This kind of marketing has been around forever. Pepsi ragged on Coke for a few summers back in the days. Sega had an array of commercials that directly mocked the 8bit Nintendo system during their "next level" campaign. Nintendo fired back (i think with star fox) with "why go to the next level when you can go light years beyond" slogan. It's just part the marketing game; they are playing off of the success of GTA and it will likely bank them a few thousand extra copies sold. I think it's humorous more than pompous.

The problem with this marketing is that it doesn't succeed because it's not over the top enough.
Saints Row is in a bad place with the state of their game, and the bottomline is that they need better marketing to get a big payback from it. But unless they start doing smarter marketing, they're doomed.

I wouldn't call it any more pompous than the same sort of jabs that the GTA series takes at numerous other games. It comes across, for the most part, as more of a light hearted "Play me too" sort of jab than a "GTA sucks".

I think it's just a matter of, "Well, our game is clearly going to sell far fewer copes and get far poorer reviews, so let's at least do SOMETHING to get noticed." It seems a lot of fans expecting more over-the-top content as seen in San Andreas took to the adds.

I thought the clip was great, all of those activities in GTA IV were worthless junk on top of too many broken, carried over systems from previous iterations of the series. Hopefully SR2 isn't as big a let down at GTA IV was.

Excellent clip indeed. Seems like THQ or whatever is a bit full of himself though.

AB
http://www.FireMe.To/udi

That was an AWESOME trailer!