Okay, I am not one who is going to sing the praises of "Red Dead Redemption" to the high heavens despite liking the game quite a bit. However I am in the odd position of saying what a lot of other people (who I typically disagree with) have said to Yahtzee in the past, about him not having played the game he's reviewing. By this I do not mean "didn't play it right", or "didn't play it enough", but when he's talking about these glitches I can't say that I've run into anything he's talked about for the most part. What's more when he talks about the mini-games he comments on them being pointless, but a lot of those side tasks are connected to obtaining various outfits to change the protaganist's appearance. Not to mention the aquisition of Fame and Honor/Dishonor (depending on what your doing) which unlocks differant perks depending on where you are on the meter.
Though I will say I sort of agree with Yahtzee on the title. However I tend to think the "Red", being used in relation to a lot of games nowadays, comes from a subversive tone of idealized communism. People have talked about this in the "Red Faction" games (where it also has a dual meaning with Mars being the red planet), here I tended to notice that a lot of the philsophical jabbering that is going on tends to ultimatly be very anti-capitolist, anti-progress, and to an extent anti-goverment (at least the one in the US). I don't think you have to agree with what is being said to appreciate the game, but I suspect this might have something to do with the title. It's not "beat you over the head" ridiculous about it, despite the bias.
Basically I can get where the "Red" and the "Redemption" comes from looking at the content of the game, but I'm not entirely sure about the "Dead" part, though the ending of the game might have something to do with it.
I could of course be entirely wrong, I suppose unless Rock Star explains it (if they haven't already) we'll never know for sure. In the end it doesn't much matter.
It's also vaguely possible that they simply decided to start subscribing to the Japanese system of naming things, which is just to throw a bunch of random stuff out there most of the time. For example there was this one Anime called "Plastic Little"... it was about a busty teenager who commands a private mercenary whale-capturing submarine she inherited, that happens to be powerful enough to stand off the combined military forces of the planet it's on. She winds up using this, and other technology at her disposal, to protect an orphan caught up in a govermental coup. What the name "Plastic Little" has to do with any of this, and how anyone is supposed to even remotely infer what it's about from that title, is beyond me. However names like that have been occuring for decades, and I guess it shouldn't surprise me that with the way the East and West have been mingling pop culture recently, that some western companies wouldn't jump on the band wagon.