1. The cold-blooded game begins by asking you to name every member of your doomed party, creating an emotional connection to each character.
2. Then you are smacked with a brutal lesson about class and value in society.
3. The entire game promotes over-the-top stereotypes.
4. People can mercilessly steal everything you have at any time.
"Good lord, I'm doomed."
5. The only fun part of the game is gleefully participating in the extinction of the buffalo.
6. And you always shot exactly 2,000 more pounds of meat than you could carry.
7. Other emigrants will try to buy an action movie's worth of bullets off you while creeping you out.
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8. For no reason whatsoever, members of your party begin to contract a myriad of painful diseases.
9. Like measles.
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10. Or typhoid.
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11. Or cholera.
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12. Or simply break limbs for no reason.
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13. "Why?!"
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14. A snake will jump out and bite you.
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15. Or your'll just plain ol' get tired.
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16. Someone may drown while wading across a stream three feet deep and lose everything you own.
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17. And your mode of transportation can be smote from heaven as well.
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18. After an inevitable death, you get the macabre option of conducting a brief funeral or simply dumping the body on the side of the road.
19. The game highly suggests the funeral option, as kicking the corpse of your relative off the wagon leads to a loss of morale.
So yes, you wrote tombstone epitaphs as a 7-year-old.
20. You yourself will most likely die, out of the blue, from a now commonly curable ailment like diarrhea.
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21. And after your entire party is dead, you will receive this uplifting message:
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And you leave the computer lab thinking:
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But at least you had this to come home to:
"Positive reinforcement!"
And in the end you learned the lesson that you have it pretty damn good compared to people 100 years ago.
