Next week, Saints Row: The Third players will get the weirdest DLC for the game yet (and that's counting the gun that launches shark-attacks) with Genki Bowl VII.

The trailer above gives the gist, as crazy-killer-feline-human-thing Professor Genki takes his Running Man-style competitive/deadly reality show out into the real world. Among the various challenges:

Sail through the skies with Sad Panda Skyblazing. Fight through dark, shark-infested jungles in Angry Tiger's Apocalypse Genki. And crush your way to victory in Sexy Kitten Yarngasm. But don't forget to help Professor Genki maintain his excitement before any public appearances in Super Ethical PR Opportunity.

"Yarngasm?" "Shark-Infested Jungles?" Yep, this can only be Saints Row: The Third. (Read our review of the full game here.)

The DLC launches next Tuesday, January 17th for an as-yet unannounced price. (Update: THQ got back to us and let us know it'll cost $7 on both XBox Live and PSN. That's 560 MS Points on Xbox.)

Kotaku's Kirk Hamilton (a.k.a. me) made an appearance yesterday on the Revision3 TV show "New Challenger," to chat with host Anthony Carboni about Saints Row: The Third. Give it a watch!

Kotaku's Kirk Hamilton (a.k.a. me) made an appearance yesterday on the Revision3 TV show "New Challenger," to chat with host Anthony Carboni about Saints Row: The Third. Give it a watch!

Kanye West's "Power" plays a central, recurring role in Volition's new open-world crime game Saints Row: The Third. The tune has been featured in the game's exhaustive promotional materials, plays regularly on its in-game radio stations, and makes bookending appearances in the single-player campaign. Considering the song's lyrics and the man who wrote them, Volition couldn't have chosen a more appropriate theme song.

No one man should have all that power
The clock's tickin' I just count the hours
Stop trippin' I'm tripping off the powder
Till then, fuck that, the world's ours

Is there a bigger egomaniac in the world than Kanye West? He is practically the embodiment of our cultural obsession with VIP-status, our fantasies of strength and chaotic destruction, of swaggering rage against a fucked-up world that just so happens to revolve entirely around us. And so Saints Row: The Third is a celebration of the player's ego and of his or her power—it's a joyous, wholehearted embrace of the "you" as it applies to video games. Who is the most important person in the world? You are! Who gets all the toys? You do! Indulge yourself, this game tells us. Stop tripping. The world's ours.

In Saints Row: The Third, players assume the role of the boss of the Third Street Saints, a notorious purple-clad gang of (surprisingly likable) psychopathic killers. The few surviving members of the Saints have blasted through two games and a sizable body count to arrive at the start of the third game, where they must relocate from the almost ironically generic city of Stillwater to the equally generic city of Steelport and claw to the top of yet another criminal empire.

By the time Saints Row: The Third's story begins, the Saints are no longer mere gangsters. They are super-criminal masterminds, amoral, invincible, and essentially unstoppable. This progression towards supervillain status has been happening for a while: Saints Row told an enjoyably soapy but grounded gangster tale, and Saints Row 2 upped the ante in terms of over-the-top antics. This was mainly in an effort to set itself apart from the juggernaut whose template it had stolen, Grand Theft Auto, and to a large extent it worked. Saints Row: The Third, then, is in many ways a full realization of the template set forth in Saints Row 2, often for the better and occasionally for the worse.

The narrative setup is as follows: The Saints have become the biggest celebrities in the world, with energy drinks and reality shows to their names. In other words, they've cashed in and have sucked up as much modern-day ego-fuel as any human being could. But they haven't exactly gone soft—the opening mission has them robbing a bank by attaching guywires to the ceiling of the a room-sized vault before explosively separating it from the building and flying away with the entire thing dangling beneath a helicopter. Skydiving gunfights follow shortly afterwards.

As for your character, he or she is whatever you want him or her to be. At the start of the game, players can choose a character of any ethnicity, sex, size, or shape, and even customize their character's voice from a list of seven options—three male, three female, and one Zombie. (Here's a video I put up earlier this week detailing the character customization options). Want to play as an overweight Asian man with a lady's voice? Go for it. Want to be an iridescent purple goth chick with a giant tiger tattoo on her face? Make it happen.

