Killer7 SINdicate

[sudaca]

I'm very sorry to interrupt this amazing thread but can this be immortalized somehow in some form, please archive this it's amazing. I've barely played saints row but this thread is sick

[conoroberstirner]

I've been noticing some discussions around the term "gentrification" and the representation of diverse characters in games like Saints Row. I thought it might be beneficial to share some perspectives on these topics.

1. Gentrification Clarification:

It's great that we're talking about issues like gentrification, but it's crucial to use the term accurately. Gentrification specifically refers to the process of urban renewal, often involving wealthier individuals moving into a lower-income neighborhood, which can result in cultural shifts and the displacement of existing residents.

Misusing the term can downplay the real challenges faced by marginalized communities. Let's be mindful of how we use "gentrification" to ensure a more accurate and nuanced discussion.

2. Representation in Games:

There seems to be the incorrect assumption being spread that better representation is a result of a political agenda. I'd like to offer an alternative perspective: the inclusion of diverse characters in games is a reflection of the evolving nature of our society. It's not necessarily a political statement but a response to the demand for more inclusive and representative content.

As our society becomes more diverse, it's only natural that media, including video games, adapts to reflect these changes. This isn't pushing an agenda but responding to the desire for a broader and more relatable gaming experience.

Hope this helps, OP. I'm always down to discuss whatever.

[Jack]

I don't understand how to navigate this site at all, but I got really annoyed at reading this shit.

I've been noticing some discussions around the term "gentrification" and the representation of diverse characters in games like Saints Row. I thought it might be beneficial to share some perspectives on these topics.

1. Gentrification Clarification:

It's great that we're talking about issues like gentrification, but it's crucial to use the term accurately. Gentrification specifically refers to the process of urban renewal, often involving wealthier individuals moving into a lower-income neighborhood, which can result in cultural shifts and the displacement of existing residents.

Misusing the term can downplay the real challenges faced by marginalized communities. Let's be mindful of how we use "gentrification" to ensure a more accurate and nuanced discussion.

Which is exactly what I'm talking about you stupid motherfucker. The identity of Saints completely changed
when it shifted towards the tastes of aging White Millennial dorks who try so hard to be hip that they use
outdated 1970s era Drug Dealer slang to tryna get down with the 'youths' & zoomers. When zoomers don't speak like drug dealers. Zoomers don't say Swag, they say Drip. Zoomers misuse a dialect & slang that came from the Black American Hoods.

What does Saints Row Reboot look like? It looks like a bunch of White Upperclass hipster kids in blackface.
Your faggot ass is so racist that you just see dark skin people & asians in the Saints reboot, so you assume that they automatically represent their cultures. When they all just look like goofy rich white kids dressed up as Steve Urkel to me.

There seems to be the incorrect assumption being spread that better representation is a result of a political agenda. I'd like to offer an alternative perspective: the inclusion of diverse characters in games is a reflection of the evolving nature of our society. It's not necessarily a political statement but a response to the demand for more inclusive and representative content.

Saints Row was always diverse, it's about a multicultural Anti-Street Gang who bonded together to keep the other gangs out of their neighborhood. The Saints Reboot just took the multiculturalism that it already had, and gentrified them into a Corpo-approved template of their ideal non-White person. Anyone who is non-threatening, and acts like one of those Consumerist Nerds from Big Bang theory.

Yeah I'm aware this poster is probably a bot and the account doesn't exist anymore any way but it still pissed me off enough to reply because it sounds exactly like a snobby redditor post. It's always this group of stupid ass upper middle class fucks who always talk down to me, when it's quite clear from the way that I speak & write, that I understand this so-called non-white (they use the word 'diverse' as codespeak for non-white) 'struggle' that they pretend to be apart of.
What am I describing?
viewtopic.php?t=319&start=59

I wanted to talk about how different social-economic backgrounds reflect your politics and I used examples of childhood friends I had. (We're all Military.)
One is an Hispanic who became a rapper. The other is a White Protestant guy who became a youtube celeb who has over 9 million subs. It's weird because I never hear about him on mainstream internet and I don't think anyone here has ever heard of him. Even though he has 9 million subs (actually 8.98 milly but that's close enough.), he's still an active & popular channel, still a chad & he is still TDS as hell but for some reason there's never any controversy around him.

