Over precies vijftien dagen verschijnt Saints Row: The Third in de winkels, en zoals je de laatste weken wel gemerkt heb is het met de media van deze titel ook opeens een stuk drukker aan het worden. Maar de website Worthplaying heeft een developers interview met Danny Bilson van THQ gehad, en deze verteld ons meer over wat een hele vette fun game gaat worden.

WP: Saints Row: The Third is obviously the third entry in a successful franchise. When Saints Row debuted, people referred to it as a GTA knock-off. THQ and Volition have gone out of their way to make sure that the series had its own definition. Over the years, what did it take from the business side to really define Saints Row as its own property and get people to stop comparing it to its competitors?

DB: Well, I would say the answer would not exactly lie on the business side; it would lie on the creative side in terms of what the team has done with the game. I look at Saints Row as a send-up, a parody, a comment on all of the other big, open-world crime games that have come before. Personally, I love those games and play them top to bottom, but some of those have become very believable in their own reality - almost like the Martin Scorsese version of a game.

This one has gone much more, for me, to the underground comic book version. Everything about Saints Row is built for fun and gaming and player enjoyment, or as the executive producer would say, "It's all about going over the top." If it's over the top, it's Saints Row. In game terms, that translates to fun, and it's separated. It's almost like the other games have gone more straight cinematic, and I can't in any way criticize them. I play them all and really love them, and this one's gone really gaming, gamer, fun factor, wild, crazy and customizable.

I think that's one thing that I really love about Saints Row, that your experience is very ownable. Based on the character that you create to start with, that kind of defines the tone of the game. If you're playing it with a straight sort of, let's call it Al Pacino "Scarface" guy, it's going to feel completely different than if you have a muscle man in a dress with curlers and kabuki makeup.

The emergent humor, humor that comes out of the mechanics. The mechanics are put in the game, and what the player does with them creates memorable moments and humorous moments that are just emergent, and I think a lot of the scripted stuff is really funny as well. It is one of the funniest games ever made. At the same time, it's also epic. It's epic in scope and epic in its adventure. I think that Saints Row is Saints Row, and it's not anything else.