Total Game Time: ~43 hours
Total Nazis Killed: 3,188

Alright. I guess that's enough, for now.

Progress: 100% Missions, 100% Freeplay Targets, All Gold Perks

Pretty sure my co-op buddy has lost interest in this, and so have I (in the single-player, anyway). I'm glad to have the game around for online multiplayer, as infrequently as that might come up; I'm still pretty impressed by how much fun the Combat Simulator is. But the campaign feels pretty antiquated, in light of ten years of industry sophistication in such areas as checkpoints, in-game directions, and maps.

Progress: Gave Up -- Saving the President

Progress: Gave Up -- Lost interest

I completed The Saboteur's campaign last night, and I still haven't really gone in-depth on its title feature - that is, sabotage. I could go on and on about the intricacies of the game's radar, how it notifies you of Nazi suspicion, line-of-sight, advantages and disadvantages of a disguise... but suffice to say, there is an extremely robust system of mechanics that allows you to expertly infiltrate and pick apart Nazi installations. Climb up a guard tower to take out the lookout while nobody else can see you; set off an explosion on one side of the base to draw attention to it; plant charges behind objects so no one notices until it's too late.

The system involves careful planning and strategy, but also gives you the freedom to go in guns blazing if you so desire (and have the hardware for it). And screw-ups are no big thing, with plenty of opportunities to escape Nazi retribution, and fairly lax dying penalties if that doesn't work. Even barring that, though, I'm way more impressed with The Saboteur's stealth system than with anything I've seen in Metal Gear Solid. This game really delivers on the premise of covertly reducing the enemy to rubble.

Which is great, because the campaign is not nearly as impressive. The pacing is all wrong: missions tend to come in spurts, with too-lengthy action sequences - often multiple missions in a row - followed by complete dramatic breaks. The last couple missions of Act 2, and the entire third Act, were basically like watching the last half of Indiana Jones without stopping. (Except with a slightly sillier plot, and a much less satisfying ending.) The optional side-missions help, and are structured in a much more friendly, episodic way, but there aren't all that many of them.

Although the plot in general isn't too special, and most of the characters are disposable, Sean Devlin is a great protagonist. He's a rough-and-tumble anti-hero who you'll be rooting for all the way. Plus, he swears like a, well, like an Irishman, which gives all the game's tense moments a necessary shot of "Fuckin' Hell!" commentary.

The Saboteur isn't perfect, not even mentioning relatively infrequent but sometimes rather bad bugs. What it is, though, is incredibly fun. Provided you enjoy killin' a lot of Nazis.

Better than: Red Faction: Guerrilla (without driving a truck through a building, even!)
Not as good as: Grand Theft Auto IV (in GTA, at least, non-Nazis -mobsters are still fun to interact with)
I'd buy a sequel: so, come on, guys

I may have seen the ending, but I'm not done yet! I've still got almost half of the game's Freeplay Targets left. There are plenty more Nazis to kill.

Progress: Finished the story, still killin' Nazis

I unlocked a perk earlier that makes me able to plant explosives, while disguised, without arousing Nazi suspicion. I stole a uniform, waltzed into a rocket base, and proceeded to plant remote-detonation charges by every group of Germans I could find. On my way out, someone saw through my disguise; so I took out my detonator, ran to a safe spot, and pulled the trigger. The entire base lit up and all the Nazis were instantly blown to kingdom come. (In so doing, I unlocked two new perks!)

This game is tits.

Progress: Act 2

It is really hard for me to stop playing this game. Earlier today I described it to someone as "Red Faction: Guerrilla with real Nazis" (as opposed to Martian Nazis), and I'm having a hard time coming up with a better comparison. The biggest difference between the two is, where in RF:G you felt like the leader of a rebellion, in Saboteur you are pretty much a rebellion all by yourself. This game also has friendly AI, but it doesn't come up very often; almost invariably, you rely solely on your own personal ability to infiltrate and demolish.

This being said, it's occurred to me that your enjoyment of The Saboteur is entirely dependent upon how much you like killin' Nazis. The game's prologue leads you to believe that it's a mission-driven game, but that's really not true; looking back at some less-than-positive reviews from the game's release, I can now immediately understand that these people did not "play the game right." Not that it's their fault, but - if, rather than taking your time to surgically extricate the Nazi presence from France, you instead try to charge through the game's story missions, you will find that these missions are made difficult by Nazis being fucking everywhere. Also, the game world will be predominantly in black-and-white. So, frustrating and depressing, all at once.