Well the point I was making is that in the USA, The Liberal party is mostly composed of the lower class or poorer people (Hispanic guy) and the ultra mega rich New England Huwite boi types like the youtuber Neoliberal Chad. I believe that he's Neoliberal in the truest sense, in that he'll suddenly drop his TDS if it somehow became more profitable for him to suck Trump's dick.
Then you have someone like me who's caught in the middle. I'm the 'bad guy' who has to checkmark myself into the richest available slot which is $100k range.
It sounds rich and it probably was but it's poor as fuck now.
The problem is the Mega Rich Utube Chad guy can easily point to people like me as
"Those rich people are abusing the system!"
Which causes types like the Hispanic Rapper guy to side with the Mega Rich Asshole into fucking me over
with their political coalition when in reality the Mega Rich White dude is actually fucking both of us over but I'm the only one who's smart enough to see through that. I can't explain the reality to the poor fuck, because the poor fuck just views me as a rich guy when I'm a poor fuck compared to the Mega Rich NeoLiberal who's fucking over both the poor & the middle/upper middle class.

viewtopic.php?t=640

What is Elite? This is the Ruling class, your de facto Kings & Queens who hide behind the veil of democracy.
The nature & function of the ruling class varies. In real life, our rulers are generally an oligarchy of
the Managerial class who work in tandem with Corporations (which are legally classified as living breathing people.)
who are supervised by the Military Industrial Complex.
The 3 functions were meant to act as a system of checks & balances
but in reality they are a Corporatocracy united by a singular goal of fucking you over & enriching themselves.

I'm just illustrating how Elites profess to be one thing but in reality are completely something else.
What I do not do is demonize the belief systems. The doctrines are just a vehicle, you don't blame the vehicle
simply because a bunch of inbred retard royals believe in it but incorrectly
practice it, because most Elites are materialist literalist morons.
It's being materialist which has perverted their belief systems, but the doctrine itself isn't evil.
Not unlike how Evengelicals completely malform their Christian doctrine into an evil war-like
fire & brimstone culture, because they too are guilty of the same exact ignorance as the global elites.

Knowledge is constantly gatekept from the cattle.
The only purpose for we cattle is to simply work our asses off until we reach retirement
age & then they indirectly kill us off through either war or manufactured viral diseases
so you can't enjoy your retirement fund anyway. They laugh at you, while they get to grow fat from
your stupid wasted life. In real life the religion Christianity, specifically the Protestent Calvinism
denomination is what guides more stupid motherfuckers into wasting their whole lives working for
corporations that do nothing but steal from you, your entire life. In fact, your life is the corporation
because hard work ethic is deeply ingrained through your religious beliefs.

In my setting, "Endoxos" is the religion that represents global Christianity or old school traditionalist founding religion on Plymouth rock.
"Enduring Evolution" is a secularized belief system (which represents the modern era Social Justice or what historically ignorant retards call 'Woke'.)
that functions as a modernized secular Calvinism & is the state & corporate approved doctrine.
Both belief systems are distractions to pit you into fighting among each other
for the future survival of one of the two doctrines.
Both belief systems are approved & mandated by the establishment but the elites pretend that there is a schism
between the two when in fact they couldn't care less which side wins, because both sides are just made up bullshit
created by social engineers to goad you into throwing your lives' away for their cause without you realizing that
fighting for your retarded beliefs, actually makes them stronger & you a completely irrlevant nothing who willfilly
drained your own resources for a cause that you thought was yours, when it was handed to you by those
who wish to take from you by convincing you to willingly give up all that you own for a stupid pointless cause
that you believed in.

I'm describing a form of gentrification when Rich whites try to goad poor non-whites into aggressing richer non-whites.
Although the race qualifiers don't matter (I'm only specifying race within this reply because you sound like one of those racist Liberal Plebbit fucks who only look at skin tone since you think that Saints Reboot is diverse when culturally, they all act White.), the important take away is that the Richest-caste tries to leverage the playing field by pitting the undesirables (those that you have termed as 'diverse') against the actual opponents that they want to displace, me.
Since you're a moron, I'll spell it out to you what the end game is. It's an indirect means of eliminating the competition so
that the Rich huwitey can swoop in and either take full control of the lower class useful idiots or bankrupt (or possibly as a last resort) buy someone like me out, because I no longer want to deal with the useful idiots. Either way, the Whitey has effectively gentrified the neighborhood because they got rid of someone who can actually stand up to them, ME!
Unlike you internet clowns with your feelgood performative-political corpo-approved speeches, I'm actually talking about real life! The life that you'll never understand because your entire life is a fucking computer screen you plebbit fuck.

