Top 5 Badasses in Video Games
Written by: Adam "ManKorn" Korenman, CC2K Video Games Editor
2) John Marston – Red Dead Redemption
If he was any more manly, you’d already be pregnant
We all want to be cowboys. It doesn’t matter who you are: boy, girl, doctor, prince of oil-rich country. The only exception to this rule is if you are an astronaut, because you are already a cowboy. Of motherfucking space!
Red Dead Redemption gave players the chance to live out the fantasy of roaming the Wild West in proper style. It was a near-perfect game, made all the more so by its protagonist John Marston. This gravel-voiced antihero galavants around the massive New Austin landscape engaging in shootouts and showdowns. He puts more men under the Earth than a natural disaster, and exhibits a carefree attitude the entire time.
What makes Marston even more admirable is his pioneer attitude. He is at home on the frontier, riding horses and swinging lassos as he brings down the toughest hombres in the West. He spends the game hunting his former partners in crime, dragging their bleeding carcasses back to the government men who hold his family ransom. By the end of the game, he’s racked up a body count worthy of a Stallone movie.
Let me put away this knife, then we can have a fair fight
His badass moment is, in fact, the last of his life. The lawmen who put him on the case realize that, as the surviving member of his old gang, Marston is now the most dangerous criminal alive. Rather than letting him live out his days in peace on a family farm, they send every man available to put him down. John safely leads his son and wife to the barn near their home, putting them on a horse and sending them running in the opposite direction. Then, with grit in his teeth and bourbon in his gut, he walks out the other side of the building.
There wait twenty lawmen with guns drawn.
Some men would lay down arms at that point. Surrender themselves to the justice they’ve earned from all their terrible wrongdoings. Not John Marston, though. He lost all of his fucks in a game of poker.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qKafS8zn5TI
Marston puts down as many as he can before succumbing to the withering gunfire. His sacrifice saves his family, and allows his son the honor of taking revenge on the survivors years down the road. It remains one of the most impressive ends to a game I’ve ever seen.
Now that has to be the least amount of fucks given in a game, right? Staring death in the face and charging in anyway like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. But no, there is one more person even braver than our spur-wearing hero.
Each of the warriors on this list fought beasts or men or monsters. While that is pretty badass, I think that it pales in comparison to one video game legend.
For while those men knew the ways of war, only one character ruled over it.