Patch Notes: Red Dead Redemption

As the most fully-realized western since Time Traveler and the best open-world game since Second Life, Red Dead Redemption is holding strong as my pick for this year's top game. Two months after the game's launch, Rockstar is set to release a patch that will address the surge of cheating in multiplayer while further polishing the single player campaign.

Multiplayer

• Removed an exploit that allowed players to mosey with nearly ten times the intended effectiveness.
  
• Players can no longer call in a Stealth bomber run after getting 5 consecutive kills, as this was historically inaccurate. Instead, the bomber will swoop down and run over opponents.
• Shooting the skybox now makes it smaller in all multiplayer modes. Shoot the other players before their itchy trigger fingers kill everyone!
  
• Added an achievement for completing a match without thinking any of the following: "howdy", "giddyup", "yeehaw", "pardner", "is that guy's name a reference to weed/Halo/anime?"
• Horses can now support up to 16 simultaneous riders.
  
• All players that cheat and claim to simply be roleplaying as lawless bandits will have their consoles remotely deactivated by developers roleplaying overzealous sheriffs.
  

Gameplay

• Integrated support for the Kinect and Move. When either device is connected, the game will cite the retail price of your peripheral then whistle and laugh. No further implementations are planned.
  
• Due to popular demand, tumbleweeds can now be hugged like any other NPC or animal.
  
• Added an option for left-handed players to completely reverse all controls, display all text backwards, render objects inside out, and mute the game's music while amplifying all sound effects by a factor of ten.
  
• Fixed a bug which caused skinned/harvested animals to get up and whimper, following the player even after console resets, reloading of previous saves, or starting new games.
  
• Shooting children's balloons now pops them.
  
• Improved the yelling minigame. Now includes hooting, hollering, and (on harder difficulties) closed-mouth screaming.
  

Visual

• Added about a handful of sand in total to the gameworld.
  
• Removed the default Big Head, Tiny Hat rendering mode, replaced it with Tetris. Everything in the game. All of it. Just Tetris.
  
• Changed blood to be the correct color. Sheesh, people, excuuuse us for not being med school grads.
  
• All beverages in the saloons have been changed to pina coladas. Since we believe in player choice, the little umbrellas are completely optional.
• 3D now supported. No 3D-enabled television is required, all you need is a stray coconut and a friend to keep you from drifting off to sleep.
• Walking around with stirrups no longer slices the ground textures into parts which flap back like tuxedo bibs in old movies.

Audio

• Gunshots are now WAY less squeaky.
  
• Considered adding Ennio Morricone's score from The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly, but went with the soundtrack from Jonah Hex instead.
• Gunshots are now WAY more trombone-like.
  
• At the request of Nintendo's lawyers, removed the mushroom powerup sound that played every time you killed a man.
  

Paranormal

• Tried to remove the ghosts, but our every effort resulted in more ghosts. We don't know how they got there. No one remembers making them. Scott was excited about an ingame ghost trap involving a slice of cheese under a precariously balanced box but one day he just stopped showing up for work. When we went to check on his apartment it was empty. Like he had never been there at all.
  

Alien Swarm
For every dollar you didn't pay, approximately four billion aliens will rape you. 8/10

Deathspank
Some people expected Diablo crossed with their memories of Monkey Island, but this is more like Marvel: Ultimate Alliance meets the actual Monkey Island - and that's not a bad thing at all. 7/10

Little League World Series Baseball 2010
Should be sold exclusively in the children's departments of clothing stores to reach its two target markets: kids and the middle aged dudes that linger near them. 4/10

Limbo
A moody platformer in the vein of Out Of This World that - like Flower and Braid before it - will wind up getting way more credit than it deserves for trite artistic decisions that make Crash and Babel seem self-restrained. 7/10

– Dennis "Corin Tucker's Stalker" Farrell (@DennisFarrell)