That's why I don't understand why the fuck I'm so vilified within the realm of gaming but I've came to the conclusion that gamers are just larpers & idiots, and they don't really understand how politics functions in real life.
Gamers think of politics as a list of ideals or beliefs, similar to a religion. When politics is just the method one uses to obtain resources & land, which both equal to more power. Politics is simply an indirect term for survivalism. Political ideology has never mattered & is only used a means to obtain power.
Survival of what? That's when the isms kick in. In the USA the isms are ironically at a group level that they base off of either their ethnicity or skin color, and their sexuality. It's ironic because these are the same exact retards who also claim to be individualists yet their thinking is structured more like a collectivist, this is also true of the American right.
Every single Non-White culture including the Japanese only care about one thing, the survival of their culture. This is why American Liberal Blacks & Muslims are extremely Socially-Conservative and are nearly incompatible with nearly everything that the American Liberals stand for, especially when it comes to LGBT. (The Liberal strategy is to band together all outsiders against the 'Whites'. I also want to band together all of the outsiders, but I want them to fight off
the Elite classes, a lot of elites aren't even White. I hate all elites and only use the ones who can be subverted.)
It's really only White people who take the time to overthink things and splinter themselves into disparate ideological political identities because modern Whites don't view themselves as a tribe. They think of themselves as a blank slate waiting to be imprinted on by the dominant pop-culture of the era.


I don't give a shit about the 'struggle' but I understand it, and speak about the 'struggle' in far more detail than any of you DEI and 'inclusivity' shitheads ever could. Inclusive my ass, that's why I'm always one of the first who's cast out, because I let you sheltered pampered assholes know that the streets, the urban folk that you champion so much. They all fucking hate you, but they can relate with me because I at least try to keep it real even if I do admit upfront that I don't care about their 'struggle'. I don't care because All is Mind and the reality you create starts from your perception of who you are.

It's you upper mid class & rich fucks who force-feed this culture of ineptitude and eternal victimhood on to the 'diverse' as a self-fulfilling prophecy. I'm about equalizing the playing field by educating anyone who falls within the label of 'Outsider' to take control of their lives with their own hands. Nobody is going to hand you a better life, you have to take it for yourself through you own ambition. Not cry like a baby until the Elite Establishment hands everything down to you so that they can use you as a political weapon against a competing out-group that they wish to indirectly steal the resources of by using the 'diverse' 'struggling' people as a meatbag shield while your hoity toity ass can just stand around basking in the glory of pointless virtue signaling for pointless likes & retweets to overinflate your fragile sense of ego, because you feel so bad that you were born under a better 'predicament' than the so-called 'diverse' people.

What the fuck about my posts made you think that I had a problem with diversity?
My damn title says it all. Saints Row's culture has been gentrified. You overly literal autistic piece of shit.
This is exactly why I hate gamers. They always waste my fucking time by talking down to me when in reality they're
just making fools out of themselves because they show that they know so little but like to peacock what miniscule knowledge they have by trying to correct 'errors' they perceived as if it suddenly changed the meaning of what I originally posted. Don't condescend to me as if you're webster's dictionary because you're a souless retard who can't comprehend what I'm saying on a conceptual level.
This motherfucker is so stupid that he literally believes that gentrification only refers to houses & neighborhoods, AYY LMAO! What is a neighborhood? A CULTURE! Hey dumbass, gentrification also refers to demographic shifts. Which is exactly what the thread was about. By demographic shift, I'm referring to how Saints Row was once about Gangsta & Underworld crime culture but it has been sanitized to reflect Millennial Consumer Big Bang Theory Reddit culture.

edit: kek I re read some of my posts in this thread, even in 2021 I was still bitching about New England Hipsters.

Why is this culture considered outdated and unneeded, only to get replaced by NewEngland style multicultural people, larping as White New Englanders? AYY LMAO!
When i was a kid, the Ambercrombie & Fitch types always got punked & dissed, for being a bunch of rich out of touch losers. What annoys me is that the Saints games were based off of Chicago crime life. Last I checked, that lifestyle is still extremely dominant in Chiraq! OOOh but internet nerds told me that's fiction so whatever the internet nerds claim must be true!

[AngelheadedHipster]

There's something a bit sad about the Saints Row series. With 3 and 4 I got the impression that Volition lost sight of what people liked about the first 2 games, with the new one I got the impression that they fundamentally understood what people enjoyed about the first two SR games, they just failed to replicate it.

And that really gets you thinking, you know? We think of SR2, especially, as a certified hood classic now, but mechanically there wasn't really anything too special about it. The opposite, if anything. Where GTA's mission design started to go into a more cinematic direction and focus more on one off setpieces, Saints Row firmly held onto driving cars and shooting guns as its main gameplay mechanics. And neither of those were even implemented in an especially sophisticated way.

Briefly I was wondering whether I remembered SR2 more fondly than it deserved, but whenever I go back to it, I start to realize just how many fun little mechanics, minigames and side activities it had, that none of its sequels, including the new one, ever brought back. The ability to pick up pedestrians or enemies and throw them around, the ability to pick up random objects and use them as melee weapons, the side activity that had you spray sewage around, the hostage minigame when you carjacked a car with passengers in it... Saints Row 3 stripped most of the fun from this series, and they never bothered to bring it back.

