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Soys Row 2022

Caim

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You know, I've always wondered something: If this game series was so great, why is it that I have never heard anything about it except for the occasional mention of the name in a list on PirateBay? What is it about, and why does nobody ever care to speak of it?
It's a series of crimsims in the style of GTA: San Andreas. At least the first two were. Saints Row 1 is the most grounded of the bunch and the closest to San Andreas: a crime drama intercut with some wacky stuff here and there. The game's also only available on XBLA, which is why it's not widely talked about. Saints Row 2 cranks the wacky bullshit up quite a bit, which can result in you doing a mission that ends with an emotional cutscene in which you performing a mercy kill on one of your mangled homies... only to hop into a septic truck and spray shit on people's houses to drive down real estate value in the next. It's on Steam, but the port is one of the most legendarily shitty ports to still technically be functional and even fan-made patches won't do it any good.

Saints Row The Third cranks up the wacky bullshit even more and sees the titular Saints having gone corporate and become slaves to PR, only to be taken down a peg and ending up having to rebuild to face a powerful cartel of gangs and a security force bordering on being a PMC. It pretends to be a serious crime drama while having you compete in a murderous wacky Japanese game show and pilot flying motorcycles. Seeing the Saints forget where they came from, getting too big for their britches and suffering the consequences for it is an apt metaphor for what happened to the series, but the developers either missed out on the parallels or just didn't care.

Saints Row IV... well, it starts with the Saints sneaking into a foreign military base, the boss jumping onto a nuclear missile and defusing it while riding it into the sky while Aerosmith's "I don't wanna miss a thing" plays in the background. It works, the day is saved and the boss gets elected President of the United States for the trouble. Then aliens invade and shove you into the Matriix, which is the exact same city from the previous game. You manage to escape and now have to jack into the not-Matrix to rescue your homies and stop the aliens, all the while developing superpowers while inside. Note that this is same series that started with you being saved from being collateral damage in a gang shootout and you joining to make the streets a safer place in the first game. And don't get me started on Gat out of Hell...

Even though the third game sold the best, the first two games (especially the second) are held in the highest regard by the fans for being the best games in the series for being crime dramas with just the right amount of wacky. The third and fourth go way overboard, especially the fourth. And since we haven't had new games in the series for well over half a decade, discussion slowed down to a crawl until there was news of the new game, and... it looks like it's going to be a woke trash fire.
 

Norfleet

Moderator
Joined
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Messages
12,250
The game's also only available on XBLA, which is why it's not widely talked about.
Ah, consoletrash. That's an instant ignore for me, yes. This entirely explains why I have never heard anything about this series except the name.

It's on Steam, but the port is one of the most legendarily shitty ports to still technically be functional and even fan-made patches won't do it any good.
Ah, yes, badly ported console trash. Not exactly the kind of thing I'd give attention to....

Yeah, I'm seeing why this series somehow managed to entirely avoid pretty much all attention in my sector.
 

mogwaimon

Magister
Joined
Jul 21, 2017
Messages
1,079
Well, long story behind it but they're supposed to be re-releasing Saint's Row 2 in the future on PC in an updated non-shitty format and with all the DLC from the originals installed, it was a passion project from a modder turned community manager that got hired by the devs and although that person recently died there's still a possibility that the work will be finished.

Once that's done perhaps you could give it a shot. If you enjoy Grand Theft Auto and can look past your anti-console bias you'll find a pretty great game there, and best part is the new port isn't a big remaster or anything; owners of the original port are supposed to get it for free on Steam so it's not going to have some big 60 dollar pricetag or anything....and tbh while the current port does have an abysmal reputation I've done one or two full playthroughs of the game over the years on PC using the fan patch without any glaring issues, but of course your mileage may vary as they say
 

orcinator

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Republic of Kongou
en though the third game sold the best, the first two games (especially the second) are held in the highest regard by the fans for being the best games in the series
Please don't pretend SR1 was good. The only thing it had over SA was that it had regular TPS controls but there were like 50 GTA clones on the ps double and some of them must have figured that out earlier.
 

Curious_Tongue

Larpfest
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Codex 2012 Codex 2013 Serpent in the Staglands Codex USB, 2014
en though the third game sold the best, the first two games (especially the second) are held in the highest regard by the fans for being the best games in the series
Please don't pretend SR1 was good. The only thing it had over SA was that it had regular TPS controls but there were like 50 GTA clones on the ps double and some of them must have figured that out earlier.

It wasn't as good as San Andreas, but it was still a very good game.

And where are all these GTA clones I keep hearing of?
 

orcinator

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en though the third game sold the best, the first two games (especially the second) are held in the highest regard by the fans for being the best games in the series
Please don't pretend SR1 was good. The only thing it had over SA was that it had regular TPS controls but there were like 50 GTA clones on the ps double and some of them must have figured that out earlier.

