Gaming Weekend: Thugs and Heroes Edition
The weekend was extra long: I took a day off to work on completing Halo 3. I have a review of Halo 3 elsewhere, so I’ll spare the extended talks on that subject. But in the meantime, let’s go over how my weekend went down, shall we?
When the Saints Go Marching In
Saints Row ought to be the kind of game I hate. If GTA and Saints Row were movies, SR would be the kind of thing I’d despise. It’s derivative to the point of being blatant, it’s buggy to the point of being comical and it revels in sophomoric “humor” so bad I hesitate to describe at as such, ironic quotation marks or no. GTA’s brand of scathing (and occasionally scatological) humor usually comes across as wicked and satirical while when Saints Row tries to rip it off, it sounds glib and stupid. I’m not sure what exactly gets lost in that translation.
But despite all this, I love Saints Row. The structure of the game is familiar and yet they do just enough better to make it preferable to just dragging out my old copy of San Andreas. Notice I said better and not just different. Because Saints Row does improve on some of the GTA formula. Combat, for one thing, is finally enjoyable. It’s a good thing, too, because if San Andreas felt like it had a lot of combat-intensive missions, SR has easily twice as many. But unlike in GTA where it always, always felt like a major hassle, here it just feels like a natural part of the game.
Also the inclusion of the useful waypoint system makes traversing the city less of a nightmare (though still not as enjoyable as Crackdown’s rooftop springboard delight) and as silly as it sounds, the ability to create your own character is a pretty huge draw. The other thing I like is that the whole game is essentially a more efficiently designed version of the first act in San Andreas. Arguably, that was the best part of that whole game. Once you ventured on into the San Francisco clone and then out into not-Vegas and the aliens and conspiracy theory stuff started coming around it just got weird and surreal and, oddly, dull. Here the game doesn’t take those thematic U-turns and concentrates on being the best gangster game it can be. It’s something I really appreciate.
My biggest complaint with the game is that it requires you to perform some of the silly (and often repetitive) side missions to earn enough experience Respect to unlock the story missions. I have a hard time understanding why I need to go through these charades just to take over the next neighborhood, especially once I get to a certain level when I can afford nice clothes and cars and have a posse of minions on my trail to do most of my dirty work while I bide my time running around and healing them as my major contribution to a fight. It seems undignified for a guy who lives in a penthouse suite to be engaging in insurance fraud, no matter how enjoyable the “fun-with-physics-engines” mini game may be.
Oh, That One Game
Yeah, so I also played a lot of Halo 3. It’s good, but not great. The story is as frustratingly told as ever and by that I mean it can be pretty tough to figure out what’s actually going on (other than, you know, “go run over there and kill all those aliens”). Truthfully I can’t tell you why the story is so difficult to follow: I rarely have the same problem in other games but I think part of it may be that a lot of the explanation for the action occurs via comm chatter in-game. The plot stuff usually happens in non-interactive cutscenes so it’s not so hard to find out what’s going on there, but the story as told in just those scenes is basically “let’s go kill all these aliens before they kill us.” Which, you know, is completely original and in no way interchangeable with 40% of all other video games.
Online play is fun, but I already miss Call of Duty 4′s level up/experience system. Halo has a ranking thing but it doesn’t offer the same rewards. Bragging rights don’t usually do it for me, which I think is why I like achievements so much.
But I did respect that about Halo 3: Nearly all the gamerscore points are tied into the single player game, not the online modes. That drove me nuts about Gears of War.
And the Rest of It
- I played some more Ninety-Nine Nights, and finished Inphyy’s campaign. It sucked. The more I played this game the less I liked it. The story was either intentionally incomplete in which case it was stupid or it was complete but written by vandals in which case it was worthless. No matter how you slice it, this game is a waste.
- Gameznflix finally got around to getting my next couple of games to me so I played some Phantasy Star Universe. I’ve never played a PS game, even on the Dreamcast where I always intended to try PSO but somehow never did. This game is… odd. I don’t like the concessions to online play even in solo mode (I really need to be able to pause my games, folks) and there is too much mindless jRPG convention-adherence going on to capture me just yet. jRPGs and I have a strange relationship where I can occasionally forgive them their indulgences but at the same time I can find another game that does the same thing but I can’t handle it. Maybe it’s a time-based thing: I forgave Enchanted Arms and pushed through it, but it’s too soon for PSU.
- Superman Returns is… actually kind of fun. I was pretty displeased that they hijacked the open world aspect almost right away so they could put you through the fighting tutorial mission, but I don’t think I would have really learned it any other way because the fighting kind of sucks. I didn’t put a lot of time into it because Saints Row was fulfilling my open-world quota almost all weekend, but I played enough to know I want to play some more.