This Week’s Topics:
Wherein I discuss an erotic discovery, a tiny building block in an acquisition empire, the failings of Saints Row 5, another vaporware revival, a re-remake that isn’t much of a remake, and inflation.
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Wherein I discuss my ‘addiction’, a PlayStation predator, Tencent’s new pseudonym, The Spike Video Game Announcement XIX, Android coming to home computer (for real this time), and the expanding veil of PlayStation.
Wherein I discuss the pros of credit cards, Saints Row VI: Sandhole, the Korean video game adaptation of Cool: How a Kid Should Live, a brave retreat to the evergreen storefront, and a foundational JRPG making its way to PC after 24 years.
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Wherein I discuss prescribed pandemic panic, the greatest gaming fiasco of 2020, the hazardous and evil-some village, a sun-bleached reprisal, and a convoluted chunk of plastic.
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I often stumble onto musings from gaming enthusiasts who boast about their collections or hem and haw about physical clutter being an annoyance. I’ve been playing primarily on PC since 2013, so I don’t have much of a modern physical library, and I have long since given up any aspirations of keeping a presentable collection and chucked my games in assorted cases and disc binders years ago so they consume less space. Now everything roughly fits inside a shoebox! I still have the cases mind you, mostly in the event that I choose to sell off parts of my collection, which I would be willing to do, since I’m never going to hook up and play something on any of my older systems, but that would require actual work.
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As the years have gone on, I feel as if I have gotten increasingly more cynical, and less permissive of things that I openly would have praised in year’s past. I do truly and always want to sing the praises of just about anything I believe to deserve it, but there are and were moments where I was a bit too excited and felt too justified in saying nice things that I ignored some of the negligence thoughts that now fill my mind whenever I play any game, which kinda sucks now that I think about it. (more…)
I have professed pretty regularly that I have nothing shy of a strong affection towards the Saints Row series, well, namely to parts two and four. I have mentioned my issues with Saints Row: The Third but most of those stem from how much I enjoy the two aforementioned titles and very much want to love everything related to the series. That said, even when viewing Gat Out of Hell as a standalone expansion that I managed to get at launch for $5 because of a pricing error, I have some pretty major qualms about it. (more…)
If you put me on the stop at this very moment and asked me what my favorite franchises are in the realm of video games, I would probably ponder and stutter for a few seconds before spitting out Pokemon, Metal Gear, and Saints Row. The last one is naturally what I’m here to talk about, as while I do adore parts two and four, the first and third parts of this to be pentalogy are far lower on the totem pole of quality in my mind. While part one is the franchise before it really got its own identity, part three was where the franchise was established, became AAA to a certain extent, and had a staff that was 80% people who did not assist in building this franchise up. But that was three years ago, and I feel it is worth revisiting… That, and I was in the mood for a game with character creation, and this was the only one on my list of games I own which I ought to play. (more…)
For the past… I don’t even know how long, there’s been a lot of talk about bringing in a wave of diverse characters and trying to lessen the use of characters fitting a mold of being straight white males with short black hair, athletic builds, and possibly some beard scruff, as that is quite frankly an incredibly dull mold when you consider how those sliders can be manipulated. Hell, when I started writing, well, writing something that I actually completed, I specifically went out of my way to avoid that mold, when I was dealing with the medium of writing, which is where the character’s visual appearance does not matter all that much as it is not a visual medium. Yet I still went out of my way to make sure I had balanced ethnicity well, even if I boiled it down to four variants, White, Black, Hispanic, and Asian, made them either pansexual or asexual, and make sure the character at the very least obtains a female form if they do not begin with it… The Transformation, Ascension, and Degeneration of Terra is coming to this blog 11/18/2014 or sooner! I’ve got about three more chapters and two months of editing left to do, so I’d say early October. Probably. (more…)
I really do not have an explanation for what I decided to replay Saints Row 2, let along the vanilla version of a not very good PC port. I am aware that there is a supposedly awesome mod by the name of Gentlemen of the Row, but I forgot about it until I was nearly done with my 45 hour playthrough where I did just about everything I could do that wouldn’t be easily viewed as mindless busy work. However, this is not a review where I look back and question why I did not see faults with a title, but one where I actually come to terms with how I probably should have loved this title even more than I thought I did. Also, I want to review something happy on Christmas, unlike last year… (more…)
Well, the yearly hype machine is coming to a stop with Steam sales for the missing titles in many collections while game of the year listings are the only thing most websites have to do. So there was not a whole bunch of news, but enough for a post after waiting two weeks. Yet, a third of this is just from a Nintendo Direct and my very abridged version of it. (more…)
Note: I re-reviewed this game in 2015. Please disregard this original review.
The Saints Row series has always been a bit of an oddity to me, but at the same time, few games managed to change themselves up so drastically over a single generation of consoles. From GTA clone, to a silly parallel to the series, to a game that tried to ape its wacky demeanor but somehow felt lacking. To part IV, which is probably going to be my GOTY unless I finally play Bioshock Infinite.
