I've been playing quite a bit of Saints Row the past week now that I have a working Xbox 360.

Its basically just like Grand Theft Auto right down to the way the cars handle. Even the plot is the same. Not that that's a bad thing - it looks gorgeous, especially the flames.

But all is not well in paradise. The game has some major bugs, more than any Xbox 360 I've seen. I thought the whole reason Microsoft boxed the games up was to do quality control and ensure buggy games don't go out the door. Hmm.

Here's what I've seen in a week:

• Last night when there was a lot going on on-screen, the game totally froze. I was still able to power off without having to yank the plug but it was still a little annoying given that I was half way through a long mission.
• I've had a wierd situation with the game not responding when getting into a car. I had a homie with me. I pressed Y to get into our car. I started to get in on the passenger side from which my character will scooch across to the drivers seat. He was going to get in the back. Just at that moment another car tapped the front of our car and nudged it a little. This made my homie get into the drivers seat. Now my guy couldn't scooch so he sat in the passenger seat. It was in the middle of its "get in the car" action so I didn't have control and pressing Y didn't do anything. And the guy in the drivers seat didn't realize he was in the wrong spot and just sat there. Luckily I could Save and re-Load the game to break out of this.
• One problem I've had which has been reported elsewhere - when the game has a lot going on, the graphics can tear on screen. Sometimes a texture doesn't get laid down and you see cars driving on nothing. Its like the video card runs out of texture memory. I had the whole of the background disappear during a hectic police chase to the point where the cars were on big black and white polygons. That time there were lots of bump maps on the vehicles because they were all beat up, so I guess free texture memory got critically low.

I guess this is the worst of it. Some problems, like the graphics tearing, should have been found in QA - its not hard to recreate - just shoot lots of cops so they come after you big time. Hmm. The one with getting into the car is a little trickier to recreate, but easy enough to fix - if you have NPCs getting into a vehicle that then moves, cancel the getting into the car (better yet, reassess where your entry point is, but I'd settle for canceling the action - at least the game wouldn't stop!)

Its a pity these little issues are there, because its a fun game apart from that. I especially like that I got my character to look really similar to me - its fun seeing "me" kicking butt.

One light on the horizon - at least with Xbox Live, if/when they issue a fix, I'll be able to download it. If this game had been back on the PS2 with these issues I'd have been tempted to take it back. As it is, I'll wait for the fix so I can get back to cleaning up the 'hood

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