I’ve got a backlog of stuff to write about video games, that must be why I’ve been lazy and not posted any of them. I know it’s one of the downfalls of blogging, when you’ve got so much to say and just can’t be arsed saying it, then the list of things to talk about just grows and grows and before you know it, you’ve got this huge backlog and the thought about going through it makes you want to roll over and fall back asleep.
I wanted to share some thoughts on a couple of the games I’ve played and loved recently, most notably, Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter and Oblivion, both on Microsoft’s Xbox 360 console, but that will be another day. For today, I wanted to quickly report on my short experience with Saints Row.
I played the demo of Saints Row on the Xbox 360, which was downloaded through Xbox Live Marketplace. I have to say, one thing Microsoft got right is Xbox Live and the marketplace for demos and game videos. I couldn’t care less about the movie preview videos, if I wanted to watch previews I’d just wait until some TV ad blasts it in my face, I’d rather not waste bandwidth downloading the preview. And theme packs and gamer pictures aren’t much use to me either. Call me cheap, I can’t bring myself to pay for gamer pictures or theme packs when there’s nothing wrong with the ones I already have. I know, I know, it’s only a couple of dollars, but still…
Anyway, back onto what we’re suppose to be talking about, Saints Row. It’s not released in Australia yet, it should be here at the end of August 2006 (31 August 2006 to be exact). I honestly can’t wait. Saints Row is much like Grand Theft Auto, another game that I absolutely loved, in terms of game play and in some respects, the theme of the game. In particular, it’s quite similar to the first part of GTA: San Andreas, where you, a gang member, run around trying to take over neighbourhoods by killing rival gangs.
In Saints Row, you run around as a newly recruited Saints Row gang member doing a similar thing in GTA: San Andreas. You kill rival gang members and take over their neighbourhood. That’s about as much as I saw from the demo. It’s an open world, meaning you can pretty much run around to any part of the “world” and do pretty much anything you please. There are missions of course. One mission I undertook was to recruit “hos” for a pimp and another was to take over a neighbourhood by killing a particular person. Every time you complete a mission, you get money and your reputation meter grows a little.
A pretty cool aspect I thought was the ability to customise your dude. You can select from a Caucasian, Asian, Hispanic or African American man and then tweak the face until you get a dude you’re happy looking at. This is a little reminiscent of Oblivion, but much easier, and therefore less, to customise. I was a little disappointed you couldn’t choose the gender, would’ve loved to run around as a chick.
The look of Saints Row is very next generation. It looks much better than GTA, but then again, you’d expect that from the Xbox 360. There’s a longer draw distance, but unfortunately, there’s still some pop ups. Most notably, there were pop up trees. Other than that, the graphics were less cartoon like than GTA and the environments are well done to give you that real life street quality. What I particularly liked was the seamless transitions between indoors and outdoors. There’s no opening of doors then waiting for the indoors environment to be loaded.
The violence in Saints Row is pretty extreme. The beginning cut scene was very graphic. Much more than any movie I’ve seen, it even made me cringe a bit, which is pretty hard to do. Put it this way, if I had kids, I wouldn’t let my 16 year old play it. If I could help it, I wouldn’t let mt 18 year old play it! The language is also pretty extreme for video games, it seemed like every second sentence in the cut scenes had the word “mother-f*ckers” in it.
The learning curve for Saints Row is pretty low. If you’ve played GTA before, you’ll find many of the buttons do the same actions. The one thing I haven’t found yet is the handbrake, which is useful to make sharp turns to get away from the cops when they’re chasing you. I must be blind or something, because I swear I simply couldn’t figure out the handbrake.
Hmmm.. that’s quite a bit of an entry for a quick report on Saints Row. If you can manage the ~1 GB demo download, and you don’t mind a lot of violence and bad language in your video games, then I would definitely recommend checking out Saints Row.
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I thought it was a little strange that Rockstar, the makers of horrendously violent yet very, very fun video games such as the Grand Theft Auto series, is releasing a family friend, sports simulation game like Table Tennis. You’d expect some other company like EA or maybe even Activision to make a table tennis video game. I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with Rockstar releasing a “family friendly” video game, it’s just unexpected, but very welcome!