
As I played through
Red Dead Redemption, I learned a lot of things about the Old West. Irrelevant things since I shot them all, but one theme remained strangely constant as I played: The West hated women. I guess The West could just never forgive them for Mary Kate and Ashley's
How the West Was Fun.
The female characters in
Red Dead Redemption are only there to nag and complain before a passing murderer uses her as a knife storage. Every woman lies to you, and most of them try to kill you. It's the first Western based on a passive aggressive letter to some dick's ex-wife, and the only game where you can see an angry customer chase a hooker out of a saloon and you'll say, "Your strangler may have himself a point, dying lady."


Most people who die in the desert die of exposure, but that would be a shitty video game. That's why the makers of
Red Dead made sure every animal in the desert hates you. Especially the women. If you come across a damsel in distress, surprise,
she's not. She wanted you to come close so she could yank you off your horse and ride away laughing. And if you know anything about cowboys, you know that taking a man's horse is a lot like taking his asshole's virginity--you better hope he's a bottom.
The first time a woman in
Red Dead did this to me, I shot her off and started putting every bullet I owned into her face. Faces don't even have a word for what I did to her. About 20 bullets in, my girlfriend woke up from her nap and asked what the hell I was doing. I explained that I wanted everyone, even the coyotes eating this bitch's remains to know the penalty for horse thievin'. She mumbled something about crazy, but I wasn't listening. Paying attention to women was how I got into this whole corpse-mutilating pickle in the first place.
The video game seemed to take less of a lesson from that than my girlfriend because an hour later, a lady by the road screamed for help and tried the same trick! This time her body helped me test how many sticks of dynamite a horse thief cadaver can withstand (somewhere between zero and one). And as the starlit desert plains became filled with the meaty slaps of 1000 horse thief chunks, a thought hit me: If this game is set in 1911, I may have just created a time paradox by inventing Beefaroni 13 years too early.
Supporting my theory that I'd damaged the chronosphere, the same woman I had just killed was waiting outside the next town to pull me off my horse. It broke my suspension of disbelief so much that the game's writer might as well have walked on the screen and said, "Players, it took me four marriages to learn what I'm about to teach you: If you want to keep your stuff, shoot every woman you meet immediately!"


In a freeform game this size, you're bound to get glitches. And when a game lets you do anything, it doesn't take long before you try something so awesome its computer brain can't comprehend it. You're constantly falling through the ground or