Saint’s Row 2 is the trashy, lowbrow game that everyone thinks Grand Theft Auto is.

Not that Grand Theft Auto hasn’t been trashy and lowbrow at times. But that franchise has been trying to grow up and go legit, while Saint’s Row wallows in the crass. This has some upsides and downsides.

GTA has always had a satiric bite to it. In GTA: Vice City, you played a horrible human being named Tommy Vercetti, but you couldn’t help but think that he was exactly what the virtual Florida deserved for the crooked real estate developers, hypocritical televangelists, corrupt politicians and all-around assholes that inhabited its 1980s-circa Miami knockoff.

The latest installment of GTA featured Niko Bellic, a former Serbian soldier and recent immigrant to New York Liberty City with a skeptical view of the American Dream. I like playing a character rather than a cipher, generally. But when you feel like engaging in that that GTA pasttime of wreaking absolute havok on a clockwork city, GTA IV comes up a little thin.

Then there’s Saint’s Row 2. It has you killing a prison doctor and shooting female prison guards in under a minute. Tasteful it ain’t.

Your gangster is out tossing grenades from moving vehicles in no time flat. What’s the socio-political subtext? It’s that blowing stuff up is fun, that’s what it is.

The house has bought two copies of this game just to play it cooperatively. (There’s no split-screen option.) It had a room full of people laughing during the character creation screen, as we assigned a a swishy “Oh no you di’nt!” taunt to the beefy asian guy we’d come up with. Sometimes trashy is just fun.

And now that I have finished writing this, I have allowed myself to look at Yahtzee’s review, where he says everything above, but in a much funnier way. Darn.

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