I remain impressed by how generous a game Saints Row: The Third is. Each of the seven voices (even the grunts of the Zombie) are usable throughout the story missions, which means that every line of the protagonists' dialogue has been recorded seven times. That's a hell of a lot of voice recording! I played as a bald dude with a rough British accent (voiced expertly by Mr. Travis Touchdown himself, Robin Atkin Downes), but I could have just as easily played as a haughty Eastern European dominatrix-type, a valley girl, or a grunting member of the undead (voiced, incidentally, by the one and only Steve Blum).

And it's not just the characters—damn near everything in the game can be customized. Cars have an exhaustive number of appearance and performance options, gang members can be dressed however you please, and for a relative pittance you can even take your character to "Image by Design," the Steelport plastic surgeon, and completely remake him into a her (or vice versa).

Saints Row: The Third's generosity extends past its customization options and into its writing. Throughout the story but particularly during the first two thirds, it seems lead writer Steve Jaros and his writing team will do anything to entertain. Time and again the story tops itself until you don't think it can get any more delightfully absurd… and then it does. I laughed more and harder playing this game than I have playing anything this year except for Portal 2.

There are very few "routine" open-world crime missions in Saints Row: The Third, and as a result the game largely avoids the sense of been-there-done-that that can creep up in GTA-style games. After two Saints Row games and years of GTA iterations, it's impressive that people can still come up with interesting things to do within the mostly unchanged parameters of the template set forth ten years ago in Grand Theft Auto III. And yet Jaros and his writers do so with impressive regularity.

The game's writing also thrives in smaller, tossed-off moments. There are references strewn throughout the game like so much confetti—for example, there is a grenade launcher called a "GLG20" (a reference which, it must be said, the TV show "Chuck" got to first) as well as a motorcycle named the "Kaneda." The throwaway banter between characters is genuinely funny, particularly in how deadpan the Saints are about the ridiculousness of their antics.

"Let's clear them out quickly and quietly!" instructs your character.

"Quietly?" asks a sidekick with great skepticism, no doubt thinking back to that last mission flying a VTOL in which half the city was razed.

"Quiet…ish?" the boss responds, just before opening fire with a bazooka.

Occasionally the jokes lean a bit too hard on current memes and slang, and it all can wind up feeling a bit on-the-nose. And despite the inclusiveness inherent to its deep respect for player customization (would you like your gang leader to be a hispanic woman? How about an elderly black man? Sure!), Saints Row: The Third frequently errs into bad taste in how it deals with female characters. Yes, scantily clad women get blown away in this game as often as big buff men do. Yes, there is a horde mode in the menu called "Whored Mode" in which players fight off increasingly difficult waves of attacking sex workers. (Though I should say that many of the "whores" are men, or S&M slaves, or any of a number of other types of oddity.)

But as easy as it would be to get het up about the fact that the game's female NPCs are all either prostitutes or have prostitutional tendencies, I felt like it managed to get away with much of its more outrageous content with pure guile and ridiculousness. I'm not sure why I wasn't more offended by Saints Row: The Third's offensive content (surely it has something to do with the fact that I am a straight white dude), but I wasn't.

Those shortcomings notwithstanding, I was impressed with the script. The writing in the first two Saints Row games was good (and underrated, I've always thought) but in Saints Row: The Third, Volition's pen-pushers have truly come into their own.

While the main story missions provide the most memorable and watercooler-worthy bits of the game, there is much more to Saints Row: The Third. The Saints Row series has set itself apart from Grand Theft Auto not only in tone and ridiculousness, but in its focus on sidequests called "Diversions," which allow players to rack up respect and cash while taking over the map one district at a time. These diversions take a backseat compared to Saints Row 2, mainly in that it is no longer necessary to amass respect to unlock story missions. It's a welcome change, and a further example of how the game puts the player's experience above all else.

As enjoyable as some of the diversions are, many are returning from past games, and it's probably for the best that they're not as directly tied to the story as they once were. Also, whither the sewage-spraying, Volition? What have you done with my favorite diversion from Saints Row 2? Blowing up vehicles in a radioactive four-wheeler is good fun, but nothing could top SR2's fecal-blasting property damage minigame, which is curiously absent from the new game. Alas.

But enough poop, let's talk cake. There is so much delicious frosting slathered on Saints Row: The Third that at times I found it hard to refocus my tastebuds on the game at its core. Which is fine, okay, frosting is delicious! A game can be all frosting. But as Saints Row ramps up in intensity towards the end, the weaker aspects of its design become increasingly unflattering. The missions mostly just pit players against a small army, fighting their way from checkpoint to checkpoint around the city. And so the game must rely on its combat systems which, while enjoyable, aren't robust enough to hold the weight of the late-campaign missions.