It wasn't as good as San Andreas, but it was still a very good game.

And where are all these GTA clones I keep hearing of?
Getaway, scarface, Simpsons hit n run, jak 2, true crime.....
 

Silverfish

Arbiter
Joined
Dec 4, 2019
Messages
3,064
I couldn't believe how blatantly True Crime stole from GTA. They even copied the "sorcerer who summons fiery skulls" boss fight from Vice City.
 

Caim

Arcane
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Dutchland
I couldn't believe how blatantly True Crime stole from GTA. They even copied the "sorcerer who summons fiery skulls" boss fight from Vice City.
Hey, as long as it works.

Also, Sleeping Dogs was supposed to be True Crime 3, but that became its own thing eventually. How much like GTA did that turn out to be? I have some vague recollectiosn of playing it years ago, and what I remembered was that the fighting system was more akin to Yakuza.
 

deuxhero

Arcane
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Flowery Land
Saints Row 2 cranks the wacky bullshit up quite a bit, which can result in you doing a mission that ends with an emotional cutscene in which you performing a mercy kill on one of your mangled homies... only to hop into a septic truck and spray shit on people's houses to drive down real estate value in the next.

Saints Row 2's three main stories are all consistent in tone within themselves (Sons is comedic all the way, Brotherhood is serious with some very dark humor, Ronin is plain dark). The "problem" is you can freely hop between each of the three stories and into side missions.

And frankly septic avenger's whackyness is overplayed. It's one side mission when the rest of them are all relatively serious.
 

Data4

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Over there.
I couldn't believe how blatantly True Crime stole from GTA. They even copied the "sorcerer who summons fiery skulls" boss fight from Vice City.
Hey, as long as it works.

Also, Sleeping Dogs was supposed to be True Crime 3, but that became its own thing eventually. How much like GTA did that turn out to be? I have some vague recollectiosn of playing it years ago, and what I remembered was that the fighting system was more akin to Yakuza.
Sleeping Dogs was pretty good. It was sorta GTA: Hong Kong. It's been a while since I played it, but I recall it was pretty short compared to GTA. I was hoping for a sequel, but it never panned out. Square had taken over publishing when it changed from TC3, and I guess they just didn't want to continue that sort of game.
 

orcinator

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I couldn't believe how blatantly True Crime stole from GTA. They even copied the "sorcerer who summons fiery skulls" boss fight from Vice City.
Jak 2 was a platformer but it was still part of the big wave.

How much like GTA did that turn out to be? I have some vague recollectiosn of playing it years ago, and what I remembered was that the fighting system was more akin to Yakuza.
bamham, it had bamham combat and was mediocre to bad all around (shity driving, small world, parkour that was never used outside the chase scenes...), only memorable for the pork bun memes.
GTA clone with a gimmick but barely managing to compete by making the campaign boring instead of tedious like normal GTA.
 
Joined
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Messages
4,010
True Crime was also total fucking shit. Those GTA3 and Vice City games sucked, but in comparison to True Crime they looked like some kind of shining bastion of game design. I mean, that first True Crime game was unplayable, I thought GTA 3 and Vice City played bad, and they do, but True Crime made them look good.

As for other sandbox open world games that happen because of GTA3, they're kind of sporadic until after San Andreas. I mean there's The Getaway and Mafia the year after 3, then True Crime after that and Midnight Club (also Rockstar) goes open world. In 2004 you get Spider-Man 2. Then in 2005, the year before Saints Row there's (and this is the best of them, especially the normal shooter ones) Mercenaries: Playground of Destruction, the Godfather and Scareface games, Gun, Destroy All Humans!, and The Incrediable Hulk: Ultimate Destination. There's another True Crime in there somewhere too. I think by that 2005 batch all those with shooting, even if they still had some kind of lock-on system, also had normal third person aiming too like Saints Row would have.

Hearing or seeing the word "grounded" in regards to any Saints Row game always seemed odd to me. The most grounded of the Saints game, the first one, is probably more cartoony than the most cartoony GTA game. It's a series where the biggest side active you do is a bad Burnout knockoff minigame called Insurance Fraud where the goal is to build combos by ragdolling your character into multiple vehicles as they're thrown hundreds of feet by cars. The series at its most grounded is still an over-the-top cartoon parody, and it pushed that more and more with each passing game. The first Saints Row is also probably the most generic GTA copy of everything to follow after GTA3.

Given how the series started with you as basically this Guardians Angels gang, and Volition made The Punisher with Garth Ennis, it's too bad they didn't bring him back to reboot this series since at least before they became the villians you're pretty much meant to be a Punisher gang. Shit, at the least they could've just ripped off their own Punisher game.
 

