Saints Row

I'm not ashamed to say that the preview media for Saints Row: The Third has me unreasonably excited, such that I'm suddenly compelled to catch up with the five-year-old franchise. And, honestly, in spite of the stilted and doughy character animation (that is, graphical symptoms of games early in the Xbox 360's life) and largely uninspired voice acting, I am legitimately interested in finding out more about their personalities and backstories. But, in its meticulous love letter to the PS2-era Grand Theft Autos, Saints Row has made a few typos that I just can't get past.

While it's impressive how some of Saints Row's features showed a glimpse of what was to come in GTA4, and in some ways cleaned up some of San Andreas's rougher features, the driving controls and handling feel slightly worse than in GTA3. The aiming is certainly much worse, with no zoom and no lock-on -- you aim what the camera is pointed at, and so you have to perpetually balance the mobility of the camera with the aiming sensitivity. So while shooting at long-range can be difficult because the target is tough to center on, close-range can be just as difficult because there's so much relative movement.

What makes the antiquated controls more frustrating is that, unlike the story-driven mission sequences in GTA, in Saints Row you have to earn Respect to unlock the story missions -- where Respect is earned by doing tedious side-missions that, in a GTA, I'd typically do only once (if at all). There's nothing going for these missions except the gameplay, which, as I've mentioned, is more than a little out of style.

Finally, while I was wrapping up a side-mission earlier - driving a drug dealer back to his home after a deal - the game crashed my Xbox. Now, as shameful as this is, it isn't all that rare or difficult, especially in a sandbox game. But what makes it a hard pill to swallow here, is that Saints Row predates the kind of auto-saving checkpoints that I've become intimately dependent on. Unless I'm as careful as possible and frequently run back to home base to save, a crash means a considerable amount of lost progress.

So when I turned my Xbox off after the crash, I had two options: either go back into Saints Row, load my last save, and tolerate more tedious side missions to get back to the point where I could slog through the sloppy controls to progress the story; or, I could go to the game's Wikipedia page and just read what happens. If this was 2006, I might be more inclined to go with the first choice, but, time makes fools of us all.

Progress: Gave Up -- 3%