Maybe it's the crack cocaine, otherwise known as Gamer Points talking, but I could barely put the game down to write the review. Throughout the game experience, I found myself laughing out loud at the hilarious blend of obvious slapstick humor and more subtle double (or even triple) entendres. There were other times when I was cursing out loud and wanted to break my wireless controller. The game is far from perfect (flaws to be exposed in grim detail) but it manages to exhibit an addictive property and an ability to consume time that should be feared by anyone with goals outside of the video game.

If you've managed to escape awareness of the controversial hit video games in the Grand Theft Auto series, then an explanation of Saint's Row from a game design standpoint is in order. Saint's Row is essentially a third person shooter, mixed with a driving game, set in a large "sandbox" city that you can freely roam around. There are interstates, stores, traffic, and people, tons and tons of people of every variety imaginable.

Within this huge city, you play a new member of the gang known as the Saints. As a Saint, you're at war with the Vice Kings, the West Side Rollers and Los Carnales (not "The" Los Carnales since that would be redundant). The story missions involve waging war on the other gangs in the city and taking over their territory. The only problem is that you need to prove yourself to the Saints before they'll trust you with the more important missions. You gain respect in the city by driving around doing side jobs for fellow gang members. Things like killing pimps from rival gangs and stealing back the hookers that they stole from the Saints. There are escort missions where you drive a hooker around in a car, avoiding their spouse or the IRS or news camera crews, while she fellates a John in the back seat.

Other missions involve defending drug dealers while they make the rounds, stealing specific kinds of cars, or my personal favorite insurance fraud. In the latter, you drive to an area marked on the map and take a dive in front of moving cars so you can sue their owners' pants off. You get bonus multipliers for witnesses being present, whether or not it was a municipal vehicle that hit you and a big bonus for hang time. This is a priceless innovation of the Havoc engine. I must have spent hours crashing headlong into squad cars or garbage trucks only to fly through my windshield get nailed from the side by another car and sail through the air as a crumpled up, thugged out mass of arms and legs.

Once you've earned enough respect, you can perform jobs for the leaders of the Saints. These are usually specific tasks that take advantage of the game engine's mechanics but are mostly unique. You can expect to escort VIPs or rescue captured gang members or blow up buildings or assassinate specific individuals, all for the sake of turf. There is no shortage of things to do in the game and there is plenty of challenge to be had. Unfortunately, it's not always the satisfying kind of challenge. Many times throughout my experience, I found myself frustrated with the game. I believe my frustration is caused by three legitimate complaints regarding the game's design.

The first complaint has to do with the control scheme. In a few key areas it feels like they missed the boat completely. The game is still playable, by no means broken, but the kludgy controls make the game harder than it needs to be to be fun. The first example is the weapon and food selection process. Instead of a simple button press like any sane button layout, you hold a button down, move the left analog stick to one of the eight positions and release it. To use food (health pack) you do the same thing except with the D-Pad. In the heat of a battle, it's too much to process and will necessarily get you killed. More than once, I thought I was picking a hamburger, to recharge my health meter and I accidentally picked an alternate weapon instead. Then I died.

Driving is just as bad when it comes to control of the camera. Let's say you bumped into another car and you need to back up five feet to leave room to drive around the obstacle. The game automatically forces you to look backwards even if you only retreat a few feet. Now you want to move forward again, but you are stuck looking out the rear window. You can either override the camera controls with the right analog stick (bad) before you start moving or let the game readjust the camera back to front facing after a few seconds (worse). Free camera movement in a vehicle is surely tough to implement but they should have taken a page out of Call of Duty's book and looked at how the other game implemented tank turrets. You could control them separately, but an option to lock the camera on the hood of the car would have been much appreciated.

The third complaint has to do with the driving distances required to complete the missions and the fact that mission failure starts you way back at the beginning and forces you to recover ground over and over again. Try to imagine this scenario. You start out weak and low on ammunition from the last mission you've completed. You also used up all your food and drink healing your wounds while in combat. Let's say the next mission is a doozy that will take you several tries to pass it, in the typical console game pattern of difficulty. It's achievable, but you have to learn the tips and tricks through trial and error and experimentation until you find a pattern that works.

Now try to imagine that in between each attempt you had to go and do your Saturday errands. You have to drive here to pick up some lunch. You have to go clear across town to pick up ammo for your guns and then all the way Downtown to find the guy you are supposed to rough up. After that you use the information to take out a dangerous, high-ranking member of an opposing gang. It's needless to say a major complaint that the game forces you through these pointlessly difficult trials. I still did it, and got a lot more skilled in the game, but it's still arguably a broken game mechanic.

Besides these somewhat frustrating issues, the game is solid in every other respect. Audibly the game is top notch. Every time you steal someone's car, you hear a different radio station playing different music or even talk radio. Depending on the type of car and driver, you'll get different stations. The black guy in the caddy might be listening to hip-hop while the middle-aged businesswoman is listening to talk radio. The music stations play hip-hop and rock songs that you'll recognize as well as some really catchy songs you've never heard of. There have to be literally hundreds of songs recorded in the game, each one worth listening to.

The talk stations are full of fake interviews and radio personalities spouting off about the gang problem in the city. The stations will go to commercial periodically and advertise the stores in the city or promote some politician who's trying to get into office. It's great to listen to all the talk that's filled with innuendo and puns all horribly racy in content.

I personally loved the content even though it was so raunchy, even to the point of strippers running around in nothing but thongs and star-shaped pasties. People even cuss at you when you come close to running them over. For all you people out there that overreact about exposure to sex and nudity, but let their kids play grossly violent video games let this be fair warning. This game has butts and boobies in it. There are plenty of guns, killing, maiming and running innocent pedestrians over, but what you really need to be concerned with are the butts and boobies. I would never allow my son to play this game (and even if I would, my wife would kill me) but I still find it damn fun and entertaining. I personally feel no more compulsion to run people over than I typically do on the way to work.

The butts and boobies and everything else in the game are rendered beautifully when you consider how much content is being kept track of in the game. The people are very detailed, the lighting effects are realistic (sometimes to a fault since it makes driving at night or in the rain very hard) and the buildings and environments are all realistic and pleasing to the eye. Your character especially looks great, especially if you tried not to make them look as silly as is possible with the body and clothing customization. I know character customization has been done before and it's not something to get worked up over, but Saint's Row has it, it's implemented well with a full range of sliders that affect different areas of the face or body after selecting one of the predefined body types.

Which brings me to my last and final point about the game. From the predefined body types, you can select almost anything. Gone are the stereotypes about certain ethnic groups or the tendency for one ethnicity or sex to dominate the crime scene. Saint's Row represents equal opportunity gangs. Regardless of your colors, you'll see white boys backing up Latinos or gun toting chicks wearing jeans and tube tops. Asians will roll up on you with a black guy riding shotgun, wielding an actual shotgun. The game doesn't even assume sexual preference. While driving around a hooker to pick up chicks you're just as likely to pick up a female trick, as you are a typical John. It feels like we are finally making progress as a society. Hell I even created a semi retarded overweight character that had no problem navigating the ranks of the Saints. That's just how open minded these gang types really are.

It's clear that the game design borrowed heavily from the fundamentals of the Grand Theft Auto games, but I feel like Volition brings so much more to the table. It's almost as if Saint's Row is a parody of the GTA games, with its over the top raunchiness, obvious innuendo and complete departure from reality. I never got that into the GTA games, but I can't seem to get enough of Saint's Row. Maybe I'm just high on Gamer Points, but had I been forced to buy the game, I'd have felt that I'd gotten more than my money's worth in gaming.