the grunter

(This has to be the review with the most number of screenshots, I had fun simply taking these photos, the game is that fun.)

As one of Xbox 360′s early titles (2006), Volition’s Saints Row obviously had the advantage that Rockstar’s GTA IV was nowhere in sight (not even announced that year), but did Saints Row really need that advantage? If you ask me, I’d say it would do just fine even if GTA IV was released that same year.

The dev team that made Saints Row was apparently well aware of two things: 1) They couldn’t succeed by making a copycat of GTA (smart) and 2) Who says the GTA series is perfect as far as sandbox games go?

With confidence Volition gave us a healthy alternative to the dominating GTA titles. I played it when it came out, and found myself saying “Game quality-wise, this is at least on par with GTA: San Andreas (the latest in the series at the time). But personal enjoyment level-wise, this game is wayyy beyond GTA on my scale.”

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When the Nintendo 3DS was first announced at last year’s E3 (Nintendo seems to have a tendency to do their major announcements there, probably again this year), 3D movies were beginning to populate theaters thanks to the success of Avatar, and 3D TVs weren’t very heavily advertised, due to their steep prices. So it was understandable that gamers didn’t want to believe that Nintendo’s next portable console would be what seems like yet another upgrade on the existing DS – We already bought the original DS, DS Lite, DSi, DSiXL (and that is not counting all the special editions), do we really want to buy the same console for the fifth time, at the price of $249.99?

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Back in the day when the original Xbox was trying to knock PS2 off its throne of being the most popular console (and eventually failed), an internal competition within several titles of the then-new sandbox genre was heating up as well. Grand Theft Auto III by Rockstar Games was the champion and Mafia from Illusion Softworks(Now 2K Czech) was one of the challengers. Others include True Crime: Streets of LA and Simpsons: Hit and Run.

It has been a while since I finished Mafia, but I do remember it being quite an entertaining game. Strangely my instincts for picking games have always been steering me away from a lot of the mainstream titles, as a result I have never finished some of the classics such as GTA III, Kill Zone 2, God of War and much more. Mafia might have caused less damage to the undefeated GTA III than it desired, but I can say with confidence that if it wasn’t for Mafia, we wouldn’t be seeing other mob-themed sandbox genre games such as The Godfather and Scarface. I cannot comment on whether this was good news or not, unfortunately.

Mafia was original, it puts players in the time where the mob power was the largest in the city so it was a big deal, and the game definitely offered me something that GTA III didn’t (I didn’t finish the game, but I did get far enough to know this much).

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