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Playing “Red Dead Redemption 2,” one of the best video games ever made, is a pastime that I’ve indulged in for the past five years now.

I’m replaying it again from the beginning after having beaten the game years ago, but having recently installed it on my laptop a few weeks ago, I’ve had to restart. As a fan of history and western cinema, it’s an absolute pleasure.

The game is the best cowboy gunslinger western simulator ever made. In it, you don the boots and well-worn leather hat of the outlaw with a heart of gold Arthur Morgan. You have a horse, or several, and all the weapons of the old west — with six shooters, lever-action 1873 rifles and the rest.

The game gives you opportunities to go the Lone Ranger route and be the good guy, or be Jesse James if you want. A “good” honor rating gets you discounts in the general stores.

As an added enhancement for me as a fan of cinematic westerns, I always make sure to have the soundtracks of Ennio Morricone (“The Good, the Bad and the Ugly,” “Once Upon a Time in the West”) or Elmer Bernstein (“The Magnificent Seven”) playing in the background while I play.

The Northwestern portion of the game, and first part, basically looks like the mountains, canyons and forests of Eastern Oregon backcountry, though it’s meant to represent the Big Sky country of Wyoming and Montana. You ride a horse from town to town and engage in various missions and side missions.

The Southern portion of the map has areas that replicate Louisiana, New Orleans and the island of Cuba. The Southwestern portion replicates Arizona and New Mexico. The amount of detail, both historical and natural with the landscapes and the hardware of the Old West is mind-blowing.

There’s no beating the real thing, but it’s just fun fake fishing and hunting. Not only is the landscape fantastically realistic, the game developers have replicated 200 species of animal, including the wildlife of the West and Northwest with buffalo, elk, grizzlies, moose, cougars, white-tailed deer, pronghorns and bighorn rams.

You can hunt and skin them and sell the meat and skins to a trader for cash, in addition to fishing for catfish, trout and salmon among dozens of other fish species. You can also lasso horses to tame or engage in ranching. Yes, I know you can do the real thing here in Eastern Oregon — but you’re never tagged out in Red Dead.

Anyway, “Red Dead Redemption 2” is such an immersive experience thanks to great plotting, character development, voice acting and the most bleeding-edge realistic physics, visuals and game mechanics in gaming, even after five years on.