Insurance Fraud was arguably the best activity to come out of the Saints Row series—what that says about me, I don’t know—but I never considered what would happen if the NPCs were scamming you. Now you can find out, as Blurbs' latest 'modsperiment' answers the call with floppy NPCs, paperwork, and courtroom intrigue.
Blurbs is a modder and Twitch streamer that’s notorious for tapping into the unhinged hivemind of his viewers: utilising a combination of custom code and Twitch chat to bring to life cursed, user-generated scenarios. Since his inaugural Skyrim experiment—in which chat messages became voice lines for various NPCs—he’s created Mortal Kombat in Red Dead Redemption 2 (challenges ranging from Arthur fighting a deer, to a showdown with Dutch) and has recently turned his attention to modders' paradise GTA 5. Alas, Blurbs doesn't release his mods, so you'll have to make do with watching them on video instead.
Getting the NPCs to commit insurance fraud was easy in Los Santos. Pedestrians turn on Blurbs in hot pursuit, a Dawn of the Dead-style army chasing him down the road and ragdolling wildly at his vehicle. Even a bird tried to cash in, dive bombing and hitting the road mere inches from the car—presumably, perishing instead.
Teleporting to court after the incident was more challenging. To create the courtroom, Blurbs used Jay17’s Courthouse [early access] as a base for his own code and, once again, invoked the power of Twitch chat voice lines. The idea was to create a "fully dynamic trial" with an incident report and a full cast of characters: a judge, jury, and prosecutor scripted by Twitch chat. It became the stage for courtroom drama far more chaotic than that time Phoenix Wright cross-examined a parrot in Ace Attorney.
One of the first incident reports was filed as "shag, marry, avoid: Trevor Phillips, Arthur Morgan, Lester C", and from there the cacophony of voices in the room became about as clear as a gaggle of geese. A shark was a member of the jury, but it wasn’t doing too well making a convincing argument while upside down. The judge yelled "objection!", instead of the prosecutor, and she had the hots for "Marky Plopper" who pleaded innocent on the basis of being "a streamer". Hmmm.
Blurbs somehow managed to play a story mission with the mod running, but by this point the judge had had enough: "You know what, I don’t have time for this. Smash Bros Melee. Final Destination. No Falco. Six docks. 5 Minutes." Nuff said. Personally, I’d love to see this as a fleshed-out side activity in GTA 6—combining the bonkers nature of Saints Row with the mundanity of Papers Please and Ace Attorney-style intrigue—but for now I’m content to enjoy this AliExpress style mash-up.
In a statement on Blurb’s Twitter, he’s announced he'll be turning to Arc Raiders next—which has recently surpassed Helldivers 2’s all-time peak of concurrent players—with a smart overlay which "allows chat to add custom TTS tapes to the loot table" that will "eventually have video and I’ll have to extract with them".