Mexi

Dumbfuck!
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True Crime was also total fucking shit. Those GTA3 and Vice City games sucked, but in comparison to True Crime they looked like some kind of shining bastion of game design. I mean, that first True Crime game was unplayable, I thought GTA 3 and Vice City played bad, and they do, but True Crime made them look good.

As for other sandbox open world games that happen because of GTA3, they're kind of sporadic until after San Andreas. I mean there's The Getaway and Mafia the year after 3, then True Crime after that and Midnight Club (also Rockstar) goes open world. In 2004 you get Spider-Man 2. Then in 2005, the year before Saints Row there's (and this is the best of them, especially the normal shooter ones) Mercenaries: Playground of Destruction, the Godfather and Scareface games, Gun, Destroy All Humans!, and The Incrediable Hulk: Ultimate Destination. There's another True Crime in there somewhere too. I think by that 2005 batch all those with shooting, even if they still had some kind of lock-on system, also had normal third person aiming too like Saints Row would have.

Hearing or seeing the word "grounded" in regards to any Saints Row game always seemed odd to me. The most grounded of the Saints game, the first one, is probably more cartoony than the most cartoony GTA game. It's a series where the biggest side active you do is a bad Burnout knockoff minigame called Insurance Fraud where the goal is to build combos by ragdolling your character into multiple vehicles as they're thrown hundreds of feet by cars. The series at its most grounded is still an over-the-top cartoon parody, and it pushed that more and more with each passing game. The first Saints Row is also probably the most generic GTA copy of everything to follow after GTA3.

Given how the series started with you as basically this Guardians Angels gang, and Volition made The Punisher with Garth Ennis, it's too bad they didn't bring him back to reboot this series since at least before they became the villians you're pretty much meant to be a Punisher gang. Shit, at the least they could've just ripped off their own Punisher game.
Idk what you're talking about. True Crime was awesome. Unplayable? Never played the second, but the first was solid. Not as good as San Andreas, but it was something different with the fighting system.
 

DeepOcean

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Nov 8, 2012
Messages
7,394
Saints Row games before Saints Row 4 were better at being a mayhem sandbox than GTA games, that is why people talk about them, Saints Row 2 is better than SA and Saint's Row 3 is better than GTA 4 and 5 and their cinematic bs. When I say better, I'm talking about gameplay that is what should matter, poorly written mob melodrama that is what GTA became bores me to the bone.

The series gone to complete shit with Saints Row 4 though, Saints 4 buried the series so hard and is the main reason it disappeared from radars. Saints' Row 4 was a low effort cash grab from a dying company that tried turning a DLC for Saints Row 3 into a full game, and the result was copy pasted low effort content everywhere, lack of any inovation and the things it added like the powers, there was zero care into balancing the game with they making the rest of the gameplay completely irrelevant and nuked the difficulty of the game that was decent before.

Hummm... low effort cash grab... it seems I'm seeing a deja vu.
 

EruDaan

Arcane
Joined
Jan 1, 2013
Messages
1,549
Also, Sleeping Dogs was supposed to be True Crime 3, but that became its own thing eventually. How much like GTA did that turn out to be? I have some vague recollectiosn of playing it years ago, and what I remembered was that the fighting system was more akin to Yakuza.
Sleeping Dogs was pretty good. It was sorta GTA: Hong Kong. It's been a while since I played it, but I recall it was pretty short compared to GTA. I was hoping for a sequel, but it never panned out. Square had taken over publishing when it changed from TC3, and I guess they just didn't want to continue that sort of game.[/QUOTE]

Only that Hong Kong was damn big with nothing to do. Besides the main quest, what could you do to earn money? And what to spend it on? Clothes? Cars? Also the no DLC for the PC version bullshit didn't made it any better. I love the game, especially the combat, the story and how you have to min-max respect gain in the PC version, but everything else? Well, forget it.

Also, If you never played SR2 then SR3 is palpable. I like to start the game every now and then, cause you can do more besides the main story in it then in, well, let's say GTA5. ;)

Oh and after having played Torchlight II for some dozen hours and then grabbing TL III for ~ 5 bucks, I can sincerely say that this abominable "Saints Row reboot" will be the Torchlight III of the SR saga. Dumbed down like hell, "modern" smartphone grafics, that somehow look worse and are far more recource hungry compared to the predecessor.
 

Nutria

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한양
Strap Yourselves In
I've been watching the trailers like I was Zapruder watching horror unfold before my eyes.

This one I'm pretty sure is mostly from earlier trailers. It's juvenile and vulgar but with no sense of humor, not even a juvenile sense of humor. Beavis and Butthead (the characters, not the TV show) were smarter than this.

After this flops I'd be really curious if anyone will tell us how this came to be. Who in the hell decided to make a very serious Saint's Row? Who hired them? Why? As far as I can tell, they are owned ultimately by Embracer, a publically-traded corporation. Are any shareholders going to ask why their property was misappropriated by employees who wanted to benefit their own careers by being "games journalism" darlings instead of making money?
 

