With a new and rebooted Saints Row on the way, now's a good time to check out the silly GTA-esque sandbox murderzone series for free. Saints Row: The Third Remastered is free for keepsies this week on the Epic Games Store, offering a fancied-up version of the third game plus honestly more DLC than you need. I think 3 is the awkward midpoint in the series between gritty and tomfoolery but hey, it's fun - and free.
]]>Getting remastered games feels like a bit of a monkey's paw at this point, doesn't it? The finger has curled, and we get remasters of all the old games we loved - but we have to play them a decade after their original release, and not as the person we were when we loved them. And I did really love Saints Row. It has this kind of uplifting, ur-adolescent energy, where if you feel like you want to punch the world you probably can, and you can do it dressed as a witch or an alien. Also, I had a massive crush on Johnny Gat.
Saints Row The Third: Remastered is probably the best version of Saints Row The Third you could get. It just depends what that means to you in the cold light of 2020, I suppose.
]]>Update: Annnd now it's official, Saints Row: The Third Remastered is coming May 22nd. See some old/new comparisons in the trailer below.
While we still don't know anything about the new Saints Row game that Volition are currently making, thanks to a wee leak we do know that the 3rd Street Saints will revisit an old adventure in Saints Row: The Third Remastered. That name comes via a listing in the Entertainment Software Ratings Board database, an organisation who tend to y'know not just make up games for funsies. Seeing as publishers THQ Nordic haven't yet announced SR3 Remastered, exactly what it changes is unknown - but we can probably guess.
]]>A friend of mine started the Saints Row [official site] series with the fourth one. She loved having superpowers and trashing a virtual city, but she did wonder what the deal was with Johnny Gat. Even though he's not in half the game – spoilers for the third and fourth Saints Rows, but Johnny Gat dies and then comes back to life – his absence is felt. Characters talk about how his loss changed them. The dude with the sunglasses and neck tattoos who seems like a generic video game badass is treated like he matters.
Gat's a mascot for Saints Row, whether cameoing in games outside the series or within them. You start Saints Row: The Third with every member of the gang wearing an oversized Gat mask during a bank robbery – even Gat himself has one, pointless as that makes the disguise. Everybody wants to be Johnny Gat. To understand why he has that reputation, why fans love him while outsiders roll their eyes, we have to go back to Saints Row 2.
]]>Hello there. This week, I'm writing not just as an RPG columnist, but as president of the newly formed League Of Folks Who Don't Really Play MOBAs But Are Bizarrely Hooked On All The Trappings. As far as I can tell, our membership is roughly a billion people and counting. That's what happens when the likes of Blizzard and Riot spend literally tens of dollars creating gorgeous videos to promote their worlds, yes, but it goes somewhat deeper than that. Have you ever watched a new character reveal for a game you know you're never going to play? Then the sickness might have spread.
]]>Have You Played? is an endless stream of game retrospectives. One a day, every day of the year, perhaps for all time.
Saints Row 2 is my favourite of the series for sandbox crimes, and obviously Saints Row IV is the best superhero game ever made, but what about Saints Row: The Third [official site] there in the middle? Well, it suffers in comparison to either, but there are worse things to be than the third-best game in a cracker of a series.
]]>Alec has already told you to play XCOM this weekend if you haven't, seeing as the full game's free to try on Steam. It's "one of the best games of the last few years" says he. Aye, maybe it is, and maybe you could. However. If you fancy real-time smashing rather than turn-based tacticisicing, have a bash at the superpowered open-world antics, shenanigans, and - dare I say - bants of Saints Row IV [official site], which is also holding a free trial weekend on Steam, as is Saints Row: The Third.
SR4 is the best action game on PC, according to John.
]]>The ghost of THQ is still with us today as some of the publisher’s greatest hits find new life on GOG. Deep Silver and Nordic Games, who bought the rights after THQ's demise, have released Saints Row 2 + 3, Darksiders 1 + 2 and Metro: Last Light Redux on the digital store, all at a discounted price until May 18th.
