f13.net

I wasn't going to get this game. I played the original and it was mediocre. And I figured, I just played GTA4, do I really need another game like that so soon? But I broke down because I kept hearing such good things.

And the game's awesome. It is a helluva lot more fun that GTA4. It doesn't look as good, and I prefer GTA's driving physics, but it is just more *fun*. There is SO much more to do, at any given time, and the game rewards you for everything. In GTA I got to a point where there was one mission in the storyline that I had to get past, before the final island was unlocked, and I kept getting almost to the end and dying. I drove around the city and realized there really wasn't much else to do, so I took the disc out and haven't put it back since. SR2 is by comparison an embarrasment of riches.

The customization is also first rate - from your character to your clothes to your hideouts to your cars - everything has an INSANE level of customization. Compared to GTA where all you had was a fairly weak selection of clothing - this is just awesome. I'm one of those who love customizing shit (I probably spent more time making characters in the latest Soul Calibur than actually playing) and after playing SR2, GTA feels like half a game without this kind of stuff.

And one final thing, I'm really tired of the "thug life/gangster" motif, but I find that SR2 is so tongue-in-cheek that it doesn't really bother me. I found GTA4 more .. depressing on that front because it played the main storyline fairly seriously. This is just a joke and over the top nonsense, so it goes down a whole lot smoother.

I liked SR1 so buying SR2 was a given, but even still this game is just awesome.  Beats the first in almost every way.  I was able to make a near perfect recreation of myself, dressed in engineer boots with purple laces, a Borat style slingshot onesy swimsuit, and a souvenir stalagmite hat with a yellow pony on the front.  Consequently, all of my friends are very thankful I don't have an easy way to take screenshots.

They made the world significantly bigger, added motorcycles, helicopters, and planes and just crammed every square inch of the game full of activity.  I've only played through the Brotherhood storyline so far, but the plot was suprisingly brutal.  A little too brutal for how cavalier and cartoony the non-mission game is, honestly.

My one complaint is that I'm not liking the maps for online gangster brawl matches.  SR1 maps seemed more open and airy, whereas things are much more cramped in SR2.  This has a side effect of making pipebomb spam way, way too deadly.

I picked it up on, erm.. last Thursday but haven't taken it for a spin yet. I still have Just Cause to finish grinding through, as well as Crackdown and GTA4 sitting in my "sandboxy play me" pile. I'm bloody well tempted to skip them and just start on this though. I really really liked the first one a lot.

Loved the first one and was sorely disappointed with GTA4s lack of customization.... I'll be picking it up when I have the time.

Got it today. Didn't play the first game, but the amount of customizations already faced during character creation made me go whoa. Only did the jail break out, so haven't played much yet.

There are plastic surgery places around town too, so you can completely redo your character at any time for only $ 500.

I think I'm going to make an old lady next.

I haven't read any of this thread. I don't want to read any of it. But as soon as I get Fallout 3 and Fable II and Dead Space out of the way (Maybe not the third), I am going to play the ever-loving shit out of this game. It's the one game I've been looking forward to.

Plot of the Original not needed to fully appreciate this one?

Same for me.

I hope to suck one of my friends in to play Coop also.

Not at all.

I hope there'll be more clothing via DLC. Playing way too much plastic surgeon and dress up.

Started playing while waiting for Fallout to show up. Spent a good half hour just messing with the character creator making one type of person. Not a big fan of the 100 point slider but I was able to update my blur-haired Asian, Gwai-lo, from Saints Row to the new incarnation, Gwai-li.

Can't wait to dig into this title. :)

Edit: Also, I've found the story for Saints Row to be far more compelling than any GTA, for whatever reason. Might be the self-insertion and Keith Mother-Fucking David.

Streaking is the most fun I've ever had in a GTA-style game. Ever. The animations you perform, your facial expression, and the world's reaction is priceless.

The multiplayer stuff's fucking stupid, tho. How the hell do you even get in a coop game? Does anyone actually do multiplayer with this? Takes ages to get in a regular multiplayer game, which suck, and co-op never finds any.

I've been playing a ton of co-op with my brother without a hitch, but haven't tried with randoms yet. 

Last night, we decided to take up a couple of biplanes and start dogfighting over the airport for shits and grins.  Some stray shots and the occasional crash had the cops on us with attack helicopters in short order, at which point the game turned into a scene out of one of the Iron Eagle sequels with us buzzing the choppers with guns blazing trying to take them (and the tons of FBI trucks on the ground) out.

This game rules.

I think most people have set co-op to friends only, which I did after I kept getting random requests for people to join my game.