There was a moment in the game—right around the two-thirds mark—when I realized that a lot of the combat wasn't actually that fun. It's surprising how little that effects my enjoyment the majority of the game, since around 90% of the missions are of the "Go here shoot guys" variety, but as the encounters get bigger and bigger, this shortcoming sticks out more and more.

The weapons aren't a problem, but the enemies are. Guns and bombs are fun to use, and GTA could learn a thing or two from Saints Row's wonderful weapon-wheel and free-aiming. But the enemies are spammy and occasionally infuriating, pouring towards your location in ceaseless, often overwhelming waves.

Somewhere along the line, the game's difficulty spun out of whack—there are always a few too many enemies attacking at once, they all have a bit too much health, and they're entirely too accurate. To balance things out, Volition seems to have made your character exceptionally, almost comically resilient. My cockney Guy Ritchie thug could absorb ten times his body weight in lead—and in a particularly forgiving touch, the final 5% of the player's health drains much slower than the first 95% did, which allows for many a down-to-the-wire escape.

The end result of all this hitpoint-juicing is that combat feels not so much overstuffed as overinflated. Most battles devolve into frantic sprint and spray-fests, with scads of regular soldiers pegging you with mosquito-powered bullets, huge breserker enemies relentlessly chasing you and throwing you around, flying helicopters and VTOLs blasting you from above, snipers taking potshots from rooftops, rockets flying in from tanks and helicopters, and fast-moving, teleporting enemies knocking you in the face with tech-hammers.

It feels jammed up and confusing, and the final 20% of the story is a real slog. And perhaps most frustrating of all, any time an explosion or large impact hits the player, their character goes limp and flails around before finally climbing back to his feet. At several points during the campaign I bumped the difficulty down to "Casual" after repeated, cheap deaths made me wonder if I would even be able to finish.

I hereby propose a moratorium on impact animations that steal control from the player in the middle of a firefight. And while we're placing moratoriums, let's also put one on party members who get downed in combat and require rescuing, but whose death results in a "mission failed" screen. Just by removing those two things, Saints Row: The Third's combat could have been a great deal more enjoyable.

The game finally truly overextends itself when zombies enter the picture. Saints Row 2 players will remember the goofy "Zombie Uprising" video game that could be played in-game and put players up against increasingly difficult hordes of zombies. Something similar happens in Saints Row: The Third, and hoo boy, is it a mess. It starts with a funny idea—where did these zombies come from?—but quickly turns into a profoundly frustrating mission. In it, you must knock containers out into the sea as hordes of identikit zombies charge you. In order to move the containers, you must switch to a melee weapon… that is terrible at killing zombies. If the undead touch you while you're aiming, you stumble and lose control, unable to shoot or switch weapons for a few seconds. This setup often results in you arriving at a container, switching to the container-mover, and then getting mobbed by zombies and being unable to switch to a weapon that will let you fight back.

On top of this, the zombies are often on fire, and they run as fast as your character is able to sprint. If a flaming zombie touches you, you are engulfed in fire and lose control for a good ten seconds as your character flails around onscreen, still unable to switch to a goddam usable weapon. Does this sound like a mess yet? Because boy, is it ever one.

I go into such detail because this mission is illustrative of the sometimes-slight, sometimes-large disconnect between Saints Row: The Third's hilarious bright ideas and its often-frustrating execution. "Sudden zombie outbreak!" sounds like just the kind of goofy shenanigan that the story has been getting away with up to this point, but the abject failure of the mission to be any kind of fun prompts a reexamination of what, exactly, is so fun about Saints Row: The Third in the first place.

Those zombie missions, as well as many of the late-game missions, would no doubt be much more managable alongside a friend. And here, another one of Saints Row: The Third's remarkable bits of generosity—the entire campaign, from start to finish, is playable in co-op via Xbox Live or System Link. I didn't have much of a chance to try it out, but it works well and allows for seamless drop-in/drop-out, and it's not hard to imagine how fun it would be to play through the entire game with a friend. Better, both players progress through the story on their own and earn respect and money in their own single-player game. It's a strong continuation of one of Saints Row's coolest features, though at times it feels like the missions are designed to be handled by two players instead of one. (And no, the generally useless teammate AI does not count as "additional people.")