This is the first time any of these games have been made available completely DRM free.
]]>You've got to get your Humble Bundles out when guests come over, haven't you. Show them the collection, that's right. They always say they enjoy looking, don't they, though they do ask why you never play any of them. They don't get get it, do they, but that's fine. You've got your collection, all tidy and shiny in those pewter frames. Those frames with a gap in the middle. That dreadful, gaping gap that creeps into your dreams and you awake screaming. The Humble Bundle you missed.
Chin up, chuck! You might catch it again. The Humble folks are running a fortnight of daily pay-what-you-want Humble Bundles--some old favourites and some new hopefuls--so fingers crossed That One That Got Away comes around again.
]]>Once upon a time, Saints Row IV didn't even have its own number - let alone a snazzy, posh purple Roman numeral. It was nascent, in a pre-life phase that many organisms have known at some point or another. That is to say, an expansion to Saints Row: The Third. Back then, it was known as Enter The Dominatrix - at least, until THQ (may it sue still-existent companies from beyond the grave in peace) set it on its course to sequeldom. But now Saints Row IV is getting a DLC expansion titled "Enter The Dominatrix," and it's, er, a different sort of thing. More literal, I would say. There is an actual dominatrix. From the looks of things, you will be, um, entering someone in a fashion. Yeah.
]]>Normally I wouldn't even bat an eyelash at some random cross-game promotional effort - let alone dedicate precious RPS Hyper Maturity Space to it - but this time is different. The reason? Two of the dumbest, most laughably enjoyable games I've played in ages are colliding, and there is now no way that last clause wasn't a euphemism for something, authorial intent be damned. Yes, it's finally happening: Saints Row The Third's infamous dildo bat is invading another game. I know, I know. It's only a matter of time before it replaces the standard-issue pistol as every game's go-to default weapon of choice, but for now Shadow Warrior's caught its purple, pulsating disease. Continue not being able to look away below.
]]>We haven't mentioned before now, but the current Humble Weekly Sale is a clutch of Cliffski's Positech games, which have already netted over $100k, with a day and a half to go. Beers are on Cliffski! (Just don't mention piracy.) And now a new fortnight-long Humble Bundle proper has launched, this time showcasing the products of the decidedly not indie Deep Silver. Four of their games (including Saints Row 3!) for pay what you want, two more for over the average, and the rather average Dead Island Riptide if you throw in $25.
]]>News out of IdolNinja suggests that Volition are gearing up to support modding on Saints Row The Third, with potential support for mods on the fourth game. They explain: "Jeff Thompson, the Studio Director of Programming at Volition, is putting together a package for us containing documentation, file formats, tools, and more on the Saints Row: The Third engine. Myself, Minimaul, and gibbed will be working closely with Jeff over the coming months to use this information to create a robust set of modding tools to supplement our existing ones and creating what is essentially a full sdk for the game! But, that’s not all! Saints Row: The Third is only the beginning!" I can only imagine how awesome this could end up being, especially if it really is a test bed for modding support on the fourth game.
Let's have a look at that Saints Row IV trailer again...
]]>This kinda seems to be happening a bit too soon - don't open world games take years and years and years to make? - but I suppose Volition wouldn't want to sit on their hands after their recent dice with death. And heck, this is probably Saints Row: The Third with bits on (EDIT - oh, yeah, I forgot, it is one-time SR3 DLC expanded into a full game. That makes sense), but when those bits include making the player a superhero I'm not complaining. Offering godlike, reality-bending powers is an entirely logical outcome for a series which started life snipping at GTA's unconcerned heels then increasingly (d)evolved into out and out AAAARGH WOOOO YEAH WHATEVS ANYTHING EVERYTHING LOOK AT MEEEE POO BUM WILLY HAHAHAHAAHHA happy-madness.
Part IV goes further still, and is somehow out in August. Take a look below.
]]>Update: I got in touch with the Humble Bundle folks to find out more about how this out-of-nowhere partnership came about. See what they had to say after the break.
