So yeah, I’ve been away from the internets for a while. More than a few people have asked what I’ve been up to.
Well, I haven’t *truly* been away from the internets, I’ve just been hanging out in different areas. Starting back w/ the beginning of my disappearance, I’ll talk about Saints Row.
If you haven’t read the wikipedia entry for it or heard of it from some other source, I’ll sum it up for you this way: it’s GTA3 done right. While I’m certainly guilty of having owned at least one of the GTA3 series, I have to admit that I often only bought them because of the sustained hype surrounding the series. To my credit, I usually rented most of them, but they somehow always left me feeling “meh”.
Rather than try to do a complete comparison, I’ll simply talk about what it is that I think Saints Row does right.
For starters, I love that I can completely customize my character. The ability to essentially drop myself into the story is GREAT. I liked it a lot in Oblivion, but the problem w/ Oblivion was that it was a first-person game, and you rarely saw yourself unless you used the HORRIBLE third-person view. I’m not a violent person, so the ability to run around in a free-roaming, no-load-time world w/o consequences is fantastic. Having my virtual thug look like me (a younger, still muscle-bound me, anyway) is pwnsome.
The color palettes are WAY better. In the GTA series, everthing’s really dark, drab and blurry. I’m sure the colors were chosen to set a mood, but frankly, they did too good a job. It truly is depressing to run around in the seedy underworld of GTA. In Saints Row, however, while I’m driving through the ‘hood, the bums sleeping on their ratty, flea-infested sofas at least have bright textures to enjoy. It’s a subtle thing, but it actually helps keep your blood rage on the happier, joyful side of the insanity guage. I feel glee as I watch bodies bounce off of the hood of my whip, tumbling through the air w/ limbs flailing realistically, thanks all in part to the Havok engine.
Combat in Saints Row works really, really well. It seems so much more natural to aim and fire than in GTA. I remember several instances in GTA where I was in a crowded alley and couldn’t lock on to the highest priority target because there were too many enemies to quickly get at the guy I needed. In Saints Row, there is no lock-on targetting. Your aiming circle moves completely locked into the camera system — it’s always at the center of the screen. Daddy likes.
The cars can all be customized, and you can have qute a few in your garage. Isn’t this just Game Design 101? Why didn’t GTA bring this to the genre first? If I’m allowed to jack any car I see in the game, why can’t I start a collection? Even better: after a car’s added to my garage, it’s there forever: it simply re-spawns. My fave car is the convertible Hammerhead that I customized — it has white lettering on the tires, accelerates quickly, has a nice top-speed and has enough seats for all of my homies (I can only recruit two at a time right now). Too cool.
I dig that the missions are so varied and open-ended. There’s always plenty to do, and the mini-games are a lot more fun. When I decide to dip back into the main storyline, however, the voice acting is pretty decent and not quite as stereotypical as in GTA. One of the subtle design decisions the developer made was to place the player in a gang of multi-racial members. With the freedom to create your character, it would’ve obviously seemed strange to have a hispanic guy in an asian gang, or some other strange combo. In the end, I feel like I’m not trapped by a particular race’s stereotypes and am free to act any way I choose.
Great job, guys!