99.9 F°

Hot today. As hot as a very hot thing in a hot place. Or maybe hotter. Lovely.

With the air of sodding typicality, I had my assignments to finish off, but I raced through the last question on the M150 and I was done by half past two, so I could come downstairs and enjoy the weather, sat on the sofa with the patio doors open wide, a hint of a cool breeze and a glass of something cold to drink.

As a reward to myself, I cracked open the seal on my copy of Red Dead Redemption and fired it up. It's always a slightly overwhelming experience starting a new open world GTA style game, but this immediately felt familiar. My first impressions are that this is the most graphically adept game that Rockstar have ever produced. I loved Liberty City, as you probably know, but I really had a hankering for the wide open vistas of San Andreas. Red Dead has landscapes that make you want to rein in your horse and stop and stare. I went on a ride and then looked at the map to see that I had covered a bare fraction of the territory. Wowzers.

It's too early to comment on the story yet, but I am intrigued so far. The end of the wild west in the early 1900s is an era that doesn't really get much coverage in films, and the only book that that really springs to mind is Larry McMurty's 'Telegraph Days' that deals with the way the west was mythologized by writers and film makers.