Original: I was incredibly tempted to begin this post with a joke about how the charity slider on this Humble Bundle is redundant, because THQ is already basically a charity. That would be mean, though, so I opted to-- oops, I already did it. Hm. Shame backspace was never invented. Anyway, the latest bundle of densely packaged humility puts the spotlight on a decidedly non-indie THQ, but oh well. Indie's a pretty terrible word when it's used to write off great games because they weren't coded by a half-person team in a garage-bedroom constantly beset by subarctic winds and ravenous wolverines. So, right then, let's take a look inside.
]]>As gamers, we do have a habit of accompanying our thrown bathwater with the baby, the taps, the bath itself, various bottles of shampoo, and all the shower fittings. And in the angered fuss about all manner of issues regarding our being "milked" by game releases, the phrase "DLC" seems to have become a dirty one. And that's just plain silly. With rumours circulating that Ubisoft are planning a season pass for Assassin's Creed III DLC, and even a new dedicated dev team to produce it, some are tending toward the negative. No, this is a good thing.
]]>Times are hard at THQ, despite their releasing a ton of good games of late. The publisher is strapped for cash, and it just keeps getting worse, most recently its shareholders launching a class action suit over the disaster of their U-Draw flop. Whether that's a factor in today's announcement, that Saints Row: The Third stand alone expansion 'Enter The Dominatrix' is now to be integrated into the fourth game, we've no idea. But that's what's happening, according to THQ boss, Jason Rubin.
]]>Open world comedy violence 'em up, Saints Row The Third, is going to get a standalone expansion. A standalone expansion! Just like the old days. The expansion is called Enter The Dominatrix, and will apparently contain "freaking super powers". It will tell the poignant story of an alien invasion of Earth. Only the Saints - now a global mega-corporation/slapstick paramilitary - stand between some weird alien dude, Zinyak, and conquest of the world. No other details at the moment, but all will apparently be revealed in the summer.
]]>Saints Row The Third's third DLC pack was just released, detailing the further exploits of the Third Street Saints, this time with the foul creations of unhinged Science. When will people learn? The Trouble With Clones is the latest in Volition's short-form content packs for the silliest excuse to have fun there is, keeping with the scifi B-movie themeing following last month's groovy Gangstas in Space. I've got some brief thoughts below about the way Volition are treating DLC, as well as the new Clones trailer. It features purple superpowers.
edit: As Maltose says in the comments, Saints Row 3 and all the DLC is currently 50% off on GamersGate.
]]>The third Saint's row game was a tonne of fun, crammed with all sorts of over the top features and missions, but what of all the things that didn't make it into the game? Lead designer Scott Phillips in his GDC post-mortem shared some of the elements of the game that got cut, including 6 months work on a game where you played an undercover cop, infiltrating the Third Street Saints, which got entirely canned.
]]>Gosh, did we really miss this? New missions and stuff for the superbly horrible Saints Row The Third were freaking the site from orbit on the 21st. The new Gangstas In Space DLC apparently features "a big budget Hollywood blockbuster in which you must battle sexy alien invaders using new sci-fi weaponry". Sexy alien invanders, eh? Hm. You can see that stuff happening in a new trailer, below, and the thing itself is on the Steams.
]]>Times are hard at THQ and that's relative to the general hardness of the hour for the majority of people who rely on one of the world's known currencies to secure food and shelter. The publisher is under threat of NASDAQ delisting, with its stock currently below $1 a share, and over the next year 240 staff will be losing their jobs. The company has shared its release schedule, which shows that Metro: Last Light is now scheduled for an early 2013 release. Other releases of note are the new game from Left 4 Dead's Turtle Rock. That's due between April 2013 and March 2014, as are Dark Millennium Online and Del Toro's inSANE. Before April 2013, it's Metro and "unannounced core titles".
