probably the high water mark of the zombie craze of the late 00s / early 10s. like all stuff from that period, it's politically incoherent and much more focused on interpersonal drama than romero's good old-fashioned marxism, but it is genuinely well-executed and it gave me a lot of feelings and some very memorable moments.

i liked this a lot at the time but the pseudo-soviet aesthetic irritates me a lot. reminds me of when people post pictures of american urban desolation with captions saying "this looks like a run-down soviet state!" and its like no dude. this is just capitalism. capitalism does this.

i rate this highly because i'm a boring guy, but really because this was the high point of mid-tier games, when a studio would be given a solid budget to turn in a CoD rip-off for a major publisher, and then given free reign with what they did with it. i respect the hell out of taking that brief and making something so utterly scathing and depressed. good for them.

now this is some real uncut Gaming "oh its broken" "there are bugs" shut da fuck up

when the mcelroy brothers did this for monster factory and made sarcastic jokes about its South Park Humour i realised something very important: saints row is way funnier than the mcelroys will ever be

bethesda games used to be broken and badly written in fun ways. my favourite fact about this game is that they organised the script in alphabetical order when they gave it to the voice actors, so the reason everything sounds so disjointed is that two lines in the same conversation might have been recorded hours apart from each other. thats the type of absolutely insane decision-making which went into making this game, and for that alone i have to support it.

betrayed a friend so badly in this one time that our friendship literally never recovered

one of the worst gaming experiences it's possible to have. five stars.

makes a lot of really good decisions, scared me a lot, made me say "thats COOL" a lot. another AAA game i'm annoyed to be rating so high but it's fuckin good is the thing.

tory harassment simulator

not as much fun as the tony hawk game it wants to be, but fair play to them for making something youtubers could honk about to make a billion dollars

this game thinks it's cynical in the jaded gen x coolguy way but it's actually cynical in the deeply uncool 45yo marketing executive republican voter with a tesla way

hate that this became a culture war flashpoint bc it means i feel compelled to defend it even tho it's actually honestly not very good, not super well-written, not that incisive, just a bit empty and shallow

i love molleindustria agitprop lets gooo

cool innovative idea and it deserves credit for some good execution. story is terrible though and it had to pander to Gamers by including shooting, fighting, basically any bits where you aren't running. honestly couldve been way shorter and more satisfying. fucking Gamers tho am i right.