In Malcolm Gladwell's 2005 book "Blink," he discusses snap-decision making as it related to the the Coke/Pepsi rivalry of the 1980's. In Pepsi-sponsored "sip-tests," people were given a sip of Pepsi and a sip of Coke and asked which they preferred. Pepsi won by a landslide, and so for a brief time Pepsi stated that their cola was objectively the better-tasting option. But as Gladwell reveals, the sip-test results were only half the story—when testers were given an entire can of each cola type, a majority actually preferred Coke. Pepsi's enhanced sweetness gave it the edge in taste-test, but Coke's richer flavor won people over long-term.

In much the same way, 2008's Saints Row 2 was very much the oversweetened Pepsi to Grand Theft Auto IV's richer Coke. While Saints Row 2 was at times an explosively fun game, it lacked the depth and flavor that made GTA IV such an achievement.

In this regard, Saints Row: The Third is a significant step up for the franchise. It has all the flavor of a supercharged Pepsi, but it's also got a lot more Coke to it than its predecessors. This is a good thing, and a sign that for all the willful dumbness of the characters and the story, the people making this game are both smart and truly dedicated to making each of their games better than the last one.

It is difficult not to be won over by Saints Row: The Third's sheer joie de vivre. This game is in love with its own madness, and it was clearly crafted with a lot of heart. Yes, there are some significant tonal problems. Yes, combat is flawed and the story runs out of gas in the final third. But in so many ways, Volition puts the player's comfort and enjoyment above all else, and in doing so their game becomes an unparalleled indulgence, the current pinnacle of the "you"-oriented video game.

No one man should have all that power? Fuck that, says Volition. The world's yours.

This week, I've been sharing a few short videos to give a sense of what Saints Row: The Third is all about. We've seen a chaotic way to start your day, how to customize your radio stations, and how fun the character creator is, especially with The Zombie Option. For the last video of the week, I wanted to show something a little different.

Fair warning—this is something that happens unexpectedly midway through the game's story, and it is fun to experience it without knowing about it firsthand. That said, there are so many funny surprises and one-off gags in Saints Row: The Third that seeing this one ahead of time won't ruin too much. But I'll discuss it a little bit here, so if you'd like to remain completely unspoiled, read no further.

Yep, Saints Row: The Third becomes the latest game to insert a text adventure into the works. It's a little bit like what Nier did (though shorter and played for laughs), and similar to Black Ops' Zork easter-egg. But it's original content, and much more of a joke than a real bit of gameplay. And of course, it's all done with Saints Row: The Third's signature stupid-yet-funny style.

Right there in the middle of an (admittedly weird, even for SR3) gunfight, the player gets sucked straight into a text-adventure game, which they have to "beat" before they can proceed. The joke works on a few levels, partly due to the utterly arbitrary nature of the game's difficulty, and partly due to your own character's increasing anger at those design decisions. Also, the game-in-a-game is called Dragons and Tears: Part 1 of The Spiraling Darkness Trilogy. Which, ha.

This sort of bizarre one-off is the kind of thing that Saints Row: The Third does with impressive regularity. (In fact, I'm not so sure about that headline, now that I think about it—there are plenty of gags in the game that are much more out-there than a text adventure.) I'd love to hear what this part sounds like with the other voices… how exactly would a zombie angrily ask, "Then why even mention the bloody hole?"

Woah. That line reads differently out of context.

This week, I've been sharing some videos of Volition's new (tremendously fun) open-world crime game Saints Row: The Third. On Monday, we saw how I start each day in Steelport, and yesterday I showed a cool refinement of its custom radio stations.

That second video was fairly low-key, so today I thought I'd delve a bit deeper into the customization in this game. Saints Row: The Third's character creator is nothing if not far-reaching, with options for all manner of race, size, shape, crazy skin color, and even voice. What's nice about it is that it isn't all faders and sliders—it's much more concerned with the more outsized aspects of your character. The voices are remarkable—I tend to favor the british dude, and the voice actor really brings it. The other voices sound good too, and it's still a bit staggering that also… the zombie option, which I get into towards the end of the video.

So, take a look—this gives another taste of the game's deep customizability, as well as its general tone of generosity to the player and goofiness. If you ever wanted to play an open-world game as a naked elderly zombie who speaks only in gutteral grunts and screeches, well… your game has arrived.