]]>A mistake Saints Row: The Third didn't make, but always seemed horribly likely to, was promise more than it could deliver. Those trailers, those terrifying spoof gameshows, the hype of such a scale of silliness and violence, was all delivered. Which is one of the many reasons why it was one of 2011's best games. But how do you follow it up? With a weird cat-thing and his twisted competitive event, Genkibowl VII.
]]>Celebrated crazy-em-up Saints Row: The Third is handing out a freebie to all Steam players tomorrow, and going a teeny-tiny bit further than most. You know how Team Fortress 2 likes to gives you hats from other games? Saints Row 3 gives you the TF2 gang's entire heads, to wear and do with as you will. Fight, dance, love, laugh. The first and the last ones at least.
But you know what else can you expect from this TF2 intrusion?
]]>Next Tuesday will see the release of the first DLC for last year's fantastic Saints Row: The Third, Genki Bowl VII. What is it? According to the details we've received, it's some sort of in-game event that will feature a number of games. And they are... Sexy Kitten Yarngasm, Sad Panda Skyblazing, Angry Tiger's Apocalypse Genki, and Super Ethical PR Opportunity. Yes indeed. There's a teaser trailer and some screenshots below.
]]>I'm just pulling together some rambly thoughts about my year in games for the site. Which reminds me that I wrote about one of my faves for Tom "Tom Bramwell" Bramwell over at EG towers, and makes me think I could link to it as an aperitif or something. And I totally can. Lots on Saints Row: The Third and yours truly. I didn't even get into my apostrophe confusion, which could be another couple of thousand words, but would be less sex obsessed.
]]>Christmas, as we all know, is a time for stealing. Wait, taking? Giving? I forget. It's also a time for building up toward for a ridiculously long time, leading to features that you even have to write on your day off. Not that I'm bitter. I'm not bitter. I'm bitter. So what's behind the door today, children? Oh, you've already clicked, haven't you?
]]>Despite its grotesquely high bodycount and the horrible and humiliating ways in which it rises, the utter absurdity of Saints Row: The Third makes it one of the silliest games of this or any other year. In celebration of the ludicrous actions that the inhabitants of Steelport are performing, Volition have added a map with a live feed of actions across the city to the game’s website. Unfortunately, because so many people are playing, it’s mostly updating with run of the mill vehicular manslaughter and lethal blows to the balls. But the far more entertaining stat tracker has captured some frankly alarming information about what’s happened since launch.
]]>Cloud gaming service OnLive is banging its drum for new members in the UK again, so they're reactivated their remarkable £1 offer (which they're surely making a massive loss on - they must have ton of marketing money stored up). Your first purchase after joining currently costs just 100 pennies, and that includes the likes of Batman: Arkham City, Saints Row 3, LA Noire, Lord of the Rings: War In The North and Deus Ex: Human Revolution. All PC versions, but tweaked for OnLive - which in Arkham's case means no GFWL. Woo! OnLive has its issues, but I really rather like it - I've played quite a lot through it now, and while the experience differs from game to game for a lot of titles on a decent ISP the experience is pretty incredible. Especially if you have the microconsole thingy and are sat back on a sofa - with your face stuffed directly into a monitor the cracks are that much more visible.
]]>This year has been unusually rich in the kind of game that I most enjoy: those that are open-ended, or provide a sandbox world for me to mess about in. We usually get a couple of these every year, but in 2011 we seem to have run into a minor bounty of the open stuff, which is good news for explorers and meanderers alike. I've gone into a bit more detail about why this pleases me below.
]]>Having completed Saints Row: The Third, I'm the Earth's most qualified person to tell you all about it. Having already detailed a great many elements of the game in two recent previews, below I take on the task of explaining why such an excessively immature game is in fact quite so very mature. The game is out tomorrow in the Americas, before a team of dedicated THQ staff begin frantically rowing across the vast ocean of the internet to release it in the UK on Friday. Read on to see Wot I think.
