(C) BoingBoing
This story was originally published by BoingBoing and is unaltered.
. . . . . . . . . .



Forgotten gem Saints Row 2 finally playable on PC after 14 years [1]

['Grant St. Clair']

Date: 2025-09-12

Nowadays, Saints Row is a brand most associated with dubstep music, large purple marital aids, and abject failure. Given that the franchise has had far more bad games than good ones and is dead for the foreseeable future, it can be easy to forget that it did have its flashes of brilliance — chief among them the 2008 classic Saints Row 2. While GTA 4 went dark and gritty, Saints Row 2 went light and wacky, although nowhere near the self-parodying excesses of the series' later games. It was this divergence in tone that allowed the series to finally step out from under GTA's shadow, and more crucially, attract a large, dedicated fanbase who were turned off by GTA 4's commitment to sometimes boring realism.

Of course, it also didn't hurt that Saints Row 2 is an airtight, nearly perfect feat of game design, and easily one of the best open-world games ever in that particular aspect. Every single thing the player could possibly do out in the open world is accounted for and quantified — and encouraged, whether through accumulating "respect" points needed to play story missions or chasing upgrades locked behind these activities rather than a traditional skill tree. Want the best shotgun in the game? Sell heroin at your local airport. Want some friendly NPCs to back you up? Get arrested and tear your way through the prison's fight club. Want to sprint for longer? You'd better get out there and throw yourself in front of a moving car for the insurance payout. All of these activities, from streaking to car surfing to pretending to be a police officer and starring in a Cops ripoff, are completely organic, meaning you can do essentially whatever you can think of, and the game will meet you with a pat on the back and a point total. The all-timer licensed soundtrack is just the cherry on top.

The only snag: it has the worst PC port. Flat-out, no qualification needed: the worst PC port. Being on PC does not necessarily mean playable on PC: since the PC version's launch in 2009, it's been riddled with more bugs than the skeezy abandoned church your gang sets up in. No matter how good your setup is, you can't play the vanilla PC version of Saints Row 2 for more than a few minutes at a time without a progress-erasing crash to desktop. Forget about beating the game; you'll be lucky if you can get off the tutorial island.

Naturally, the answer lies with the modding community. Although fan efforts to fix SR2 have been going on for more than a decade, it's only within the last few months that a completely stable solution has been released to the public. It's called the Juiced patch, and the way it turns a broken mess into a smooth, bug-free experience while also punching up graphics and gameplay along the way can only be black magic.

It's easy to install, too, which is genuinely impressive for a mod of its size and scope. Just drag and drop. I can personally vouch for it turning your PC copy into the definitive version of one of the best open-world games ever, and updates are coming out every few weeks to make it even more rock-solid… and even eventually bring the game's console-only DLC to PC.

I can't recommend it enough. Play a bit of this and you'll forget all about that reboot, guaranteed.

[END]
---
[1] Url: https://boingboing.net/2025/09/12/forgotten-gem-saints-row-2-finally-playable-on-pc-after-14-years.html

Published and (C) by BoingBoing
Content appears here under this condition or license: Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 3.0.

via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds:
gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/boingboing/