The new one tries to go back to the basics, but in taking this series back to its roots it actually shoots right past even Saints Row 1 and ends up with something that's basically GTA Vice City without the Scarface references. The premise is as basic as it gets, you're trying to get a criminal enterprise of the ground with some of your mates, so you secure business opportunities, pull jobs and pick fights with the larger gangs that run the city. Simple enough, good enough. In theory. It's effectively the same premise as the first three Saints Row games, doesn't have their structure, though. See, where in SR1 and 2 every individual competing gang had their own series of missions that you could do in any order, this one's all over the place. Whether that makes a difference at the end of the day is debatable, of course, but I do kinda miss the more methodical structure of the early games, where you took out enemy enterprises, all the gangs had their own arcs where the cutscenes after missions occasionally cut to their leadership reacting to what you just did, you know, it all conveyed a sense of progression where the pacing of the new games just feels like it's stuttering along to a pretty abrupt conclusion.

On a fundamental level the gameplay's not too different from the old Saints Row games and, thank god, much less reliant on the janky gimmicks of 3 and 4. We're back to driving and shooting. The driving's functional, essentially, the combat gets pretty old. Most of the game has you fight of waves of enemies with very rudimentary AI and the combat never really acquires much in the way of variety, or challenge. Weapon variety and enemy variety both leave a lot to be desired. Honestly, the most redeeming features SR2022's gameplay has are its absolutely stupid physics. Enemies get hurled around for hundreds of meters when they are caught in an explosion, and so do cars, if you hit them right. That's where a bit of that early PS3 era charm actually comes through.

The actual mission design has its moments of actually trying. It's still the old driving and shooting, but they try to keep the whole context around it fresh occasionally. There's a train robbery, an assault on a caravan, shooting your way through an office building, a prison break... by no means do all the missions feel unique but at least they vary up the locations some. Most of them would have fit just fine in an older Saints Row game. It just doesn't help much that those older Saints Row games were a good bit longer and better paced. What stands out are a series of missions based around a city wide competetive LARP which... well, you know, I didn't find it especially funny when Sunset Overdrive did it either, but at least it's something different. Plus, it has the only exchange in the game that got a smile out of me. "I'm looking for someone to grind with" the protagonists nerdy friend says. "Don't we all?" the protagonist replies. Eh, it got a chuckle out of me.

On the other hand, you got the businesses you can buy which all open up their own side activities, unfortunately enough the majority of these side activities boil down to some type of collectible hunting. Go somewhere and fetch a specific car. Go somewhere and make a specific photo. Go somewhere and fetch another specific car. Go somewhere and tow a specific car. You get the idea.And, you know, it's not like the game doesn't have a ton of collectibles already. Drug packages, photo opportunities, decorations for your HQ, those weird tourist destinations where you can listen to lore about the city the game's set in, it really wants you to explore the world. Which is something you might not do otherwise, because the games map, the southwestern city of Santa Ileso is, putting it bluntly, a boring desert shithole. Invoking sort of a small, sad version of Las Vegas where there's little to see and little to do.

I don't mean to dedicate too much space to the writing in Saints Row, considering it was never a series with much focus on that, but it's fairly bland all around. Even at its most grounded, in the first two games, it was about cartoon gangsters fighting with cartoon physics in a cartoon city where all the business names are dick jokes, even before SR3 ditched that in favour of very poorly realized comic book camp. But what the earlier games managed to succesfully convey was that it was about ruthless, cuttthroat criminals and the protagonist came out on top of it, mostly on the virtue of being the most ruthless and cutthroat among them. The new SR, while in many ways feeling like an attempt to return to the style of the first two games, really sands off the edges in its own way, though. The Saints, in this game, are represented by a trio of nerdy kids that are fairly bland, mainly on the virtue of having to serve as straight men to the protagonist, who's written as a goofy meathead. On the other side of the ring, your enemy gangs consists of a bog standard latino gang, a group of what I imagine liberals think anarchists are like and a private militia, none of which get a while lot of characterization. Gone are the charismatic leaders and lieutenants of SR1 and 2, what remain are generic mooks.

There are many series that peaked early and then kept lingering around in a state of stagnation or decline, but something about the SR series' weirdly abrupt and weirdly consistent inability to surpass, or even remotely replicate, the level of quality of a 2008 game always made me wonder, you know, what gives? So here's my thesis statement: Saints Row 3 and 4 removed most of what its predecessors had in terms of gameplay and content variety in favour of flashy gimmicks and second rate spoof movie humor. Saints Row 2022 does away with those gimmicks and that humor, but, for the most part, doesn't bother to add the gameplay and content variety back in. What does that leave us with? Something that's less annoying and less padded than the last two SR games, but hardly any more fun. And that's disregarding an abundance of borderline game breaking bugs, like the game getting stuck of loading screens, failing to spawn NPC's or failing to trigger flags in missions that occured regularly enough to chip away at all my good will. By the end I had not much left.