]]>Following on from my more general preview of Saints Row: The Third, this time I want to tell you about a few specifics. Some of the game's more "esoteric" early moments. (And there are so very many more later on, that it would be a crime to reveal.) Here's some more of what you can expect when the game comes out next week. This is where it gets weird.
]]>My fingers are shaking I type this. I'm not sure exactly what I'm posting, other than it's a surreal advert for Saint's Row: The Third. I have a vague fear that it might be attempting to subliminally control me, but I feel fine so far. Anyway, I showed it to John and he demanded we share it with you. And that everyone buys 12 copies of Saint's Row: The Third and gives all their possessions away to the New World Order.
]]>What are you expecting from Saints Row: The Third? From the promotional material so far, it's probably an awful lot. They're promising the moon. I've had a good long play of the early stages of what's obviously a huge game, so I'm beginning to get an idea of quite how it's balancing it all.
]]>The latest trailer for Saints Row: The Third once again impresses upon us quite how outlandish the game is aiming to be. A game I've been playing all this week, and will bring you some thoughts on in an hour. But in the meantime, take a look at the barrage of nonsense that's being crammed in there. Including, oddly, one scene that breaks the rules for what Volition don't want revealed about the game ahead of launch. Go figure.
]]>Saints Row The Third - a game that has been distilled from the boiled nightmares of Daily Mail readers - fears nothing in its ambition to mock and satirise the whole of existence. The massive moving targets of the monolithic military shooters that are currently trundling toward us on the hype-train are easy pickings for the Volition crew, as you can see below. Saints Row's Shock And Awesome trailer is just another reason why this might be worth getting. (Calling in air-strikes while wearing a top hat made it for me.) Stupid. Clever stupid.
When? November 15th for North America, November 18th for the Europe.
]]>Saints Row: The Third seems a bit more mad every time I see it and the latest announcement concerning its release is one of the maddest things of all. Showing a keen satirical sensibility, this declaration has emerged from the neon-lit, glitterball-strewn funhouse that is Saints Row HQ:
THQ and Volition announced that the PC version of Saints Row: The Third is scheduled to release exactly when they said it would. Developed in-house at Volition in Champaign, IL and powered by Steam, Saints Row: The Third on PC is not scheduled to be delayed by any unforeseen development problems, shipping issues, inclement weather, or zombie apocalypse. As such, it remains on track for a November 15 release, exactly when we said it would.
In a perfect world, this would not be necessary or amusing, but we live in an imperfect world and those few words sadly show that Volition are paying more attention to their PC audience than some companies seem to do throughout an entire development cycle.
]]>It looks like Volition are not yet finished with their campaign to subvert everyone's expectations regarding Saints Row: The Third. I thought the craziest it could get is maybe a bigger poo truck than in the second game, but here we see an entire digital world squeezed inside the digital world of Steelport. As Saints Row: The Third's urban warfare spills over onto the digital cyber-world, it seems like it's going to take more than just guns, cars and explosives to put the Saints back on top.
]]>A brief "vehicles" trailer for Saints Row: The Third has turned up. It shows off the game's street-cleaning machine, so that's good, but it also shows off a hoverbike and what appears to be a rocket-boosted sportscar. It neglects, however, to demo the VTOL jet or the the terrifying pedestrian-launcher thing. I've posted the previously revealed (and extensively bananas) game footage which includes those things for good measure.
]]>It's hard to separate the reality of playing Saints Row: The Third from what I imagined playing Saints Row: The Third would be like. Because it's pretty much exactly the same. That is to say, it's what I remember playing Saints Row 2 was like - time, tall tales and fondness has seen me forget the busywork of the game and recall only the absurdities, the insanity, the just-because rampaging. Saints Row: The Third is all those absurdities pushed to the very front of the game, rather than hung around its sides: thus, it's the actualisation of what we think Saints Row games are rather than what they have been to date.
