Me and my crew rollin’ around town in my pimped-out ride:
I’ve been playing a lot of Saints Row recently, and it’s a pretty decent Grand Theft Auto clone. The storyline isn’t all that great and takes itself a bit too seriously, but they’ve improved on a lot of the gameplay mechanics (driving and shooting stuff feels a lot more natural now), and there’s a ton of stuff to do.
They’ve added some new mission types like ‘insurance fraud’, where you have to throw yourself in front of or ram other vehicles and try to cause accidents with as high a dollar value as you can. It even uses the ragdoll physics model to rate you, based on whether you fly through the windshield or not, how high and far you get tossed…
It still has a few other problems, such as missing motorcycles, which were my favourite way of getting around in GTA:SA, there are no countryside areas, multiplayer is somewhat buggy, exploitable, and laggy (though a patch is on the way for that), there’s frequent screen tearing since they don’t use vsync, and it’s frozen on me a few times now. It’s still fairly fun overall though, and a good way to fill the void until the next GTA, which will hopefully pick up some of the improvements from Saints Row.
Heh. Was watching you online from Wade’s place this past Saturday (did you get my voice message?), ya addict. ;-) I almost hate to say it, but the 360 is the first thing MS makes I actually like. Makes me wish I could afford one.
Oh, and what’s the deal with the chiggen in the back seat? :-)
What, you’ve never seen a gang comprised of a cowboy, an elderly Chinese gentleman, and a corporate mascot before?
Oh and the 360 is indeed nice in its capabilities and the games starting to come out now, but it’s…quirky. I haven’t seen the Checkerboard Pattern Of Death or Red Rings Of Doom yet, but it has frozen on me a handful of times now. Other people on forums I check are on their third or fourth 360 now.
Of course, other consoles like the PS2 aren’t exactly the pinnacle of reliability either, and the Internet tends to amplify negative responses, but it still feels like reliability problems are way too common. They’re replacing the CPU with a 65nm version that should cut down on the heat and power problems a lot, but not until next year sometime.