New Rockstar Game, GTA Victoriana

Rockstar Games’ forthcoming title (the latest in the GTA historical ports) is currently courting controversy. Actually it’s doing nothing of the kind since ‘courting’ rather brings to mind chaperones and aunts, stale cake and a little furtive holding of hands when really Rockstar aren’t even in the same room as a girl with this one. No, if Miss Emily Proud is to be courted, then controversy here is being tied up with barbed wire, dabbed with aniseed flavoured mince liver and tossed in a cage with four extremely randy Patagonian mountain cock-hounds. Which to their mind is a date. A date in the same sense as the Saw movies are rom-coms.

No, this time and Rockstar put the player firmly in the role of Jack The Ripper, albeit with the player’s name and face ported in for the starring role. Marketing having long since taken over from programming here then (for example) Giles The Ripper will find his glasses steaming up as his avatar wades through quite literal pools of blood. There’s not much of a plot here but given it’s the only game scheduled to be released in the next four years that isn’t a first person shooter (including the updated Tetris, now a scarred Spetsnaz super-soldier set to save us from crocodile-faced space zombies) it’s already being heralded as the ‘next stage in rpg gaming’. Presumably if the role one is playing is that of a mostly naked horror with a ported face that has to cut open passers-by for health packs. As was the case in the 1880s. 

The game is said to be best played with headphones as the game engine includes a number of voices, set to be heard right in the player’s head - whilst the Wii version has a distinctly non-virtual orifice.

Taking on the success of Red Dead Redemption and Red Dead, Dead, Dead. Dead the game is to remain firmly away from the weeks of your life soaked up by GTA San Andreas and instead involve only two missions, one of which is optional. But still and all this aside who isn’t whilst tutting and shaking their heads is not going to do so whilst jacking hansom cabs and stalking Victorian docks?

For shame, you’ll say. This is disgraceful, indeed. Also, whores, whores, leave me would you!

Red Said Fred is set to be released November this year.