RED DEAD REDEMPTION R3 Available Now.

It’s one thing for a video game to get a glowing write-up from enthusiast websites like Gamespot, IGN or 1Up. Those are game reviews written by gamers, for gamers, using the sort of inside baseball shorthand that game fans understand and expect. But when the New York Times — the Gray Lady herself — calls a video game a “tour de force,” it’s something special. Isn’t it?

In stores today, Rockstar Games’ Western epic Red Dead Redemption is already racking up some of the most positive reviews of any game released in the last year or two, with a 95% score on review aggregator site metacritic.com. In his review for the New York Times, critic Seth Schiesel calls Red Dead Redemption “a new standard for sophistication and ambition in electronic gaming” and ends his review with, “In the more than 1,100 articles I have written for this newspaper since 1996, I have never before called anything a tour de force. Yet there is no more succinct and appropriate way to describe Red Dead Redemption.”

Schiesel is a fairly unique bird in that he covers video games for a large mainstream newspaper audience. (I suppose I could also be considered such a bird, but you don’t see me sneaking references to classical music conductors into my reviews. Like I’d have any idea who they are.) I like his reviews because they’re articulate and well-written, and because I find it useful to observe how he straddles the line between making his reviews interesting to gamers but also accessible to non-gaming readers. It’s something I struggle with every week, and I still don’t think I have the hang of it.
RDR1

A gunslinger stands in front of a cemetery, as if to illustrate the Wild West's circle of life.

While I don’t need Schiesel’s thumbs-up to convince me to play Red Dead Redemption — it’s made by the ridiculously talented people at Rockstar Games (of Grand Theft Auto fame), and it’s a follow-up to 2004’s Read Dead Revolver, which I loved — it is interesting to see the reaction his review has garnered. Some folks are tweeting about it as if to say, “Look! The New York Times says video games are a serious and worthy form of entertainment!” while others are scoffing at Schiesel’s tendency to overstate how good some games really are. (He definitely does tend to toss around superlatives with abandon.)

But mainly I just like the fact that the New York Times does video game reviews, full stop. I’m terribly bored with the whole “are games art?” hand-wringing nonsense, but I am glad that, if nothing else, some media outlets do put games on the same level as movies, TV and music when it comes to coverage. (Not to toot any horns here, but I don’t know of any other major news outlet in Canada — or perhaps even North America — that generates two full pages of video games coverage per week like we do.)

I don’t need the New York Times to tell me what games are great, but someone out there probably does. And hopefully he or she will be inspired to pick up a copy of Red Dead Redemption. Which is exactly what I’m going to do right now. Giddyup.

SOURCE: TorontoSun.com