Finding My Old 94% Saints Row 3 Save

Lately, I’ve wanted to play something new but familiar. And preferably with low graphics so I can play with a decent framerate. I browsed through my game library and noticed that I hadn’t played any of the Saints Row games in a while. The last time I tried anything like that, I found myself playing Agents of Mayhem, and I very much ended up giving up on it. The game just wasn’t enjoyable to me, and wasn’t really Saints-Row-y enough. I’ve had similar problems with the Saints Row games, but something drew me into reinstalling Saints Row 2 and 3. So that’s what I did.

However, I’m a lazy person, and these games don’t just work right off the bat. At least, Saints Row 2 doesn’t. I installed the game a couple of days ago, and I still haven’t gotten around to installing Gentlemen of the Row. Saints Row 2 is an old game and it’s almost unplayable on newer devices. Gentlemen of the Row is a powerful mod that fixes Saints Row 2, and was made by IdolNinja, a modder so good that he got hired by Volition, and was working on a complete Saints Row 2 makeover before he passed away. Unfortunately, we’ll probably never see the remaster, mainly because Volition is now kinda dead.

Anyway, I decided to play Saints Row 3 instead. Mostly because I don’t need to mod it to make it work. The last time I played Saints Row 3, I did experiment with mods a little, but I didn’t try anything too complex. There’s a Gentlemen of the Row mod for Saints Row 3 as well but I never really tried it.

What was bothering me more though was the fact that I had various saves on Saints Row 3, and I never backed them up anywhere. One of my saves was at 94% completion, with almost everything unlocked. As much as I like Saints Row 3, I’ve already played through the main campaign a couple of times, and I wasn’t really in the mood to unlock everything again. Either way, I booted up the game, expecting to start from scratch. Amazingly, all my saves were still there. Including my 94% completion save. Somehow, my saves had been, uh, saved to the Steam Cloud at some point, and Steam had just downloaded them all again after I reinstalled the game.

This was great. I immediately celebrated by loading my save and seeing what I needed to do to get 100% completion. Unfortunately, the answer wasn’t as great. I needed to do three Trailblazer missions, a Genki mission, a Snatch mission and an Insurance Fraud mission. While the Insurance Fraud mission wasn’t too bad (it mostly relies on luck though, because you need a good amount of traffic to throw yourself into), the other missions all sucked. So I decided not to try and do them. Instead, I decided to just go on a rampage.

The rampage was a lot of fun. I had managed to upgrade most of my guns to have infinite ammo, but I did realize that there were a lot of areas with no gangs at all, because I controlled 92% of Steelport. Those areas with missions I hadn’t completed turned out to be somewhat useful, since they did still spawn gangs. I ended up spending an hour blowing up both Luchadors and the local police, to the point that they were sending tanks and helicopters. There were a handful of friendly fire incidents, mostly because allied AI is godawful, and that’s the main reason I haven’t done that last Snatch mission.

Still, I had a lot of fun playing in my mostly completed game, and maybe I’ll go back to finish those last few missions. Now I have to get Saints Row 2 working, the superior Saints Row game…