I will readily admit that this aforementioned Nazi presence is staggering - I've spent most of the past several days blowing up tanks and lookout towers, and the game's stats screen informs me that I've only done around 20% of its "freeplay" targets. That's a lot of Nazis! Fortunately for me, and my opinion of the game, I love killin' Nazis.

Progress: Act 2

Most GTA clones stick to imitating the gritty modern-crime formula, with some floaty aiming and driving controls tacked on; "not as good," in so many words. But, as they showed in Mercenaries, Pandemic has had a knack for making an open-world havoc game thematically different enough that it feels unique - special, even. The Saboteur does this in two ways.

The first is killin' Nazis. It may sound hackneyed, but through the city's oppressed color palette, asshole Nazi NPC behavior, and (somewhat spotty) story scenes, The Saboteur does a great job of vilifying its villains. More so than receiving upgrade points or advancing the plot, killing those fuckers feels like a genuine reward in and of itself.

The second is tits.

The Saboteur is a rare case where, in spite of some jarring voice-over accents and jerky character animations, the game world feels highly immersive - because I want to play in it. It preys on my knowledge of historical events, my desire to see the Nazis defeated, and my desire to help Sean Devlin get his revenge. It's a compelling package.

As for the gameplay, it's very workable, although I don't know that I've been blown away (no pun intended) by anything so far. Naturally, the driving controls are a little floaty; aiming is okay, though. There's some Assassin's Creed in here, too, as Sean can climb to the rooftops - but once he's up there, rather than parkour around the city, he tends to just blow shit up.

There are a jillion non-linear objectives scattered around Paris, from destructible Nazi structures, to observation points, to car collecting, not to mention unlockable "perks" from completing particular challenges. For instance, killing a bunch of Nazis with grenades got me a bigger bomb bag. Though I have yet to dive in too deeply, all those little objective blips on my map are very enticing.

Progress: Act 1

True story: before the new Punch-Out!! for Wii came out, I thought the franchise was actually about boxing. I guess that's like thinking that Mario games are actually about plumbing. Sounds pretty retarded when I put it that way.

Anyway! Nintendo offered this downloadable mini-game as a gift to people who've bought too many Nintendo games, so I decided to (finally) give it a whirl. I have a new appreciation for the Punch-Out gameplay formula, but don't really care much for it - as a test of memory and reflexes, it utterly flummoxes me.

If you're a person who's good at video games, though, it seems like this (meaning, the full game, not this borderline racist preview) would be right up your alley.

Progress: Gave Up -- Couldn't beat the Doc

Remember two hours ago, when I was halfway through the game? Since then, I got a drink, tooled around on the web, finished the game, waited for my website to come back up, and then typed this. I guess I just April Fools' pranked myself.

So yeah, my total completion time was somewhere south of 4 hours, even with numerous dies-and-retries in retarded chokepoints full of dead-eye Russians. I won't even bother mentioning the countless minor issues with Rogue Warrior - except that it is stupefying how often reloads get cancelled - since, at their worst, they will only last a few hours.

If you're like me, and have an unhealthy obsession with bad games, this is a great one because of how short and vulgar it is. Otherwise, just watch the credits and forget that there's a video game preceding them.

Better than: Kane & Lynch: Dead Men (PC, PS3, X360) (Rogue Warrior is funny!)
Not as good as: real video games
Seriously: watch those credits

Progress: Finished on Regulars (normal)

There is one good thing about Rogue Warrior: attitude. It is basically a non-stop sequence of stabbing and perforating dudes, narrated by Mickey Rourke's superb cursing. You'll never laugh so much at dead North Koreans as you will listening to this game.

Aside from that, though, it is terrible. The controls are shoddy, the game balance is stupid, the level design (and checkpoint locations) are just wrong, and it's phenomenally short - I'm at the halfway point after about two hours - although that may actually be a good thing.

It's plainly evident from playing for more than a few minutes, that Rogue Warrior is not the game that it was initially designed to be. Stealth portions, when they work, work well; it sometimes feels like a foul-mouthed Metal Gear Solid. But when you're detected, it turns into a shitty shooting game, where all the guns are terribly inaccurate, and cover frequently fails to cover you.

Not that I would have liked it much if Rogue Warrior was a completely stealth game. But its split personality makes it successful neither as a shooter nor as a sneaker.

Progress: Mission 5