Gee Tee Ayy

Continuing the trend of discussing videogames before I’ve quite finished playing them.. I’ve recently had a go at playing through “the best GTA for the PC”, GTA:San Andreas.

Now I can comment about whether Saints Row is a GTA clone. - it’s not. Saints Row is actually fun.

Well. GTA:SA is fun in its own kindof way.
But when you say “GTA”, I think people mean the GTA you play with cheats, where you can wreak havoc throughout a city/world. Without cheats, that’s not exactly how it plays out. (Saints Row, on the other hand, gets much closer to achieving that effect).

Both GTA:SA and SR have their share of dumb gameplay gimmicks, for what it’s worth; both have some poorly designed missions.

- GTA:SA is much less forgiving in terms of “what happens when you die”. For GTA:SA, you lose all your weapons. Similarly, there’s no notion of “garage” in the same sense as Saints Row, where you can always get access to a nice car so long as you get it at least once.
This means that in GTA, doing things is always “expensive”. You can’t ride the fast car more than once, and if you go on a dangerous rampage, you’ll lose all your expensive weapons. This philosophy is similarly applied to collection of cash. In Saints Row, you can collect cash from conquered territories very easily. In GTA, collecting cash from Properties requires going to the property itself.

Vehicle physics are more difficult in GTA:SA than Saints Row.

But in terms of combat, in GTA:SA it’s very easy to die, but also very easy to kill things.
On the whole, I’m not sure that’s necessarily a good thing.. since it’s so very unforgiving and I don’t feel GTA:SA really allows the player to compensate the disadvantage. (There’s no way to “play cautiously” as opposed to “dangerously”; not a big distinction, anyway).

GTA:SA tries to have some kind of RPG system going on.
It maybe makes sense for things like weapons. Maybe vehicles. It’s slightly more obscure in terms of “swimming skills” or “strength”.
Saints Row 3 had the RPG qualities only in terms of using cash to unlock abilities. (e.g. to carry more pistol ammo). SR4’s RPG system was similarly through “buying” things to unlock them.
But I suppose an experienced-based system for unlocking things is kinda cool.

- Oh, and while I can customise my characters appearance in SR to look however I want them to look, GTA:SA doesn’t quite allow for that. This is probably due to GTA:SA having a much stronger focus on story than SR.

So if I wanted to play one of these games to mess around in?
Without cheats, probably not GTA. On the other hand, I kindof don’t consider SR3’s “unlocked invincibility” to count as “cheats”.
Either way, I think I’d still prefer Saints Row.