I played coop with a buddy last night and it is a blast.

Cross-platform co-op?

No

GAH, stop making me want to buy this.

Definitely way more fun than GTA, and I've right now only done the break out and first mission. Mostly just screwing around. After robbing a bunch of stores, I wish regular houses would be enterable to rob/annoy/kill regular people doing random activities (watching TV, doing a party, having sex).

Roomie and I are starting this up tomorrow and I can't wait. This game, from the whole 20 minutes I played, was a lot more fun than GTA4. Of course this could all be ruined if his girlfriend shows up. :awesome_for_real:

If they make an MMO GTA-style game, they need to use the customization options from this game. You can make *so many* different variations of characters, its awesome. The car customization is ridiculous as well.  I actually look forward to popping into other people's games with my character to show off.

This game is so much more fun than GTAIV that I hope the Housers are crying right now.  The driving is a tad too arcadey for me, but otherwise it's superb.

I just looked at the Achievements for this game that are public now that I've beaten the game.

Complete all campaign missions and all activities at all levels in Co-Op? Fuck, why not just put a disclaimer on the front and say "Play in Co-Op or you'll regret it."

Uh, I think APB is going to have that covered. Judging the various videos of the character creation, it may even go beyond that.

I just have to point out that this game is so much fun co-op and suggest anyone who has a buddy they like to play co-op with should pick this up. I think my roomie and I are at about 14 hours total played. We've even been caught up in the side missions that typically, from my experience with the GTAs, are usually frustrating or horribly boring.

Seriously, this is the best co-op I've played since ... I don't know. And there are a ton of things to do, if you get bored with the main gang missions you can take breaks doing the side stuff (The air assault mission was a lot of fun, one player pilots the chopper and the other guns) Heck there is side stuff that you don't even know is there until you try something. My friend ended up on top of our ride-of-the-moment, and I'm all "see how long you can stay up there while I drive!" and as soon as we start, the game pops up with a Car Surfing minigame. Or if you shoot enough rival gang members on the street from inside your car, it starts a Driveby minigame. The game rewards you for just messing around having fun.

Finished up the plot missions last night.  Those two swordfight mini-game Ronin missions were complete bullshit; stood out like sore thumbs.

Even so, my overall take on the game is that it's damn fun from beginning to end.

I have yet to do MANY of the activities in the game because I want to do them co-op. Thankfully, it keeps track of what you do accurately.

The co-op requires two people with separate machines and games, right?

Can you do 2p co-op on the same Xbox? If so, I could likely convince the wife that we need a ninth game at this point in time.

Can you do co-op missions using your newspaper clippings?

Can't figure out how to do insurance scam missions though. Steal a police car and smash into another car as fast as you can doesn't seem to work like it did in the first one.

Anyone else having it freeze up? I've had 2 freezes so far.

My roomies legit copy freezes up sometimes. Apparently most companies aren't using high quality DVDRs.

The easiest way to do the insurance fraud is to grab a dump truck, put it in the area, hop on top of the truck and drop inside the dump truck through the hatch. If you tumble around the time stops, so you'll be able to do all of the levels no problem. If you have a buddy playing co-op, he can sit in an adrenaline zone and make it easier for you.

Yes, 3 freezes, made me learn  to save as soon as I complete a mission. Also made me hate them for not putting an autosave function, like GTA.

Insurance Scams: Go to the appointed area. Stay on foot in the middle of the street. Wait for a high speed car to pass. Press any trigger button while moving in their general direction to throw yourself in front of them.

You have some degree of control while flying around, so it's possible to chain hits when your adrenaline is high, since that makes you a human coil.

Quite fun.

Uh, it does have autosave. Actually, the game autosaves after you complete anything in the game. Looks like you either disabled it or somehow you're missing the very obvious "Autosave" at the top of the load list.

Yes. It will also display if you've completed that mission in Co-Op as a handy reference.

I love this game, but damnit if they didn't fix the random freeze issues that the first one suffered from.

At least they added auto-save so you don't have to worry about erasing two hours of play time with a freeze, which coincidentally is why I stopped playing the first one.

I'm all up for Co-Op after I finish Fallout 3 and assuming no other bombs drop...

...shit. Bombs be dropping every day this month. Shit.

Indeed, saw that today. Makes me wonder how the fuck i managed to lose progress after a freeze.

It may have been that you were doing one of the longer missions which have way points. The game doesn't save those way points, so you would have to restart that entire mission.

