Uhhh... wow. I think that's all I can really say right now. I have seen bugs in games, some annoying, a la Army of Two: The 40th Day, and some amusing, usually floating people in Fallout, but never so extreme, so funny and in such magnitude than I did in Red Dead Redemption earlier today.
It was an ordinary afternoon in the West. I had just had a grand victory in a game of poker in Blackwater and with the winnings I bought myself a new horse, and decided to take it to Tall Trees for a hunting session. 10 Elks, 6 bears and a handful of boars later I was riding back into Blackwater to buy some medicine before a journey to Escalera to sell the spoils of my hunt. I crossed the railroad, took a right along the road by the Telegraph station, and slowed. Something wasn't right. There was a cow walking along the pavement.
At first this didn't strike me as hugely odd. In many of the settlements in Red Dead, there are livestock, and it's not uncommon for these to sometimes wander around the outskirts of the town a little. However, not only was this buy a road, and not near the Blackwater stables, this was a cow. There aren't any cows in Blackwater. I chuckled at this, and mused at how a cow got to such a place. Despite the odd situation, I wasn't prepared for what happened next. The cow bumped into my horse, raised its front two legs as if to say 'give me some space' and then proceeded to actually talk. 'Excuse me, sir.'
I burst into uncontrollable laughter and tears. I don't know if you've seen or heard of Laddergoat, but this was a serious Laddergoat moment. It turns out that the cow was in fact an ordinary human, but with the 'skin' of a cow as the coding clearly got confused on which skin to apply to which model.
What's more is that this wasn't all. After 10 minutes of laughing and recording it on my phone, I decided to go and watch the buffalo. Because I like buffalo. They're cute. Unfortunately, them being out in the Great Plains meant, inevitably, that I had one of the random encounters in which a man wants you to save his wife from being hanged, and being such a reluctant moralist I had to go save her. After doing so, I saw something very odd. You may have noticed that when the victim is hanged, they are tied to the tree whilst horseback, then the horse is bolted. Usually, when horses run, they run normally - that is, on the ground. Not so here. This horse was apparently Pegasus as it immediately took off and began to, quite literally, ride off into the sunset. At this point I was beginning to get worried.
After this short exploit began the last bug, and this was unbelievable. The cow swapping skins with a human is, whilst easily the funniest, at least believable, as both are ground creatures that have walking animations and such. This time, birds of all species had swapped skins with humans. The sky was littered with the almost embarrassing sight of humans gliding through the air, desperately flapping their arms as if feebly trying to teach an abandoned chick its life skills. If you can't picture it (and I don't blame you), try this video. Excuse the cliche song.
At this point, I decided I'd had enough of this total madness and switched off my Xbox, if anything in the interest of keeping my sanity. I'm still struggling to work out if I think at the time it was funny or sheerly terrifying.
