Rockstar has a few things to learn about "their" genre.

Because Saints Row 2 is, in every important way, vastly superior to GTA 4. Let me first admit that I was on the anti-Saints Row bandwagon. I never played the original, and from a few early screenshots, I thought the sequel looked like shit. This just goes to show you that a well-informed opinion can't come from stuff like that. So, at the behest of a friend, I picked up Saints Row 2, and I can now say that I enjoyed it so much more than Niko Belic's disjointed and confused adventure.

Since there are so many things this game does better, I've decided to just make a list of everything, in no particular order, and I'll elaborate on a few points later.

• Features a garage where you can store any car you want, and here's the sticker: you can dump the cars from your garage anywhere in the world, and they'll always be available for you to take out again from any owned garage in the game.
• Missions have a lot more variety. Sure, a lot of them just involve going somewhere and shooting someone, but most of the time, the story and situations the game puts you in make them far more interesting.
• Once you complete certain activities, infinite ammo is unlocked for specific sets of guns. This makes everything a lot more fun, and the game doesn't take itself seriously enough to warrant any gripes about it ruining the realism or any such nonsense.
• The entire game - missions, activities, diversions, everything - can be played co-op. Obvious plus. Roughly half of my overall playtime was with a friend.
• Vehicles are fully customizable. You can upgrade them with nitrous, improved tires and overall durability, etc. It makes the garage feature that much more awesome when you know you have a pimped-out, bad ass ride waiting for you wherever you want it.
• Almost everything you accomplish in the game has a tangible gameplay reward attached to it. Finishing certain activities, for example, will give you the ability to have more homies ride with you while on missions, or increase your health or stamina. Basically, you're working towards a goal even when you're lighting people on fire with a friend.
• Fully customizable avatar. Once again, the game lets you decide how you want your game to look. Your character can be male or female, and the range of options available for changing their appearance is pretty great. If you want to have a 19-year-old skinny chick that sounds like a 50-year-old guy working in a mine, go right ahead.
• The story is flat-out better and more entertaining. I'll go into more detail below.
• You can actually, for the most part, accomplish missions and objectives the way you want to. One big problem I had with GTA 4 was the fact that Rockstar had a specific vision for how a lot of the missions played out, and if you deviated from the way they wanted them to, it was game over. In Saints Row 2, if you want to jack someone's car to chase the guys on motorcycles that you're after, you're free to do so. You don't have to take the vehicle they provide you with.
  
• Humor. it ties in with the story, which again, I'll go into further down. But it's a lot funnier than you'd think.
• Cribs. For whatever reason, GTA 4 didn't want to let you feel like you owned the city. Saints Row 2 does. There are about a dozen houses for you to buy, and you can - yet again - upgrade them and pimp them out.
• You can replay any story-related mission in the game as many times as you want. Durh, that's awesome. The same goes for all the activities as well.
• One of the perks of co-op is that if you die, your friend has 15 seconds (on hardcore difficulty) to revive you. Extremely welcome, especially when you have a five-star wanted level.
• You can carry way more weapons on your person at all times, including an SMG, rocket launcher, shotgun, dual pistols, samurai sword and satchel charges.

All of those examples are off the top of my head, so there's probably other stuff that I forgot to mention. Of course, the game isn't perfect, and Rockstar probably has more money and staff to polish their games a bit more than Volition does. Graphically, GTA 4 is superior, but it really doesn't matter. Saints Row 2 looks just fine. On the other hand, the game can be a little buggy at times, and clipping is a common occurence. But again, it doesn't hamper the fun in any meaningful way.

That's the thing about this game - I had way more fun with it than I ever thought I would. Even before I played Saints Row 2, I was disappointed with GTA 4 in a lot of big ways. After playing it, my disappointments with GTA 4 stand out even more, in stark contrast to what Volition has accomplished. I think sometimes Rockstar is more concerned with being "mature" and controversial than they are with making a cohesive story. With GTA 4, they set out to tell a tale of sin and redemption, but ended up with a pile of shit. Niko's motivations were explained as being forced into violence by outside forces, when all he wants is to lead a better life. Fair enough. But his actions showed a totally different person. He doesn't want to kill people anymore, yet if you were to flash a twenty in his direction, he'd probably shoot everyone in the room and snatch it from your cold, lifeless hand. The whole thing doesn't make a damn bit of sense in that regard, and I just got turned off about half-way through the game. Not to mention the fact that you commit countless random acts of violence and murder while you're driving around aimlessly, but that's more of an inherent problem with trying to tell any kind of realistic story when the player is allowed to do whatever they want.

Saints Row 2 isn't trying to tell a realistic story at all. It's instantly recognized as ridiculous and over-the-top, and that's exactly what I liked about it. In a game where I can use rocket launchers to blow up helicopters while someone is driving me around, I expect to see the same shit happen in the cutscenes, and it delivers just that. A lot of crazy shit happens in the story, in fact, and I found myself laughing out loud at the insane stunts the main character pulls off. Speaking of cutscenes, they were suprisingly well-directed. A lot of them had a great kind of movie quality to them, and it was nice to see Volition take the time to make such a non-serious story at least look awesome. Overall, the story is really just the standard get out of jail, start up your gang again kind of thing, but it works because there are no pretenses of being gritty or serious. Make no mistake, there are a lot of fucked up things that happen, and I would say it's on the same level of hardcore that GTA 4 was on, but the big difference is the non-contradictory way it all played out.

Look, if you were left wanting after you finished GTA 4, then this is a no-brainer. Get this game, you'll love it. If you can get someone else to play it with you - holy shit - the satisfaction is increased by a factor of about a billion. Rockstar should look at this game and weep in their feathery-soft pillows.