MrKlorox

Throughout this thread, I'm picturing Volition/Deep Silver community managers/PR team high-fiving eachother at every mention of their game being "AAA." Triple-A still means development budget, right? If thats the case, and SR4 is AAA, what does that make GTA5? Quintuple-A? I agree, and posit that GTA5 being on the brink of release is a major opportunity (aka Chinese for crisis without the danger) to experience a recent entry in the Saint's Row.franchise. It's not like the player (which would obviously be Jake) needs to 100% the side missions to see what those guys were going for.

For the sake of a definitive juxtaposition™, anybody who is interested in playing a highly anticipated game and expressing opinions about it has to experience at least one of the games in a series primed as a counterpart to the motifs set by it. People who have built a following talking about games who want to play GTA5 have an obligation to play Saint's Row 3 or 4 to have a point of contrast regarding each franchises's strongest competetor (as of Autumn 2013). As much as I dislike the Saint's Row franchise and think it would clash with this podcast's personalities' definition of a "good game," I believe its participants owe it to both themselves and their readers to have first hand experience in the game that other outlets and the public hold as the strongest point of comparison. And the only reason I, personally, feel they're even comparible is because Saint's Row 1 felt like a bunch "painfully suburban" dudes played GTA:San Andreas and said, "I want to make a game like that except without any degree of authenticity (Dj Pooh), while using this sweet next-gen console hardware... except more extreme like the professional wrasslin' we watch." I don't really give a rectal fracture which one the crew plays first, because the comparison will still be apt, as long as it doesn't lead to expectations within the opposite franchise.

I'm with Chris. His doubts about Saint's Row are entirely deserved, and are the reasons why I hate the series. I have to admit it's much better since they embraced the zany side of the open world action crime genre, compared to when they were trying and failing miserably at doing a more serious tone in the first game. SR3 felt like Volition messed around with Sjaak327's Simple Native Trainer for GTA4/EFLC and decided to make a game inspired by that, except way less fun in execution. Listening to someone describe what you do in SR3 and imagining what it would be like is infinitely more fun than actually doing that stuff when playing the game. I have no reason to expect SR4 to be any different.

Tony Prince practically sounded like Snagglepuss in his few cameos in the main GTA4 storyline. They cleaned up his stereotype quite a bit for his DLC. You can hear a few of the voice actor's pre-TBOGT performances the few mission cutscenes that cross over with GTA4's storyline, and the contrast is very obvious. Johnny Klebitz also sounds a little different in TLAD than he did in GTA4, but the change wasn't as drastic; just more fleshed out.

edit: Crap, I put this on the wrong episode thread. This was a terrible first post.