Right, that does for the XBox 360 stuff

I put in a bit of time with Red Dead Redemption, played a couple of story missions, went to try my hand at hunting down a bounty, shot and skinned a rabbit on the way there... and it struck me.  Mechanically, the game has a lot of similarity with something like Far Cry 3, just remove the radio towers and exploration aspects and add horses (which, to the game's credit, are handled differently than your usual "vehicles" in these sorts of games).  Of the two games, I'd rather do Far Cry 3, but I purposely skipped over that game earlier, so I'm not going to keep pushing forward with this one.

The setting is probably the biggest thing I have against the game... it's not that I mind scrub-lands and cacti so much, but, even from the intro video, the willful ignorance and arrogant class and racial elitism on display just grate on my nerves.  If I ever did come back to this game, it would likely be to play as a total rat-bastard, plundering and pillaging at will, but that's nowhere near my current mindset, even in "just a game".

There was one bright spot worth mentioning, though.  On a whim, I went to a movie house, and was presented with a delightful little cartoon produced by the local ladies' temperance movement, supposedly.  The subject was a patent medicine purveyor and his wares, which were almost 100% things like morphine, cocaine, and laudanum.  I don't know if there was any significant attempt to copy the animation styles of the period, but the contents definitely didn't fit.  Once you've seen a man blast a load of tapeworms out of his ass, followed shortly by him manically humping a tree, that's not an image you'll soon forget.

So, what's next?  Well, I was intending to start in on my XBox One backlog... but I just caught wind that NieR:Automata, a game I have wishlisted over at Steam, is coming to Game Pass, so I expect I'll be taking this opportunity to try that out, along with a raft of other games I have mild interest in.  If I find anything of particular interest, I'll post about it here, but otherwise it'll likely be a while.