]]>Let's kick off the day with a fresh look at Saints Row: The Third. There's not a huge dose of the series' trademark silliness on display here, but I suppose they've got to try and sell the game to stern-faced grumpy gamers, without a taste for the absurd, too. I do enjoy how the camera wobbles during the fisticuffs, and I'm looking forwards to having a lot of fun in that VTOL plane. Trailer go:
]]>Dear Volition/THQ,
I'm really looking forward to Saints Row: The Third. While I didn't much enjoy the original Saints Row, Saints Row 2 was one of the most entertaining open city games I've played, and by the looks of the trailers for the third game, it's heading even further in the direction of anarchic fun that so delighted me. So I really want to ask you to reconsider your current marketing strategies.
]]>I've got to admire Saint's Row: The Third's sheer determination to entirely depart the shores of normality, but at some point it's just going to start frightening people. They'll back away slowly, hands in the air, trying in too-calm voices with tell-tale quavers to say "Hey guy, hey. Hey. Why don't we all just take a deep breath and think about this, huh? It's alright. No-one's going to hurt you. We're all friends here, huh? Why don't you just put that musket down and take the live scorpion off your head? It's going to be okay. No wait Oh God..."
This trailer for the game's retail DLC Professor Genki's Hyper Ordinary Pre-Order Pack makes me think it's not going to be okay. It makes me think it's dangerous
]]>You know how, with inbreeding, the longer it goes on for the more likely the symptoms are to show? As in, it might be invisible for one generation, but after several you're bound to start seeing webbed toes and crossed eyes? Yeah.
On an entirely unrelated note, the new seven minute trailer for the third Saints Row game, Saints Row: The Third, is waiting for you after the jump.
]]>If Saints Row 1 was a GTA "tribute", and Saints Row 2 was Volition discovering how they wanted to approach the genre for themselves, then Saints Row: The Third is the complete rejection of anything that originally influenced it. It is the most anarchic, vile, hilarious and puerile approach anyone has taken to a sandbox game. It's the silliest and foulest game of E3. It's the one I've enjoyed seeing the most.
]]>Along with news of a release date on 15th November, Volition have produced a CG trailer for Saints Row: The Third. Straight facts, no jokes. Except for this one: What's red and invisible? No tomatoes.
]]>The first screenshots of Saints Row: The Third have appeared. Hip hip, poo-splatter. As the old saying goes. There's a LOT of them. Which is what we like to see. We also like to see tanks crushing police cars, insane parachute shoot-outs, and crazy neon fights in which a girl is hitting a masked wrestler type with a four foot purple dildo. Wait, no - we don't like to see that at all. Good heavens. But still. We have. You should too.
]]>While April 1st saw everyone oh-so hilariously lying about their products to create pointless confusion for gamers, it did also see a rather good sort-of-prank-but-actually-just-a-good-joke-even-if-it-weren't-International-Lying-Day-and-isn't-a-lie-either from Volition for Saints Row: The Third. Advertised as the first in-game footage, it's - well, it's exactly that. It's below. There's also some sadder news.
]]>There's some lovely comments from Volition's studio manager, Eric Barker, over on Eurogamer. Discussing why it's always worth developing for PC when creating cross platform titles, and how Volition will no longer be using external developers for their PC versions, he drops this gem of a comment that I'll be quoting for some time to come.
"I don't think [piracy] is something at the forefront for us. First and foremost, we want to make sure we're making a game people would want to pirate. Let's make a game that's worth stealing, and then we'll worry about making sure they don't."
]]>Thank goodness for that. Saints Row 3 is officially official. We've known it's happening for a while, and a recent leak of images made it even more undeniable, but nothing's real until the publisher says so. THQ said so. And this is good news, because I want it. And what I want counts.
]]>I wield a lot of power. What I'm saying is, you should fear me. I was only bemoaning the lack of Saints Row 3 confirmation a couple of weeks back, and THQ instantly leapt into action. "Volition!" they screamed. "Walker needs the third instalment! WORK HARDER!" And so it is, with the news that a third in the anarchic and puerile series will be with us this Autumntide. THQ CEO Brian Farrell told listeners to a conference call,
]]>