Caim

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Are any shareholders going to ask why their property was misappropriated by employees who wanted to benefit their own careers by being "games journalism" darlings instead of making money?
No, they're just gonna go "oh this product doesn't make money anymore, shut it down" and move on.
 
Joined
Mar 3, 2010
Messages
8,818
Location
Italy
Also, Sleeping Dogs was supposed to be True Crime 3, but that became its own thing eventually. How much like GTA did that turn out to be?
easy and linear, but fun and solid. environmental fatalities are a treat. the remaster is pretty much bug free. dlcs are shit.
 

KateMicucci

Arcane
Joined
Sep 2, 2017
Messages
1,676
Saints Row games before Saints Row 4 were better at being a mayhem sandbox than GTA games, that is why people talk about them, Saints Row 2 is better than SA and Saint's Row 3 is better than GTA 4 and 5 and their cinematic bs. When I say better, I'm talking about gameplay that is what should matter, poorly written mob melodrama that is what GTA became bores me to the bone.

The series gone to complete shit with Saints Row 4 though, Saints 4 buried the series so hard and is the main reason it disappeared from radars. Saints' Row 4 was a low effort cash grab from a dying company that tried turning a DLC for Saints Row 3 into a full game, and the result was copy pasted low effort content everywhere, lack of any inovation and the things it added like the powers, there was zero care into balancing the game with they making the rest of the gameplay completely irrelevant and nuked the difficulty of the game that was decent before.

Hummm... low effort cash grab... it seems I'm seeing a deja vu.
SR4 was a lot better than SR3. The city was shit and SR4 let you superrun/fly past it faster.
 
Joined
Nov 23, 2017
Messages
4,010
I've been watching the trailers like I was Zapruder watching horror unfold before my eyes.

This one I'm pretty sure is mostly from earlier trailers. It's juvenile and vulgar but with no sense of humor, not even a juvenile sense of humor. Beavis and Butthead (the characters, not the TV show) were smarter than this.

After this flops I'd be really curious if anyone will tell us how this came to be. Who in the hell decided to make a very serious Saint's Row? Who hired them? Why? As far as I can tell, they are owned ultimately by Embracer, a publically-traded corporation. Are any shareholders going to ask why their property was misappropriated by employees who wanted to benefit their own careers by being "games journalism" darlings instead of making money?

Serious? This isn't a serious Saints Row game. I mean, I guess you could say it's more serious than the last ones where they're superheroes and in hell, but this doesn't seem any more serious than the third game. I guess they've said its "serious" and other things like that, but nothing they've shown would indicate this being true.

It would however be interesting to find out exactly how, and why, the fuck this game happened this way. Feels like key people on the team were perpetually on Twitter and ResetEra, (especially ResetEra) and thought they just couldn't make games like they did before the mid 2010s. The marketing for this game (especially compared to the leaked trailer that got recut) also feels like it was done by someone that secretly hates Volition, Deep Silver, or both.
 

maydaymemer

Educated
Joined
Jan 2, 2022
Messages
89
The game's also only available on XBLA, which is why it's not widely talked about.
Ah, consoletrash. That's an instant ignore for me, yes. This entirely explains why I have never heard anything about this series except the name.

It's on Steam, but the port is one of the most legendarily shitty ports to still technically be functional and even fan-made patches won't do it any good.
Ah, yes, badly ported console trash. Not exactly the kind of thing I'd give attention to....

Yeah, I'm seeing why this series somehow managed to entirely avoid pretty much all attention in my sector.
SR2 was pretty based you should try it once it gets patched
Saints Row games before Saints Row 4 were better at being a mayhem sandbox than GTA games, that is why people talk about them, Saints Row 2 is better than SA and Saint's Row 3 is better than GTA 4 and 5 and their cinematic bs. When I say better, I'm talking about gameplay that is what should matter, poorly written mob melodrama that is what GTA became bores me to the bone.

The series gone to complete shit with Saints Row 4 though, Saints 4 buried the series so hard and is the main reason it disappeared from radars. Saints' Row 4 was a low effort cash grab from a dying company that tried turning a DLC for Saints Row 3 into a full game, and the result was copy pasted low effort content everywhere, lack of any inovation and the things it added like the powers, there was zero care into balancing the game with they making the rest of the gameplay completely irrelevant and nuked the difficulty of the game that was decent before.

Hummm... low effort cash grab... it seems I'm seeing a deja vu.
SR4 was a lot better than SR3. The city was shit and SR4 let you superrun/fly past it faster.
I agree. SR3 was a disapointment but at least SR4 was different enough in genre for the shitty map design and my dislike that they changed the controls to not matter anymore
 

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