Sony has announced that new purchasers of the PS3 version of Saints Row: The Third (or anyone with an online pass) will get a free digital copy of Saints Row 2 and all of its DLC. The offer will last for 90 days, or until February 13, 2012.

Yesterday, I showed you a video of how I begin my day in Saints Row: The Third. I said it was emblematic of the game—one sequence that sums up the total experience. Saints Row: The Third is full of such moments. Many of them involve skydiving, or tigers.

Today's video is more low-key, but it showcases one of my favorite features in Saints Row: The Third. The team at Volition has never quite had Rockstar's ability to assemble radio station playlists—the music in the game is hit-and-miss for me. Some of the tracks are great, but others are boring or even just plain bad.

But in the spirit of Saints Row's love of customization, players can put together their own "mixtape" playlist of any of the songs from any of the radio channels. While the original Saints Row allowed players to make a radio channel of ripped MP3s, the ability to remix the in-game radio stations is almost cooler, to me, particularly because it's so easy to use. It lets me stay in the game's "world" while also getting to listen to my favorite tracks.

Better, the ability to browse and listen to all of the tracks in-game is huge for me. I can't tell you how many tunes from Grand Theft Auto IV I can sing for memory without being able to tell you the name of the artist or album. I can only hope that this feature will be emulated in future open-world games. (Yes, a similar feature was available in Saints Row 2, but you had to go to the record store and actually buy the tracks you wanted. In the new game, it's all unlocked and right there on your phone—it makes a big difference in how usable it is.)

I'll have more Saints Row moments to share as the week goes on.

Aah, morning. Such a lovely time of day, when the world feels new and possibilities are endless. I usually start the day by having some coffee and reading the news. That's how I start my day in real life, anyway. In Saints Row: The Third, I tend to start things with a little bit more… immediacy.

As I have already said, I think that Saints Row: The Third is a riot of a good time. I'll be doing a full review of the game later this week, but for now I wanted to share some videos to show you guys what this game is all about.

Many games contain what I've started thinking of as "encapsulating moments," in that they're a single moment, sequence, or level that pretty much sums up the game in its entirety. Hanging from a gargoyle in Arkham City? Encapsulating moment. The train sequence in Uncharted 2? Encapsulating moment. The feeling of relief when you take the Duke Nukem Forever disc out of your console? Encapsu... okay, you get the idea.

Saints Row: The Third is pretty much a game made of encapsulating moments. The one in this video is perhaps the most encapsulating of them all, in that it's how I start each day in Steelport. (I should note that there is a fair amount of screen tearing in the video, and while tearing definitely exists in Saints Row 3, it's not usually so noticeable. I suspect something is up with my video capture cable.)

Aah, smell that morning air! Take in that scenic view! Okay, let's base-jump into a sprinting old-guy suplex and then go destroy some things.

Here comes Saints Row the Third, walking down the street without a care in the world, waving its giant purple schlong about for the whole wide world to see. Why is it in such a good mood? Perhaps the assembled game reviewers have the answer.

Okay folks, it's getting old now. As Kotaku's resident Frankenreview crafter, I'm responsible for building all of these charts, making sure they're eye-catching without being too garish, and that they maintain a certain design symmetry. All of these perfect 100 scores are ruining that. Batman: Arkham City, Battlefield 3, Super Mario 3D Land, Skyrim, Uncharted 3, Skyward Sword; it's a cavalcade of perfection, and it's getting on my nerves. I figured I was safe with Saints Row: The Third. We suggested you buy it, sure, but it's a game marketed with sex toys. Surely it won't get a perfect score anywhere.

*eyes the chart and sighs* Oh just go read your damn Frankenreview.

One of its most compelling aspects was the playable role of an irredeemable villain whose sociopathic treatment of others made for a truly vile character. A real scumbag, yet one that we couldn't help rooting for due to the sheer magnificence of his or her bloodthirsty antics. It was a game about being evil, and not in the pussyfooted way that other games present playable villainy. It was pure, malevolent, all-encompassing turpitude, and it was spitefully good fun.

Saints Row: The Third aims to top the outrageous behavior of the last game, and it certainly manages that in several ways. In a few others, however, it seems to have taken a drastic step back.

