3. Play Red Dead Redemption
With Red Dead Redemption, Rockstar showed us that they could do more than make games about shooting people in the face and stealing their cars. They proved that they could also make a game about shooting people in the face and stealing their horses.This sequel to Red Dead Revolver lets you play as John Marston, a former outlaw who is enlisted by the government as a bounty hunter, to track down members of his old gang in exchange for his family's freedom.
Why Should you Play it?It's probably the only purely Western entry on this list; it isn't set in feudal era Japan, it isn't set on Mars, or in outer space, and it features a fully explorable rendering of the American frontier, with loads of Western mainstays: bank jobs, ghost towns and cattle ranches. They even got the tumbleweed physics right. The story immerses you in the genre just as much as the setting, as your only aim is to travel from town to town solving problems with your gun like you would in a Spaghetti Western. You might think that a formula like this might become tedious in a game, but Red Dead makes it interesting with its intelligent enemy AI. Playing this game is as close as you're going to get to a real gunfight while sitting in your living room couch. Unless of course you're Clint Eastwood, and there happens to be an empty chair nearby.