When the Saint Comes Marching In

Recently in this blog there has been allot of talk about GTA IV. How it was a real city, and how its character defined himself by his actions, while being able to justify them via his past. With regard to GTA IV, my take on this game is that you were a man living in a city, you were simply placed there (as demonstrated by the intro) and you had to live there. The game was serious, and Rockstar tried to make it more so by removing some of the more incredible weapons and vehicles. Saint’s Row 2 goes in the entirely opposite direction, and I love it.

Just to set the scene I’ll spoil your first mission, you wake up from a coma, design your new plastically altered hero and bust out of prison using a Squad Automatic Weapon to blow up several police boats and choppers. Then you break your “homie” out of prison and have to fight a combat-shotgun wielding Judge Judy character. Wow, how could this be any different from GTA IV? Yet this game with poorer visuals, as much character depth as a dried up mud puddle and vehicle handling like an early 90’s arcade racer (yes, I can corner at 90 mph in a SUV…what, you can’t?), all of it comes together to form something great in and of itself.

Fun, spelled with a capital F and U (cursing is rampant in the game) is what Saints Row 2 is all about. GTA IV strived to make a real city for you to live in. Saints Row 2 caters to what you would do in that real city if every time you got arrested or died you lost $20 and appeared at the local hospital. Perfectly demonstrating this is the “Mayhem Missions” where you have to rack up as much property damage as possible in a given amount of time, if you do well you get a flamethrower, oh, and they give you unlimited RPGs during the mission.

There is nothing in Saints Row 2 that is not designed to give the player enjoyment, everything from prostituting yourself out (if you’re a girl) to the fight club missions whose introductions are thinner than air in a vacuum. When I played GTA IV I felt insignificant, I felt like I was in a real city that existed despite of me, in Saints Row 2 it feels like the city was made for me. There is nothing deep about this game, there can be no moral analysis beyond the statement that there are no morals, the character doesn’t evoke any emotion other than outright laughter at his accent choices (I chose the Aussie).

The only point in talking about this game is to demonstrate that while GTA IV was a giant leap for the industry in terms of creating a world that was real, Saints Row 2 demonstrates that there are still games out there that don’t further the genre, that don’t push any envelopes, and that certainly didn’t employ any story writers, but that still are fun to play and are worth playing for the simple enjoyment of using a minigun to mow down cars while you laugh hysterically sitting on your couch, and actually, isn’t that what allot of gaming is about…fun?