Roomie and I just finished the game and so far this has been the greatest co-op experience I've ever had in a video game. THQ/Volition set out to make a game solely for the purpose of being fun and nothing else. They weren't trying to be too serious, realistic or mind blowing. They set out to go back to games that didn't take themselves too seriously and made every attempt to provide you with hours of fun. Maybe it was that we played co-op through the entire game, but of course the content did weigh in on how or when we had fun. Overall, for me, this beats GTA4 hands down.

Oh, just before we shut the game down after we beat the hidden mission and got our completion achievement, we started shooting at each other. My roomie dropped off the bridge to get me as I ran under and died on impact. I was laughing hysterically at his misfortune when out of no where came a car that was speeding because of our fire fight. Slams into me and kills me. It was the perfect way to end the game and reminded me why co-op makes games just that awesome.

I've heard that 360 users experiencing freezes can correct the problem by clearing the HDD cache (http://news.teamxbox.com/xbox/11131/Xbox-360-Cache-Clear-Code-Revealed/) - YMMV, however.

No contest. For pure fun factor SR2 is on another level - and factoring in the coop, a whole other league. Which totally went against my *expectations*, after enjoying GTA4, SR2 seemed a blatant copycat trying to be "X-treme GTA" - how wrong I was. Turns out Volition had the better gameplan by quite a bit.

As far as freezes, I've had exactly one. After it happened I took a look at my disc - and it had a weird spotty film on it, took a cloth and wiped it down, haven't had a freeze after that in quite a few hours of gameplay. No idea if this is what's affecting others, just my experience.

Pretty sure freezes are because of a software bug, not a disc thing. I've installed to HDD and have still had a freeze now.

With the GTA4-VC deal on Steam this weekend, I was debating whether to get it or wait for SR2 next year. All I had to recommend SR were happy memories of the FreeSpaces (and the untapped potential in Red Faction 1), and the knowledge that Eliza Dushku did some VA.

This thread has convinced me to wait. For now I will remain the only gamer in North America to have never touched a GTA title. Thanks for the discussion - I'm looking forward to playing.

If you have a 360, I also recommend playing through SR1 first.

I love this game.  I have 42x respect, all but 2 missions done, and most of the activities I can be bothered to complete.  Co-Op is all love.  Me and a buddy have been playing LAN style with me bringing my ps3.  Fun shit.

GOTY contender for me.

Maxed out my respect now, by doing most of the side missions. Just have Insurance Fraud (need to try that dump truck thing), Trail Blazing (both difficult and Not Fun, Mayhem (seems much harder than in SR1) and the races to go I think. Don't know if I'll bother with the Crazy Taxi and Crazy Ambulance and Crazy Fire Truck side-side missions or not.

Mayhem is easier Co-op.  You can chain combos with satchel charges for huge points.  I think we have a top combo score of $1.7m now.

So, after all of this mention about co-op, would this be a good title for the single player alone?  Trying to pad my Christmas list some and I'm really not a co-op gamer. 

Also, PS3 or 360 version, either version have problems?

I played through the entire story solo and it was good fun - good enough to basically replay the entire game with my brother in co-op.

I've had a couple of lockups to date (PS3 version), but nothing that would put me off recommending it to anyone.  360 users are reporting similar infrequent lockups as well.

Nod. Just played it in SP for about 3-4 hours, and while I'm sick of the side missions/distractions to the point where I'll probably just say "fuck it" to finishing them, the main story is quite a lot of fun. I may come back to some of it in co-op once I've finished it and taken a break.

I rented the game and played through it in a couple of weeks then sent it back. I think it's a great game but I don't see much reason to buy it.

Oops! Looks like I spoke too soon. (http://www.webwire.com/ViewPressRel.asp?aId=80710)

I don't reward publishers for shoving ads in my face. No exceptions.

They are so bad that I haven't even noticed them after 34 hours of play!

As far as I'm concerned, putting ads for real products in games set in 'present' times, in places where said ads make sense, is entirely fine.  So in Saint's Row 2, ads are fine with me as long as they're designed as part of the game world.

Now if you try to tell me that Orc Warriors drink Coca-Cola, that's different.

I agree with that in principle, actually. But I also believe that the more tolerance gamers show towards in-game ads, the more places publishers will try to cram them in. Since THQ has a long term contract with Massive, my zero-tolerance here is to preempt the possibility of Coke ads on the sides of Eldar buildings in Dawn of War II.

I know I'm being unreasonable. But it's principled unreason!

Since you are boycotting SR2... Currently you can get GTA San Andreas on XBL for about $20. If they put it on steam for that price I would recommend trying it, as it was much more fun than GTAIV.

