This is where you can read any of my irregular wafflings about computer gaming. The whole point of this blog is to help motivate me to properly finish games, whether they be recent ones or older ones I played when I was younger that I never managed to beat.

20th October 2017 - Straight No IV

A few months back Scoob and I started to play Saints Row IV, but had some trouble with the game, as well as the original GOG build having its own problems. A few weeks back we tried to continue it, but the connection problems we were having back then came back to haunt us tenfold. In fact, we couldn't even get through a single mission without the second PC quitting out. It didn't matter which computer hosted, the one that was connecting to it just fell over all the time.

So unfortunately I had to push through the rest of it on my own, and that really was not a help. I mostly decided to just get my head down and race through the main quests, ignoring all the shit bonus quests on the map as well as most of the secondary quests. The opinions I had of the game from back then did not get any better. They actually got worse.

Here's the thing. Saints Row The Third was janky and buggy as fuck, and was totally stupid. But it was so much fun to play. This one should have also been fun, with the addition of the super powers, but these additions took away nearly everything about the previous game that I really liked. The gun play ended up being really weak, and the necessity of cars was pretty much eliminated from the game. Loads of the enemies needed you to use the new super powers to kill them, especially the tougher enemies, but the super powers took so long to reload that using them was dull. Also, the super speed and super jumping made it really hard to do simple repositioning in fights, as you'd simply run or jump well clear of where you were hoping to go. There should have been some way of doing regular sprinting and jumping, then having the super jump and sprint as different controls.

It's such a shame, but I've ended up feeling like I had a really crap time with the game. How the third game could be so much fun but this one so frustrating and boring I have no idea. The game even crashed, completely froze, a couple of times when I was playing it solo. One of these even came in the final cutscene where all the characters were dancing in celebration of the bad guy being dead. I have no idea if anything else happened in the cutscene after that, but I was not going to play through the entire last mission all over again to check (there's no saving in this game part way through missions, unbelievably).
The third game, despite its own issues, never crashed or disconnected on us once as far as I can remember. This game was just an absolute mess. I was going to play Enter The Dominatrix and Gat Out Of Hell to follow this up, but it's just put me right off.

25th June 2017 - Saints Row Update

Out of the blue back in April, I had a hankering for some more Saints Row action. Scoob was happy to jump back into Saints Row The Third with me to start a second play through.

Then as luck would have it, while we were playing through Saints Row The Third, GOG released Saints Row IV on us. I quickly bought and downloaded it so we could get cracking.

Unfortunately, we don't like this game anywhere near as much as the previous installment. It didn't help that the original GOG build had problems preventing the autosaves working, and would not remember any changes we made in the options menus. Though they have now fixed those issues, we haven't yet gone back to it. If we do go back, I think it will be just to go through the story missions, rather than go through all the extra stuff, which in this game seems boring and far too numerous.

The problems we have with it when compared to the previous game are mostly to do with the gun action. I know super powers are in this one, but they've really nerfed the guns, and we love shooting the bad guys. They just do less damage, take longer to reload, and take longer to level up to get some of that power back.
I also don't like how cars are pointless, as I enjoyed collecting and modding the cars in the last game. Worst thing of all: THERE'S NO HOT PIZZA SONG!!!

The two computers also sometimes disconnect from each other, which is something that has never happened when playing The Third. It was even more of a bitch at the time because autosave wasn't working. Hopefully they've fixed the network stability in the updated version, but I doubt it.

21st August 2015 - Who Doesn't Love Hot Pizza?

Just got done with one of the most fun games I've played while doing this blog, in Saints Row The Third. I know it's a bit old now, but I was super happy to get to play it after GOG released it on their website a few months back. So me and Scoob joined up with the other Saints to rid Steelport of other rival gangs, and it went something like this...

Because my 2nd computer is too old to run the game, we first had to figure out how to play LAN co-op over the internet, which was something we had not done before. We were originally going to try hamachi, until I read on several sites that Tunngle was supposed to be better for games. Whether it's better for games or not I can not answer, but I have not enjoyed using it for the last few weeks, and am glad I can now remove it. I don't appreciate any service that forces you to watch ads, which Tunngle does. What's worse, very often after waiting through the ad, the program would crash at the end of it, meaning I would have to reload and sit through another bloody ad to get into it. Grrr.

Once in the game, we spent most of our early adventures driving round and blowing shit up while playing the hot pizza song, and certainly had a laugh doing this. Because the game is so bat-shit crazy, even its many glitches and graphics bugs only made it more fun. There were one or two bugs that became annoying, mostly when you were trying to get in a car, or trying to get the NPCs to get in a car, but we managed to muddle through them.

I'm not quite sure what the writers were smoking when they came up with most of the story, but we went from fighting normal gang members to fighting zombies through to going into a computer game disguised as a toilet and a sex doll. Odd.

I guess the main problem with the game was that it was way too easy, especially by the end when we were levelled up. Hardly anything in the game can do damage to you when you hit top level, and I think that was a bad choice.
But overall, the game was a right laugh and gave us something to do outside League Of Legends for a while.

1st June 2015 - Heading Down To Steelport

The other game is one I've wanted to play for years, after seeing footage of it on Youtube, being Saints Row The Third. Recently, and surprisingly, it was released very cheap on GOG, and I swooped on it like a hawk. We've only played a little of it so far, but it's definitely gonna be fun, and I can't wait to sing along to the Hot Pizza song.