Gaming History 101

Last week developer Volition, best known for the Saint’s Row franchise, discussed its canceled game on PSP Saint’s Row Undercover.  It started out as a PSP port of the second game in the series, but expanded into something more.  In addition, the company sat down with magazine Game Informer and turned a standard interview into a 4-part nearly hour long documentary on the company.  In addition, Volition released a 122 page PDF that is basically a design doc and walkthrough of the title.  With all of this amazing transparency, and the release of the prototype itself online, we just had to take a look.

I would love to give you a crazy video that details all of the wacky things you can do, but honestly the game lacks any true definition.  Now to be fair, it shouldn’t have any definition, it was a game the developer was prototyping for potential release and then was canned.  I take this moment and brief write-up to mention it only because people have asked me in the past why I haven’t covered Resident Evil 1.5 (ie: Resident Evil 2′s original version) and other unreleased demos/alphas/prototypes that have been set free on the Internet and it’s basically because not much is there.  The story, design docs, interviews, and concepts of what Resident Evil 4 or Saint’s Row Undercover could have been are fantastic and interesting, but what remains that can be played are shells of a game.  Anyway the links are there, have fun with it, personally I find it to be derivative of the Grand Theft Auto “Stories” games that came out on PSP, but then early on that’s all Saint’s Row was until it defined itself.  It also gives me an opportunity to cover Volition and Saint’s Row all week, so stay tuned for some wacky articles.