We only have a taste of Saints Row in the demo that was made available, but that taste was odd. There was also an aftertaste. They're trying so hard to produce an "authentic" "urban" voice that it strikes the ear as parody. It sounds like one of those soundboards you might use to do a prank call - not that it will matter overmuch to the target demographic.
Games of the Urban Sandbox genre rarely get played for their plotline, at least not by anyone I know - but that might be a function of GTA's frustrating missions and imprecise combat. As a game where you are simply screwing around, Saints Row is probably more enjoyable in raw terms: substantial input on your character design, much sharper graphics, more complete brawling, and (this is key) running down physics-operable pedestrians. The framerate can get a little rough, but I honestly have no idea what stage of development this "muh'fuckah" represents.
Where the game is going to shake off the "Grand Theft Auto Clone" moniker (which it richly deserves in every other sense) is in the multiplayer. Yes, multiplayer. Modes where one collects Big-Ass Chains from fallen enemies to score - like Rabbit, in Tribes - along with modes where one must protect your Pimp, or go point to point blanging out your ride with a car full of teammates sounds pretty hot to me, and there's a lot of room on Live for games where one is not a professional soldier or a race car driver.
There was a bunch of little stuff that happened, some of it in the last few hours:
- The Dead Rising demo hit Live, and I haven't played it, but I know that a) it is around gig, just as many demos are on the service these days, and b) it is locked down to fifteen minutes. This last part is unfortunate, but since playing it at (what would come to be the last, true) E3 I have been wondering how they could possibly release that demo to a person they then expected to buy it. I'm here to tell you that even after having played it already, I waited in line for forty-five minutes the next day to play it again. It's a little sandboxy as well, in that the areas you visit are full of all kinds of crap and you can sort of just do your thing. If they hadn't constrained it in some way, you would be "getting the milk for free," which might obviate your cow purchase.
- Transgaming's Cider product allows Windows games to run on Intel Macs without dual booting or costly and painful waxing. It isn't emulation exactly, and it does require some devloper cooperation. I've been expecting Apple to handle something like this themselves, and they may yet, but perhaps they believe that Boot Camp has it under control. I sometimes, even in our enlightened age, see snark merchants snickering about the dilapidated state of Mac gaming. This was in a post I was reading on my Mac, booted into Windows, right before I played the demo of Prey with no hitches the very day of its release. I don't know if there is this storehouse of tired-ass Mac jokes out there that have no defined use, or what, but we're way past the expiration date on that type of material.
(CW)TB out.
Someone asked me this week why I only seem to post about Penny Arcade related business lately. It’s a fair question and I guess the answer is we just have a lot of shit going on right now. Someone needs to talk about it and honestly I don’t mind doing it. So here I go:
Page 5 of our Prey comic book is now online. The idea was to create sort of a 1950’s guide to surviving an alien invasion. We took a cue from old videos like Duck and Cover. We tried to infuse our Narrator with that same charming naiveté. No matter how terrible an event might be, say for instance a nuclear war, as long as have a blanket you’ll be fine.
Also we have three new shirts available in the store. The new Beach poster was scheduled to go up today as well but it’s still being printed. It should be online next week. Here are the three new shirt designs:
Pure Hell (Also available in Babydoll)
-Gabe out
I know that Dead Rising uses time limits in the actual game, but I don't know where I came up with the idea there was a time limit on the demo itself. It's a limited area, but there's still a lot of fun to be had there, to say nothing of strange weapons to discover. I left the mall and got a cutscene which ended the demo, but I'll have to play it again right now to see if there's anything approaching a hard limit otherwise.
Sorry to be a source of misinformation. I hate lies, and love truth! Honest! That has been my policy since 1672, when I was apprenticed to a sorcerer in Prussia.
(CW)TB
We ran up against the limit in the last playthrough. We kept leaving the demo early before, sometimes after what felt like pretty significant amounts of time, which made it difficult to tell. It hardly matters - independent of larger storylines or light character advancement available in the retail product, you'll know in a couple minutes if this is the sort of thing you could do for hours on end - for example, do you want to stuff a dismembered limb in a zombie's slavering maw, and then take a funny picture of him? It's a course of action I endorse without reservation.
(CW)TB
I wonder if lightning flashed when they came up with this. Did the lights dim? Also, I imagine shaking arms raised in triumph around an oval of rich boardroom oak. They signed me up for some kind of "payment insurance," and if you do not read every sheet inside their twenty pound envelope you might miss it. I would love to know how much money they make, annually, because people have chosen to live their lives as opposed to scrutinize every paragraph of their cyclopean document for hidden treacheries.
I always want to be super mad at these people when I call in, the incandescent avatar of the consumer, but I was those people at one point. I can't purse my lips and nod slowly at those who, seeing paths clearly marked Good and Evil, chose evil as I had once done in my savagely misspent youth. I only lasted a week and a half, which I saw then as evidence of my indomitable spirit. I can't really speak to that, I believed a lot of ridiculous things. And it's not as though I stopped believing them, but by now I've believed them so long that they've graduated to traditions. It's like, we don't really ask why a rabbit would bring chocolate to a person anymore. I can imagine a couple raised eyebrows on that score initially. Now, we just accept that rabbits operate in concert with chocolatiers.
I always think I'm going to say something clever when I call these places up, but whenever I try to start in I find it very hard to maintain my appetite for cruelty. I don't know why they work there, but it probably wasn't an authentic choice. What's more, the job is so miserable that even if I were to level my considerable verbal skills, they are most likely suffering at a level beyond which any additional torment would be wasted.
You make all these little deals with yourself to manage it. It may be that he picked up a Caramello and it's just sitting there on his desk until his break, waiting, centerfold luscious. He will try to make it last the entire fifteen minutes. He very nearly did, yesterday. While he's talking to me he is dividing the bar, in his mind, into discrete blocks which also represent the period of time each one will take. The person he is talking to seems tense, but is making no effort to deviate from the script. Sometimes they jump the rail and you have to improvise. He's letting me get all the way through it, first refusal, second refusal, third refusal, and... Done.
I always imagine looking up into the sky to see a great, black boot descending. Does he also see the boot? And does he then calculate where he can stand, safe, in the raised part of the waffle?
(CW)TB out.
this is the way that the world is run
