Playing A Game The Saboteur PC

I don't even care -- this game is still awesome. The Saboteur's twist on open-world ownership - rather than buying or gang-warring for territory, ala Saints Row or GTA: San Andreas, Sean takes the map back from the Nazis by blowing up a shitton of them - is uniquely satisfying and super-cool. And the depth and breadth of its mechanics give you the freedom to quietly infiltrate or go in guns blazing all on a whim.

At times, The Saboteur also shows an impressive attention to detail. It wasn't until this playthrough that I discovered what happens when you skip the NPC set-up dialog when accepting a mission: Sean will verbally indicate his impatience (e.g. "Get to the point already!"), and the NPC will skip to a line which summarizes the mission objective. And if Sean runs out of earshot while the NPC is still talking, he'll further exclaim "Yeah yeah, I got it!" It's a surprisingly sophisticated mechanic that makes the game world even more believable.

I don't know if I have the industriousness to go back and take out all ten-kerjillion Nazi freeplay targets again, particularly considering my sour experience in the last mission -- due to a combination of bugs, including a cutscene hang, an AI pathfinding fail, and a total game freeze, I had to play through the entire Doppelsieg factory three times over. But I definitely had way more fun re-playing through this three-year-old game than should be reasonably expected.

For shutting down Pandemic before they even had the opportunity to patch the game's most frustrating bugs, EA has earned a special place on my shit-list.

Progress: Killed Dierker, again

Rating: Awesome