If there was advertising in SR2, I sure didn't notice it.

Well, the article is dated yesterday and cites the 24th as the date the agreement was reached/signed, so there's probably going to be a bit of ramp-up time before you start seeing ads in anything.  I'd be unsurprised to see ad support rolled into a future update for the game though, hopefully along with something else like new guns or missions or something.

If it makes sense and fits in with the game, it doesn't worry me, and can even ad to immersion. IE a Coke billboard in SR2, or the buckets of KFC lying around in the background of GHWT, or the billboards in any racing or sports game being covered in sponsorship shit. Coke ads in Dead Space might not work as well though.

Ads don't affect me anyway.

Might pick up some KFC for diinner tonight on the way home, though. And have a nice, cool can of coke from the work fridge with my lunch...

I got the game finally. For me the coop is everything that GTA4's should have been. I love it.

While not a fan of the Thug Lyfe, its so over the top that I can deal. Also, being able to customize your gang's style is a great touch.

I also finally got the game.

While not a fan at all of the Thug Lyfe, it's so over the top that I can deal.  Also, being able to customize your character, all your vehicles and your gang's style is a great touch.  I'm a Customization Whore.  :grin:

Isn't there supposed to be some downloadable content for this game at some point, too?

I only listed Gang Style, because you could do all that other stuff in the first one.

One thing I always liked about SR was that if you stored a car in your garage, it was yours forever. In GTA I always would store the good cars, but then never use them, "cause I might need it later". In SR, if you ditch a car it goes back to your garage, and if you total it, you can pay to have it repaired back in your garage. I love that.

Also, Cruise Control is a good send, it makes shooting people while driving so much easer.

I'm in love with this game now, but holy crap is the Mall mission for the Sons a pain. Checkpoint my ass.

So anyone from f13 with a 360 keen to do some co-op in this thing? I've got some time off work so that means I'll be online when you guys usually are.

I am pretty much always down for some coop. I love this game. Add me as a friend and send me an invite when you see me online.

Xbox Live Name: rup3t

Same, just finished the game co-op but would love to work on achievements/strong arm, etc.
Gamertag: binfuser

added!

Had a ball doing some co-op with fuser this afternoon, and finally finished the game today.  :drill:
Now I'm ready for Tara Patrick, Microbiologist.  :drillf:
I should now also go back and finish Just Cause, I guess.  :uhrr:

Still up for some co-op achievement whoring though. Send me a message if I'm playing something else (except the music games - if one of them is on it means my wife is playing the 360).

http://www.msxbox-world.com/features/Saints-Row-2/stilwater.php

There's the map of all the jumps/cd's/spray/barnstorm locations. It's a real PITA as it "resets"/reloads everytime you mark something as complete. Click on the icon's for better detail/pic's of the locations.

Cool site.  I recently picked up this game and it's my favorite game on the 360 by far.  Better than Fable 2, Gears 2, etc. 

How do you do the insurance fraud missions?  I kept running in front of cars in the insurance fraud area and I would get hit pretty hard but I wouldn't get any money for it.

By far the worse diversion's, Azazel and I were talking about how bad they are. The easiest way seems to be on a highway near the zone you need and keep getting hit and bounce into other cars. The car speeds there can give you good bounces and the hit damage you need.

Park yourself on a highway and wait for semis or buses.  Bounce off cars for points.  The Insurance fraud stuff reminds me vaguely of Crash mode in the later Burnout games that aren't Paradise.

Thanks, I'll try the bounce technique.

You do know that you have to pull the left trigger to go in to "rag doll" mode right? Otherwise you will just end up getting smacked and not get any money. I really like insurance fraud in the first SR, but they seem to have made it MUCH harder in SR2.

Doh, I must have missed that somehow. I tried one of those missions once and didn't understand wtf, never tried one again.

I love the callsign for the muzak radio in (at least) the plastic surgeon. I went by a few times as I was carefully making my guy as hideous as possible before it registered.

However, the most ridiculously over-the-top thing seen in game so far:

(http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/122163/sr2dj.jpg)

AAGTHIODHSJLHDFJ

No.  I did not.  Thanks.

Got back onto this yesterday to knock out some MP missions. Had a bit of fun.

Also noticed that Tera Patrick: Microbiologist has been released (a month ago, apparently), so I burnt most of the last of my MS points that had been sitting around forever on it, rather than 1 level of Force Unleashed DLC.

 :awesome_for_real:


edit - erm, apparently the next DLC pack for this thing is due out in 3 days.  :ye_gods: :grin: