Be Excellent To Each Other

The one thing at E3 that excited me the most is this. SR2 was easily the most entertaining game I've ever played. I cannot wait for this.



FUCKING FUCK YEAH, FUCKERS.

I'm having more fun staring at Flashblock's "click my to enable this video" screen than I ever did with Saints Row 2.

Watch the video. You need to watch the video.

Also, you need to have enjoyed SR2, I must say. That you didn't makes you foolish.

Day 1, all the way.

Not played any.

Boring and full of bugs, just like the first game. Not arsed at all.

They really need to have got the graphics engine sorted out, it was a proper clunky, glitchy PoS in SR1 and SR2.

Any news if there's a PC version? The 360 couldn't cope with it at all, especially when you had a really fast car and it couldn't stream the game world in fast enough.

It felt like the developer of Dead Rising tried to make GTA. No thanks.

Shut your whore mouth.

I assume there will be a PC version, but I have to say I never noticed a single draw distance issue in all the time I played it, even on the bikes.

Just before I got rid of it, Perkies tried to win my over with some co-op highlights. I had to protect some celebrity. The fifteenth time I threw a guy into a jet engine, it gor boring. An hour later, I turned the game off, and traded it in the next day.

I played the demo, well played, I gave up, actually, that could have been mercenaries 2.

Saints Row 2 was good...ish. It wasn't nearly as funny as it thought it was. It wasn't nearly as funny as Stewart Lee actually is. And Stewart Lee isn't funny.

I had it glitch out on me more than once, and a couple of straight crashes too.

This was on an original Xenos chipset 20GB 360 though, which sounded alarmingly like it was going to explode whenever anything demanding was asked of it. (And no hard drive install either of course, so the disc was going full chat the whole time too.)

Oh yeah, there was some proper glitching going on. Teleporting out of cars and onto the pavement still travelling at speed, and the like. That was part of its charm though.

I think it's too soon, to be honest. Part of the problem with GTA-alikes (ignoring that GTA started to take itself too seriously) is that game fatigue can build up really quickly with them. There's only so much you can really do to change the core Fun parts of them before you end up actually making them less fun.

I mean, try playing any gta-style game all weekend, and tell me you don't want a break for a week or two, more so than with any other game type.

Have you watched the video? There's a van that sucks up passers by and SHOOTS THEM OUT OF A CANNON. And you can beat people with a 3' jelly dong!

I can't think of a better antidote to the tedium of GTA IV.

Craster why are all these people such wrong heads

That looks rather fun. Was SR2 like that?

(I have it. On two platforms. And never played it)

Yes, it was.

It had characters whom I felt absolutely no empathy with and couldn't care less what happened to them; horrible glitches and bugs in the gameplay; boring map that was almost exactly the same as the first (at least in Crackdown 2 it felt like time had passed and not been kind to it); almost exactly the same side-missions as the first game; co-op lobbies that would inexplicably boot one of you out of the game just as you'd finished a mission before the quicksave.

It was infuriating and I only completed it because Alberto dragged me through it. A horrible, budget GTA clone with no charm whatsoever.

I loved Saints row 2, it was GTA IV without the brown, annoying cousin, and an actual sense of humour.

Racist.

This exactly.

Much as it pains me to say it, he has a point. I really enjoyed SR2 when I played it single player (not maxed yet though dagnammit!) but when I played it co-op with myp just before Xmas it was a horrible bug-ridden mess. I will confess to being possibly the only person alive who found the Strongarm multiplayer mode quite fun though. I guess it's the presence of myp that breaks things.

Full of bugs, I might admit to. But anyone who thought it was boring is broken in the soul.

I guess you never played the first game then. This is just Saints Row v1.1.

Greavsies Row will be much better.

SOULBROKEN.

Your face is broken.

And there's egg in your ginger beard.

Gaywood's eggs.

I just remembered what my character looks like those customisations were great, I think the fact that myp didn't bother with it and we just cracked on was part of his problem... because yes, your character was a prick who you wish dead and that hinders the enjoyment of the plot, but, if you make him a fat Mexican guy with a Cockney accent and emo hair who runs around in white y-fronts and a pink rucksack with an occasional stalactite on his head then you can warm to him a lot more.

Would there be mileage in a BEEX Strongarm night?

Not with Kovacs.

I made my character look like , that's probably where I went wrong.

gah, just traded my copy in whilst it was still worth something at Amazon.
I muchly enjoyed the 2nd game in co-op and will give the 3rd a try. The fact you character sang along (badly) to the in car 80's radio station occasionally was a nice touch.

If they lose the achievements for ranked matches and enforced co-op I'll be happy.