GameTrailers
The Third Street Saints are sitting on top of the world, with lucrative licensing deals, major motion pictures, and a very active finger in the crime pie in the city of Stilwater. Since there's little conflict in being number one, a shadowy syndicate moves in and kicks the Saints down the social, economic, and criminal ladder. That's the gist, and it follows an outline not unlike earlier games in the series, getting exponentially more absurd by way of hulking clones, Belgian bankers, and rival gangs that are also populated by walking stereotypes. The story doesn't pretend to aspire toward realism, with humor trumping structure, lessening the effectiveness of plot curveballs.

BSDM clubs that give way to auto-tuned pimps in pony suits set the level of narrative and trots on out from there. Offensive jokes, flashes of skin, and pretty much anything crude and rude run the show. Its cheap jokes get cheap laughs, and while there's nothing wrong with Saints Row not taking itself seriously, the game is also constantly stroking its own ego, combining pride and profanity, resulting in an obnoxious bit of mediocrity.

GamePro
It all begins with the character creation tool. I don't think it should be understated how awesomely democratic this feature is; you can be anyone, and I mean anyone, you want to be. The fact that your character talks and engages in cut-scenes makes each player's experience unique, and almost gives you the impression that you're taking part in the game's design. That's a pretty cool concept that was satisfying to see in action, especially as the story continued on. It was for me, at least.

The evolution of the character you play as — "The Protagonist," as he or she is referred to — doesn't end there. Saints Row: The Third is practically a role-playing game with all the ways you can enhance your character through personal upgrades, not to mention the system for upgrading your weapons and cars. As much as the open world contributes to the variety you'll experience in the gameplay, the customization options are another layer that enriches the entire experience.

Game Informer
When you're not taking part in one of the ambitious story missions, the series' trademark activities are scattered all over town. New distractions involve keeping a tiger satisfied while it sits in your passenger seat, riding a cyber bike through a computerized world, sniping enemies while rappelling down the side of a building, and participating in a televised deathmatch that feels like a cross between The Running Man and a Japanese game show. While most of the distractions are fun, some tedious activities like Trafficking, Snatch, and Escort make their return instead of more entertaining alternatives from Saints Row 2. That game's Fuzz, Septic Avenger, Fight Club, Demolition Derby, and Crowd Control activities seem like a natural fit for this sequel, but they're surprisingly absent.

Regardless of a few omitted favorites, Saints Row: The Third features no shortage of activities, side-quests, collectibles, and humorous distractions. Between them, the wealth of new upgrade options, co-op play, Whored mode (a Horde mode clone), and the explosive story missions, there's no shortage of content. It's also good to see Volition continue to make the series less buggy with each installment. Occasional glitches will rear their head as you cruise around the new city, but they're rarely more than cosmetic. Taking over Steelport as the 3rd Street Saints feels like a more focused effort than its predecessors' campaigns, and it'll keep you laughing throughout.

The Gamer's Temple
As you play the game you'll have to face more than your share of gun battles with police, rival gangs, and even the military. The gun battles are fun, not just because of the variety of weapons and explosives at your disposal, but also because the controls don't get in your way. The controls are tight and responsive, and you'll be able to take on hordes of enemies without taking on the controls as well. If a battle has you overmatched, you can call for backup from either random flunkies from The Saints' rank and file or from some of the NPCs you've forged alliances with. The NPCs each have their own special skill, so calling in the right person to back you up in a pinch can make your job easier for you. The AI of your allies is pretty good and they're there for more than show, doing their fair share of the work in taking out the enemies. The enemy AI isn't quite as good - their attacks tend to fall into patterns that you quickly learn to recognize and it's pretty easy to flank and take out an enemy hiding behind cover. Most of the challenge you'll face will come from the sheer number of enemies the game can throw at you at once. This can sometimes be frustrating as a near endless stream of enemy reinforcements can come streaming at you until you're overwhelmed. Luckily, death just means a trip to the hospital and some medical fees conveniently deducted from your bank account.

Games Radar
Saints Row has always been seen as something of an also-ran, but The Third finally says, in no uncertain terms, that it's just as big and even more fun than its more serious competition. Some might be tempted to dismiss the game because of its extreme wackiness, but know that at its core, the game is incredibly well crafted and ceaselessly fun. While the comedies typically lose out to the dramas come awards time, none of it changes the fact that Saints Row: The Third is one of the best games of the year, and given this year's competition, that's no small compliment.

Did the gang just jump from Third Street to Main Street?