"Outside of the novel setting, the individual multiplayer games have nothing substantial to offer a person other than progression. This is pretty ordinary stuff.<br />
<br />
There are so many things to do in the actual game that you'd want to do with other people: you'd want to play horsehoes, or Poker, or Blackjack. Even those would be diversions, though. You'd want to drive cattle, or steal them; you want to cut a slice of that country out and see what you could make of it – or get yours riding rough over the smaller towns. As it stands, you're given desperately limited access to a sterile, stricken place without heart or memory." (RDR is great, no question of that, but I think Tycho's right about the missed opportunities of Free Roam. More on this in a proper blog post, coming soon).

"Now, the cordial racist shopkeeper and I have a relationship. Every five days I return to Armadillo; he warmly greets me, and I kill him. I've even found ways to avoid tedium. Sometimes a single shot to the head does the trick; other times I lasso and hogtie him before letting him have it. If I've had an especially bad day on the range, I let him tell me about the Jews before plugging him multiple times in the piehole, courtesy of my Dead Eye slo-mo skill. Occasionally I even shoot up the store. I guess you could say I'm a loyal customer." And still the myth of Rockstar's "open-world" is punctured by rendering players impotent against things they – rather than their character – have a problem with.

"Do you see this? It's the world's tiniest open-source violin." Yes.