saints row 2023 -
the words i am looking for are “ass-backwards,” “hulu-original,” “scared.” it has the sex nerd problem borderlands 3 has but inverted. it is trying so hard to not sexualize things that it has pervert vibes peeking out of the seams. i can’t help but think that i know what they are thinking.
as a game it’s definitely a post-myspace saints row game, which, if u let the xbox store reviews tell it: is not really saints row. saints row 3 wasn’t really saints row, saints row 4 was definitely not saints row, saints row: gat out of hell was not saints row, agents of mayhem wasn’t even called saints row, and now saints row is not saints row.
saints row is what ppl who have never one hundred percented GTA IV think the GTA series is, but queer. the most prominent saints row youtuber is named “flippy”, and he gives total abuser vibes, maybe he’s chill but the anger he left me with his video on saints row 2023 gave such an ugly aura. but he said something interesting, something that i actually said years ago when saints row 2023 was first revealed: “it’s not hood”. another thought when the trailer dropped was that it was giving 0 MadTV vibes so it would also flop bc of that but
flippy would never have the intellectual fortitude to expound upon this further but saints row 1 and saints row 2 are both hood games very much of their time; the 00s was a second peak of hood film and crunk music. you couldn’t be more counter-cultural in the bush years than:
See, me, I ain’t nothing nice, and Crime Mob, it ain’t no stopping
It be like Saddam Hussein, Hitler, and Osama bin Laden
an open world crime game in a contemporary hood style understandably hasn’t been done yet. what the fuck would anyone who works at “deep silver volition” know about that? maybe GTA 6 could be this, but i’m given pause by the lack of all-out satire direction rockstar seems to be taking going forward. i don’t think i want to play a serious gun crime game with such realism. the balance has to be delicate. maybe GTA 6 needs another 10 years of development time. have u seen the gore graphics in dead island 2? have u read that one xbox store review that assumes the “zombies in L.A.” theme is social commentary on the rate of homelessness in california? everything and everyone is stupid
sleeping dogs: definitive edition -
so good… i already beat this in high school but it was two dollars or something on xbox. the ethos of united front games’ short gameography i can’t put properly into words: modnation racers was and still is my favorite kart racer. littlebigplanet karting felt too sad to play as a LBP day-1. all of their other work was on who-cares kind of stuff like the tomb raider 2013 and halo remasters, or disney infinity 3.0. they made like 2 real video games w/ their chest.
what they were working on b4 squaresoft-enix killed them was triad wars. triad wars was going to be a sleeping dogs mmo in the style of KMMO classics like freejack, audition, getamped, the list goes on. i played the beta. sleeping dogs would get compared to shenmue for some reason and thus triad wars would be based on an aspect of shenmue’s successor game, yakuza: the parts where u climb a tower and fight a bunch of guys and then fight on a rooftop against a big guy. which is also like HOT-B’s 火激, the greatest megadrive game of all time.
in a silent way, HOT-B was the united front games of japanese 1990s, it’s such a sadness the circle was never completed.
infinite guitars -
this has the swag the artful escape wanted. queens of the stone age should be doing the soundtrack though