If me and Perkies can be Kingpins (kingspin?) then there's no excuse. Bring on more grinding!!!

Although having to play with myp was a chore I could have done without I'll admit.

I think the problem with SR/SR2 was that they were a bit schizophrenic, especially in 2, yeah you could make your character look and sound like a twat but it didn't make the storyline and the characters any less hateful, or the game any less buggy, or the missions any less badly designed - and having the game played by a fat fucker in a pink afro was a joke that wore thin very quickly.

Plus the car handling was utter shite (GTAIV gets a lot of stick in this area but I always found the sports cars to be pretty good fun to drive, the crap cars drove like crap but you could easily get the hang of them), the graphics were bobbins, and the humour ultimately got a bit one-note.

I might give SR3 a go if they knock out a decent PC version, but I'm currently in the process of playing through GTAIV again and TBH I'd forgotten just how bloody good it is. Saints Row has a lot of catching up to do.

I don't think you and I are ever going to see eye to eye on this. How you can ever think that the characters in SR2 were more hateful than the vile crowd that made up GTAIV is beyond me, and the same for the car handling - I've driven shower cubicles with better handling than the GTAIV cars.

I guess we just enjoy different things. I found GTAIV hateful, drab, full of wankers, and with shitty car physics. I found SR2 admittedly buggy, but charming, witty, and just a damned sight more fun.

Well no, any saints row game is better than GTA4. But I mean, a thir done already... ech. I've still not even finished with the first one, to be honest.

I couldn't even get done with the first proper mission on GTA IV. I got halfway through and thought "when this is done I'm going to get a call off my fucking cousin aren't I' and ejected the disk never to load it again.

Same here, except I got annoyed halfyway through, as I got a phone call from a woman I was supposed to be dating, and I had a BIG GAME DILEMMA CHOICE moment as I had to choose whether to go on the date, or call it off to go and save my cousin's life.

Rather than, say, EXPLAIN THE SITUATION to the woman, and simply seeing her a bit later on instead. Stupid game.

Once you've seen the tv programmes and watched a fat man roll down a hill, you've run out of things to do in GTA4.

Well each to their own I guess, I've happily spent most of the night playing GTAIV, including doing nothing but fucking around for the last hour or so doing the side missions and getting my 'like' up with some key characters so I get their bonuses.

There's some fantastic humour in there too, from the talk radio stations (and indeed the radio voiceovers in general, particularly Iggy Pop and Juliette Lewis), the radio adverts (the one about the hamster opera had me genuinely LOL-ing) to Roman's taxi drivers giving you all sorts of abuse when you use them for a free ride, to the girl you can date who's a really nasty drunk, Brucie's constant steroid-fuelled ranting, or just the way seemingly innocent situations can kick off into a full scale ruckus.

Yeah the characters are mostly utter arseholes, but the story is at least moderately interesting and worth following through, as opposed to SR/SR2 where I was just like, 'who fucking cares?'.

As for the cars, the good cars handle just fine (the 'Ferrari' you can easily pinch from a showroom and then store outside your safe house is peachy), but even the heavier/crappier/4WD/etc cars all have their own unique characteristics which, once you get the hang of them, can all be used effectively. None of the cars in SR/SR2 had any 'weight' and felt like you were driving them on an ice rink.

Plus, on this playthrough, I'm experimenting with all sorts of different ways to do things, and it's amazing how many alternatives there are to completing some missions, in some cases scarcely having to fire a single shot. (There's that one where you have to kill a high powered lawyer for the corrupt cop, and that gave me all sorts of grief on the 360 as it results in a massive firefight when you shoot him and it's hell to get out of the building. This time round I went for a silent kill with a knife, which didn't alert the fifty bazillion security guards in the building or give me a wanted rating, I then blew out the window behind him with a shotgun, jumped down to the ground, and sped off in my car, and I was thinking 'WTF didn't I try that last time around?')

Don't get me wrong, there was a lot I enjoyed about SR/SR2, and certainly before GTAIV was released they filled a gap. However, given that I have no interest in the multiplayer side of things, my feeling is that as a single player experience, they simply don't stack up.

Also, as I've mentioned in the PC Hardware thread, I'm playing it through this time on PC, so I'm seeing the game at a level of sheer gorgeousness and smoothness that simply didn't exist when I last played it through on the 360, and that's making a difference to my enjoyment of the game.

If someone rings you up for something you don't want to do, just accept whatever it is they're nagging you about, and then call them straight back to cancel. That way you won't lose any 'like' with them and can carry on with what you were doing.

IMO it's actually worth going on the different events with the various characters at some point, some of the dialogue is pretty good.

And as ever, the truth (ie. my opinion) is somewhere in between...

Nah.

I did, honest.