Saints Row 2 vs Grand Theft Auto 4

I was really excited about Grand Theft Auto 4. I really was. Although Vice City is my favorite installment and I had never finished San Andreas or bothered with the “Stories” iterations of the series, I was really looking forward to seeing what Rockstar could do with the franchise on next-gen consoles. I got my copy at a midnight launch, and I really enjoyed it at first. At least, I thought I did.

Basically my experience with GTA 4 went something like this:

1. Alright, a cinematic opening, what seems to be a finely crafted plot! Oh boy! This is gonna be great!
2. Oh… so the first 20 or 50 missions are a tutorial. Well, that’s cool, I can understand that.
3. Goddamnit, Roman, can’t you go one day without getting kidnapped or wanting to go get drunk?
4. Great… more exposition, yes just repeat your main themes over and over and over why don’t you? Can I please blow something up now?
5. Great… another fucking car chase mission.
6. Man I don’t even play this game, I’m trading it in.

Seriously. I got to a point in the game where my options were: chase some guys in a car, chase a guy on a motorcycle, steal a car, race a car with Brucie (and nobody wants to hang around with Brucie), do a mission for that undercover police chick who double crossed you that would probably end in another goddamn car chase anyway.

Really, Rockstar. You think there were enough car chases? Have you gotten that, I dunno, uncreative? It took me a while to admit my disappointment with the game, I think the moment it really hit me was when a kid I play on Live with (the rare times I’m up for co-op) pointed out to me that you couldn’t buy businesses or houses in GTA 4 like you could in past games. Memories of earning cash selling drugs out of a freakin’ ice cream truck in Vice City rushed into my mind, and that’s when I knew Grand Theft Auto had forgotten how to be fun.

Now really, I am one of those “games are art” people, and I like my games to have engrossing plots. But I also like them to be, you know, entertaining? I realized recently that it seems Rockstar was so determined to make a game with a movie-like plot and a “deep message” that they neglected the whole gameplay part of the equation. Oh, you want to play? Fine, here’s a few car chase missions to stimulate your puny mind, gamer monkey. Now sit still and listen to Niko talk about the war and how America is not much different than living in old country. He only makes this same point every 5 goddamn minutes, it’s all he ever talks about! I mean it wasn’t deep, it wasn’t compelling, it wasn’t even satirical, I’m not sure what point the writers were trying to make other than they assumed their audience were complete morons who couldn’t pick up on any of the plot’s themes unless they were driven into the ground.

And the thing that made me think about it and come to that conclusion? Why playing Saints Row 2. Now I pretty much ignored the original Saints Row, in my mind it was quickly stamped with a “ghetto-ass GTA clone” label and filed away in the “stupid crap” bin. And that’s without even playing it. However I had heard tell around the intrawebs (and not just from the obvious source) that Saints Row 2 trumped GTA 4 for the simple fact that it was fun. So I finally decided to rent it.

Now I’m thinking I’ll eventually buy it. This is certainly one instance where the knock off actually improves on the original product.

First of all, Saints Row 2 has full character customization. I mean full. I mean control everything down to the size of your character’s goddamn earlobes full (and I didn’t make that up.) You can be male or female, make them any varying degree of fat, skinny, muscular, control their entire face, pick two colors for their hair, pick from six voices, and even choose exactly how they walk. I’ve read that there was character customization in the first one, but you could only be male. However the game doesn’t try to be realistic in that it doesn’t even bother to justify why the character (who has been in a coma for 5 years) could and would look completely different in the sequel. Everyone just kept asking my somewhat dumpy, butch thug girl who was supposedly the man from the previous game “have you done something with your hair?”

But that’s not even the end of it. When you purchase clothing in shops you can choose the colors of various parts and sometimes even the style, thus ensuring anything you want to buy will match (or, horribly mismatch if that’s what you’d like) your current outfit. Your outfits also gain you style points which in turn gives you bonuses on how much respect you earn from missions, which in turn gets you other kinds of bonuses. It’s a pretty good system. Oh, have I also mentioned you can customize what kinds of clothes are worn, what kind of cars are driven and what kind of signs are thrown by members of your own gang?

I used to laugh that Sims-like customization was showing up in very male-oriented games but I think its going to be the wave of the future. Personally I just feel more attached to a character when I’ve crafted them myself.

But if customization isn’t a draw for you the gameplay ought to be. The game makes use of every single button on the controller and does it well. You can dual wield pistols (something GTA 4 doesn’t even do) and use a variety of melee weapons, all attacks controlled by the trigger buttons. The missions are enjoyable and varied. Many times you have to do things called “diversions” and “activities” before you gain enough respect to do the next story mission. So far I’ve seen these range from spraying waste from septic truck to lower property values in neighborhoods for a corrupt realtor, causing a certain amount of property damage any way possible in neighborhoods so a reporter can gain a big scoop before her rivals, throwing yourself in front of cars for an insurance fraud, racing, and prostitution (yeah, skipped those) but there’s still more to find. You can also gain respect by just driving around doing stunts and killing members of other gangs (preferably while taunting them using whatever motion you picked in your character customization. Mine’s the Smooth Criminal dance.) And of course you can buy cribs and businesses, with an option to pimp out the former in various ways earning style points.

But of course the most miraculous godsend to me is that the missions have checkpoints. Glorious checkpoints. The first car chase I did encounter I failed as I am wont to do, however instead of having to start the mission over by driving all the way over to the guy who issued it, then driving all the way back to the mission location, go through the first part of it again, and then get back to the car chase which I would be in real danger of failing once more as I would have had to do in say, GTA 4… the checkpoint system allowed me to start again at the actual car chase. Who could have come up with such an innovation!? I guess Rockstar could have if they weren’t so up their own asses being “deep” and “edgey”. I got to a motorcycle chase later and was having trouble gunning the guys down from my own bike cause I’m just not good at that sort of thing. So what did I do? Got into a car instead and mowed them all down. And I was able to do so because the motorcycles didn’t become abnormally fast if I dared get into a car like in the aforementioned GTA 4 motorcycle chase mission. Dicks.

Saints Row 2 also has something else GTA should have implemented a long time ago: difficulty levels. Run into a mission that’s too hard because you’re just not good at what its making you do? Hey! Lower the difficulty level mid game so you can get by it! Then put it back up however high you want! Okay, so maybe for some of you that eliminates the “challenge”, but you know what? I paid my dues. Games in the 8-bit era were hard as hell and that’s all we had. I’m an adult now, I play games to relax, be entertained, and enjoy a good story. I don’t have time to repeat a level over and over until I’ve memorized every little move I have to make to get by it or give up and chew the controller in frustration. You also get regenerating health, which some people may complain about, but alot of the time it’s not enough. So like GTA, you can heal with fast food, unlike GTA, you can stock up to 4 food items to carry with you.

So basically, yeah, Saints Row 2 is much more fun than GTA 4. Right in the opening level of the game I was shooting down a police helicopter while laughing like a 15 year old boy, rather than, I dunno, driving around with my fat drunken cousin and speaking random phrases in Serbian. That isn’t to say Saints Row 2 doesn’t have a plot. Sure alright, it’s a pretty typical gangster movie plot, but try and tell me GTA 4 didn’t have alot of that going as well, stereotypes and all. At least the rival gangs in Saints Row 2 are quirky and a little over the top. The voice acting in SR2 is also top noch, and nobody has annoying badly done Eastern European accents. I found the main characters much more charming as well. So if anyone longs for the good old days where GTA was colorful and didn’t take itself so damn seriously, go ahead and pick up Saints Row 2.

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