...and it has been worth every minute of it.

I've not bought a Steam game in a while now (unless a game came with a free Steam code, in which case I redeemed it anyway). After playing Sleeping Dogs on a friend's PS3 and observing the absolutely horrible frame rate on it but seeing how fucking awesome the game was nonetheless, I decided to go against my principles, cancelled my PS3 order and bought the PC version, which forces Steam upon you.

I am seriously loving every minute of this game. In the ten years or so that the market has been churning out GTA clone after GTA clone, there has hardly been one that has even comes close to the original and best. When Square Enix said that Activision dropped the ball by giving up the rights to True Crime: Hong Kong, they weren't kidding. This is a true masterpiece, and it's a crying shame that it sold so poorly on the PS3 and 360 and, going on the basis of SteamGraphs, on PC too.

Great melee combat (not too difficult to master, but there is a fair bit of technique involved), great gunplay, decent driving mechanics, awesome voice acting, great story, gorgeous visuals. Certainly my personal GOTY so far.

And I'd like to mention that this has been the first full-price Steamworks game that I've bought in four years that I've bought where I *didn't* have problems activating and starting. Hurrah.

Fair warning: If you have a slow connection and buy it on DVD, you will be forced to download a 1.6GB patch upon installation. If you buy it as a download (which, apparently, you have to do if you live in the US, unless you're willing to import from the EU) then you obviously won't have this problem (the game itself is about 8GB if I remember correctly, there's a high-res texture pack that weighs in at roughly another 2GB).

You're playing the censored version?

No, the censored version hasn't been released yet. Mine's the uncensored "PEGI" version and it registered in Steam as "Sleeping Dogs (EU)", so there's no reason to believe I've been given the censored version by virtue of my region.

The USK-rated version *will* be censored.

Steam, like .NET, is inevitable.

And I played Saints Row 2 for the first time a week or so ago. I had no problems because I'm still using XP (other than problems resulting from my hardware being under par).

I was very happy to find that, what i thought was GTA clone, was a total parody of these organized crime games.

There is absolutely nothing about Saints Row 2 that was intended to be taken seriously. When building my character I noticed how they even over-exaggerated the 'Gangsta Strut' to make it look more intellectually handy-capped than degeneratively intimidating.

There was one point where I was attacked by a rival crim and I sent him flying - The Po-Po's show up Johnny on the spot and I'm thinking they're gonna butt-hurt me for the bashing I dished out.

Instead they plugged the crim a few times while he was on the ground, to finish him off, them hopped in their little squad car and drove off.

The samurai slayings were a trip but best of all was being an eight foot tall, built and ugly albino bitch who had a simpler time just picking up problems and tossing them in front of cars speeding by watching them bounce off hoods.

Drivers, like an operating systems, are inevitable.

Mentioning Steam and Saints' Row 2 in the same breath to a German gamer is liable to get you strangled, hung, drawn and quartered. It is the one of the main reasons why the rise of Steam has only been a bad thing. I actually had to spend hours finding out whether the uncut version of Sleeping Dogs would actually run here (Square Enix have used regional locks before - for some odd reason, the UK version of Deus Ex Human Revolution refused to activate in Germany, but they quickly fixed that).

(For the record, it was the first time that Steam was used to enforce actual regional content restrictions in Germany. We had a severely cripped version of the game sold here in Germany, and the uncut import versions - including from the UK no less - refuse to activate or run in Germany, and still do to this day.)

That is one thing that threw me off about Saints Row 2 is that even though the city is modeled after Los Angeles, the police are in New Zealand uniforms and most don't seem to be armed with guns (our police have to run back to the bat cave and unlock their firearms if needed.).

Then I found out that there was an Australasia-Specific version of Saints Row 2 but I'm not sure if the police in the US original were armed? i mean it could be intentionally designed that way so that finding firearms is more of a challenge.

During my short testing of the game only about 20% of the officers out in the city had firearms and even then, they weren't on foot so they weren't easy to rob.

However, if they artificially removed firearms to custom tailor to NZ then they may have rendered the game impossible to complete. I'm pretty sure I'll eventually get to a point where I need more weaponry than just the samurai sword or picking up people and slinging them against walls.

I just bought it.

If I don't like it I'm holding you responsible!

;-P


Edit: WOW, the first game that I got a CTD from in a very, very long time.

Apart from that the first hour was very good. The graphics, just wow. Seems to shape up to a good game. Looking forward to it. I just hope this crash was an exception.