regular game. Bank robbery didn't work out so well for me.