Anyone with their nose in the gaming world's business has heard of Rockstar's new masterpiece, Red Dead Redemption. It's release is on the 18th here in the US, and I'm planning to wait in line for my copy. If you want info on the game itself you can check out their website, which I"m not linking to just to save you the google search. My question to the FA regards the game's multiplayer, and a feature called "posses". Posses are essentially "parties" in any other game, and I'll draw comparisons from GTA4 to illustrate them.

The Multiplayer of this game works through an optional branch of the game called "Free-Roam". In free roam you can play it solo and just dick around as you would in, say, a free roam multiplayer game type in GTA4. This is elaborated upon more on their website.

Basically in free roam you can join a posse with up to 7 of your friends, and you can just mess around in free roam or you can compete with other posses online. I've not done much research on this branch of the game, but it sounds like Rockstar has streamlined this party-based competitive system beyond annoying lobby menus and such. Normally I would expect a game like this with competitive multiplayer to be purchased by players for the single player experience and then taken online just for fun, much like Bioshock 2 was for me, but surprisingly the competitive multiplayer is already being taken very seriously by various forums, and I even found a proboards page dedicated to Red Dead's competitive multiplayer, with scheduled tournaments and everything.

I'll get to the point here. Highly active and competitive multiplayer in a team-based setting is exactly what we here at the FA can appreciate, and so I thought I would mention this to everyone here on the forums and see what sort of attention it garners. Does anyone plan to get this game, and if so would you be interested in pursuing, however seriously, the creation of an FA posse and maybe some participation in these informal tournaments or something? I'll let you guys run with the idea from here, I just think it would be something to consider.

And while I have you here on the topic of Xbox Live, I'll throw in this tidbit. My gamertag is Orphaeus and I'm on Live pretty frequently. I know I have a few of you on my friends list, but to those of you I haven't added yet please feel free to throw me a line. If you're ever interested in playing anything with someone, I'll usually be more than happy to tag along.