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A little determination or stubbornness can go a long way to completing your desired goal. It’s the final day of June and with it comes my video game challenge progress report for the month. The results of my challenge has been both surprising and mostly satisfying. It’s also different from the past few challenges I have implemented on myself.

As you know, this month’s challenge is what I like to call the redux edition. I decided to go back and tackle the last few game challenges I failed to complete and see if I would have any success the second time around. Having a marathon game session for Saints Row 2 in an attempt to finish what I’ve started has been a roller coaster of fun and frustration. I tackled any missions I had left to finish, which wasn’t really a ton when you think about it.

In this game, the Saints are tasked to take over the entirety of the city of Stilwater by taking out key gangs one territory at a time: The Sons of Samedi, The Brotherhood, and The Ronin. When I picked up the game again, I was steadily finishing up missions I had leftover for the Brotherhood gang and then begin the ones for the Ronin gang.

Some missions were harder than others. The ones I had the most difficulty with always involved me having to drive a vehicle to take down gang members or their leaders, an annoyance I expressed recently in a Geek Force Network post I did. This required a lot of patience and diligently starting the mission again, either from the beginning or from its checkpoint. Eventually, I was able to get past certain hurdles to complete one mission and move onto the next. The missions I definitely did best at were the ones where I had to shoot certain targets at different locations. I also personally like shooting things up anyway.

Progressing through the game and watching my map become a lovely shade of purple after I kicked each gang to the curb was exciting. Playing this game after having completed Saints Row: The Third first has allowed me to see the differences between each installment and how the series has transformed itself. Saints Row 2 has a measure of absurdity to it like the games always had, but there’s more of a seriousness and story to this game compared to Saints Row: The Third.

Playing Saints Row: The Third is good fun, but definitely a game that’s hard to take seriously. It seems like the third game forsakes story just so the developers can focus more on how they can make the game as crazy and outrageous as they possibly can, a sentiment some gamers have expressed when they played the game. In my opinion, I did like how the second game has more of a purpose and reason why the Saints were doing what they were doing. Boundaries have been crossed and in some cases taking out a gang is personal. The third game is more about hijinks and laughs, which isn’t such a bad thing, but a little focus in the game is nice to have.

You’re probably curious what the verdict is in terms of me completing the game or not, and you may have noticed I said this month’s challenge is both surprising and mostly satisfying. The answer is––I mostly satisfied my month’s challenge and there has been a hiccup in one of the missions I didn’t think I’d have problems with. The game is sort of 100% complete from a story mission standpoint. By the time I took out all the gangs in the game, there was still the game’s epilogue missions to do, which the Saints final and biggest take down was the corporation Ultor.

The end was in sight and I was eager to get there. I got pretty far too, except the one thing keeping me from saying without a shadow of a doubt that I’m totally done with this game is the epilogue’s final mission…And A Better Life. It’s literally THE final mission of the game and it’s surprisingly hard to complete. I got halfway through the mission without any problems, but my weakest link was the one thing I didn’t expect––I had to drive a helicopter to shoot down some power stations. It’s extremely difficult to keep the aircraft airborne and to avoid an Ultor helicopter sent in to shoot down your aircraft at the same time. I spent many hours retrying this mission and I either lost control of the helicopter or the Ultor helicopter blew me up. It got to the point where I was raging pretty badly. Needless to say, this final mission remains unfinished until I can come back to it with a level head. Or enlist a friend who played and beat the game to help me finish it once and for all.

The important thing is I did finally finish this game to the best of my ability. It was a fun experience, but definitely not a simple task to take on. I still feel a sense of accomplishment in having gotten through this game and not giving up after failing a bunch of missions numerous times. I did succeed eventually and I’m confident I’ll succeed in completing that final mission. Maybe not today. Check back next week when I reveal my game challenge for July!