10 Video Games That Were Basically One Big Apology
1. Saints Row 2
The first Saints Row was, perhaps unfairly, dismissed as a Grand Theft Auto clone. When a game dominates the industry like GTA has, Saints Row developers Volition had to do something to make their franchise stand out from the crowd.
Whilst the first game did have individual moments of tongue-in-cheek humour, it still had a fairly serious tone. With Saints Row 2, they decided to ramp up the levels of craziness.
Activities included killing a mob boss in a destruction derby, taking on a shady villainous corporation with a sewage spreading truck and taking part in parodies of American cop shows.
The storyline was utterly bonkers, involving your character having major plastic surgery and setting up a HQ in a building destroyed by an earthquake.
The franchise went from being a GTA clone to a parody of serious sandbox games, and a great game in its own right. After all, can you really call a game a GTA clone if you can zap pedestrians to death with shock paddles? Probably not.
In a way, then, this game was less of an apology, and more of a 'if that's what the people want then that's what they'll get'.