Banditry in the Old West & Medical School

Lately I've been spending my gaming time replaying Red Dead Redemption 2.  If you haven't grabbed RDR2, you definitely should.  It's an open world, old West masterpiece that always amazes me when I start getting back into it.  There's just so much to do!  And, to top it all off, the characters and story are both great.  It frequently goes on sale for around $20 and that's a real steal for the amount of content that you get.

On an unrelated note, it was announced this week that there will be a new DLC for Two Point Campus.  The Medical School expansion is the perfect tie-in between the Campus and Hospital games in the series.  It releases on August 17th for $8.99 and looks similar to the other DLC--three new campuses with new courses and challenges.  I love Two Point so I will definitely be grabbing it.  Here's the trailer:

Back to those rootin' tootin' cowboys in RDR2!

For some totally explainable reason I get a lot of these kind of "gaming secrets" videos in my social media feed and they're of RDR2.  I love watching those vids to see all the random, sort of secret-y stuff that I miss--if you've ever played a Rockstar game, you know that there are tons of little cool things tucked away inside the massive worlds.  Here's the best part though...I usually can't remember where half of them are located after I've watched the video.  Watching these videos made me want to do another playthrough and I've been enjoying the hours spent in the saddle with Arthur and crew.

This time around I've decided to be a bit more exploratory (thanks to all those vids) and to take time to check out the nooks and crannies on the map.  I've stumbled across a few hidden items and locations that I've managed to miss in previous playthroughs--I found a broken pirate sword on a swampy island and several hatchets that I had somehow missed before.

In the past I've largely ignored some of the more obnoxious "collector" type of tasks--namely looking for dinosaur bones or petroglyphs but have weirdly managed to find more than I ever have before.  (Sure, I could look up a guide, but I hate doing that)  I have found that a lot of objects that I took to be animal bones are actually dinosaur bones.  So, if you were blithely riding past an obvious pile of bones...throw on Eagle Eye and see if they're glowing orange because there's a good chance that they're actually dinosaur bones.  I've had no success with the petroglyphs--they must be really tucked away.

The one guide I did look up was for a treasure hunt that I've somehow managed to miss in previous playthroughs.  When you go to confront Flaco in the Grizzlies be sure to fully check out the cabin he comes out of--I think I ignored it in the past because I thought it was locked, but once you've killed him you can enter it and there's some decent loot inside.  This includes a hidden lockbox under a bed that has a map for the "poisonous trail" treasure hunt.  I decided to look it up because I would've never figured it out--in particular there is one part that takes you into an extremely hard to reach part of the map.  It's totally worth it too because you find 4 gold bars worth $500 a piece!

This time around I've also chosen to focus on sprucing up the camp rather than crafting a bunch of clothing for Arthur.  I'll admit to being a fairly pathetic hunter and I definitely don't have the patience to do the collector mission that requires you to hunt down perfect carcasses for random birds and small animals (which are probably the most difficult to hunt).  I always do the legendary hunting and fishing tasks--they're kind of fun.  Typically I get bored with hunting after awhile, so we'll see how much progress I make.

As I've had my Arthur spending some time in camp, I have realized what a total d-bag Micah is.  He's constantly hitting on the women in the camp and generally being a total jerk to everyone else.  I also witnessed him do something that made my skin crawl--at a certain point a stray dog turns up in the camp and Dutch agrees that it can stay.  Jack, the one child in the camp, is elated and excitedly points out the dog to Arthur.  It's a cute scene that I had somehow missed previously.  The dog, who Dutch names Cain, walks around camp and you can find him and pet him.  The bad part--Micah, is a bully and an asshole and at one point I watched as Cain was innocently laying on the edge of camp.  Micah saunters over and kicks poor Cain!  I already hated Micah (I mean...if you know, you know!), but this made me hate him even more.

If there's one major gripe I have with RDR2 it is the way that photo mode images are saved.  They don't get conveniently located in a random folder that you can Google...you can only access them through Rockstar's Social Club.  I've complained about this before, but it's an additional and needless step that turns me off from snapping pics of what is a very gorgeous game.

Am I making different choices for my Arthur this time around?  Nope.  I just can't play him as a ruthless bandit, it breaks my heart.

It's back to the old-timey sort of West for me!  Happy gaming folks!