Flames from Review of Red Dead Redemption

Speaking of lasagna, Mr. Davis emailed to let me know every single thing wrong with my review, including the fact that it wasn't even a review:

From: John Davis To: Zack Subject: Red Dead Redemption review Useful information gleaned from your review: "Don't be surprised if you encounter the same "trick" ambushes several times in an hour of playing." "You can ride to a town and play mini-games like poker and a knife game..." "(Getting hung up on the environment while riding your horse is) especially annoying when you're stuck during a random event (these happen infrequently) where you have to react quickly or fail the event." "Multiplayer for the game consists of an open roam system, a posse system for versus games and structured games, and cooperative missions and objectives." That's it. Not even much elaboration on these items and what made them good or bad. If your biggest complaints are that predatory and prey animals appear in too close a proximity, you can't fuck the whores, and you don't like the country music soundtrack I see very little to dissuade readers from purchasing this game. You tell us the story is non-existent, yet you are annoyed having to traverse the "alphabet soup" to hear it told (a trait common to every Rockstar game), and then give no detail beyond the intro is a "snoozer" and you talk to most characters about how the times they are a changin'. This lack of detail leads me to believe you may have completed little more than the introduction. A critical review is not what you liked or didn't like about a work. That's a third grade book report. A critical review analyzes the effectiveness of a work's elements to achieve its goals and round out its major themes. How did the whistling enhance or detract from the settings and action? How could a choice to betray Madsen's wedding vows have given the game greater depth? How was the plot cliche or hackneyed? Quoting Shakespeare does not indicate intelligence when it is not relevant to anything being argued. And spending most of the article whining over historical accuracy, anti-republican sentiment, animal cruelty, racism? You must be trollin'. I read SA for laughs. This was neither funny, nor informative. In the future, please inlcude a modicum of reason to your reviews before rendering a verdict. You discredit yourself, your editors, and your publishers producing this pile of garbage. Thank you, John Davis P.S. The "knife game," also called five finger fillet, was from Aliens and was not the first time it appeared in film. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knife_game

Editors? Publishers? Discredits? John, I think you have Something Awful mistaken for some other website where the writers "care" about "anything." We don't. Lowtax pays us in Confederate militaria and we have to fight with him to be allowed to write anything other than Dharma & Greg reboot spec scripts.

You want some "critical review," well alright, I'll answer your questions.

How did the whistling enhance or detract from the settings and action?

It should be self-evident, but the next time your mom is pulling a train in the men's room at the Cat Hatch I'll kick the DJ off the Lords of Acid and start whistling Sittin' On the Dock of the Bay into the PA system. Derail the whole thing, and I hope you know her Fat Mom in Heat DVDs put the jorts on your trotters.

Lisa stops for a little paid entertainment from Mrs. Krabappel in The Simpsons Hit & Run.How could a choice to betray Madsen's [sic] wedding vows have given the game greater depth?

There's a reason TBS doesn't play edited Emmanuelle movies. When people play a GTA-style game, with hookers in it, they deserve the erotic satisfaction of watching horses bounce up and down and the agency to beat hookers to death for a refund. See GTA-clone Heavy Rain for how to do this properly. You could make a woman take an all-nude shower, strip tease, and get her cooter literally drilled by a crazy old man.

How was the plot cliched or hackneyed?

Really? It was a genre game. By its very nature it was cliched and hackneyed. You ever stopped in the manga section long enough to wonder why they don't put your Gun Diva XXX and Sausage Fiddler Umami in the literature section at Borders? They're worthless trash. They reserve it for true classics like The Lovely Bones.

P.S. Wikipedia isn't a reliable source for academic research, which you would know if you weren't the sort of insufferable, sexless, autistic manchild who replies to articles point-by-point in a vain effort to fill your otherwise barren life with some human meaning.

A quick note to all of you out there who "get" Truth Media: don't send us email pretending (poorly) not to "get" it and doing Jeff K. shtick. It's embarrassing for everyone involved and dishonors Jeff, may he rest in peace.

– Zack "Geist Editor" Parsons (@sexyfacts4u)