How Do You Know If You’ve Spent Too Much Time On Red Dead Redemption?

A question many people will ask themselves or others may ponder about their friends that have dumped them for, what has to be, the game of the year. Inspired by this months Official Playstation Magazine in the “mail@opm” feature, I felt compelled to share the symptoms or behaviours listed but add a few of my own.

In OPM:

• Instead of setting your lunch appointments for 12pm, you now arrange them for high noon
• You can’t understand why people look at you funny when you tell them you spent yesterday playing five-finger fillet
• You insist on everyone calling you Django or John GG Tucker
• You stop addressing your friends with “Hi, mate”.  It’s “Howdy, partner” now.
• At the local boozer, your favourite drink is now whiskey, straight from the bottle
• You have an appointment with your bank to inquire about a loan and down payment options on a horse
• When not playing, you keep your Sixaxis (now called a six-shooter) in a holster
• You don’t lock up your car/bike/moped any more, you tie it to a lamp post
• When tying up your car/bike/moped to a lamp post isn’t enough, you brand your initials into it
• You’re annoyed that you’re reading this because it took up five minutes of quality RDR time you’ll never get back

My own:

• Instead of calling people twats or cunts, you refer to them as “pandejos” now
• When you walk along the street your mind plays the typical spaghetti western-style music and your body naturally makes you walk like you’ve just rode a horse for 9 days straight…or you’ve shat yourself
• You continually crave to be sat by a campfire eating beans out of the can
• You look at a map and can’t figure out why you can’t fast travel when you’ve already been there countless times
• You sit in a taxi or other public transport and want to skip the journey and get there with a minor load time
• As you go about your day you spot a variety of animals and estimate how much your local corner shop would give you for their hides/teeth/claws etc.
• Every time you see a man (or a woman, in some cases) with a moustache, you rate it on a scale of 1-10
• After rating the moustaches, you try to picture which one would look best on you
• If you pass someone you know, your hand inadvertently raises to your forehead to tip your invisible stetson
• When someone runs past you in the street you reach for a non existent lasso to rope them in
• If you see a riderless horse you feel compelled to “break them in”
• On a typical night out you mentally rack up how much of a bounty could be on your head for your wreckless acts of enjoyment
• You don an “elegant suit” on your poker nights so you can cheat

I may come back to this and revise it at some point.