Mar 20

Mar 20 Uncharted: Drakes Fortune

The Gun Is Good

Full disclosure straight out of the bat, I worked on Uncharted, for an *entire day* back in 2007. My last day before becoming a Lead Tester at Sony. Big changes in life, 13 years ago, becoming a line manager, getting to know 7 strangers and lead them. I’m mean like, could have been a harder job to lead people through, than say, testing games… but that is the arena I made my career in, it’s all relative right?

Anyway, Uncharted & my first impressions… I thought it was pretty decent actually, one of the better games I tested at the time, but I reached say, one third of the way through the game before my shift was over and that was that. There wasn’t a strong urge to get back involved and finish it when the opportunity next became available.

A year or two later, my personal games system of choice the xbox 360 had delivered upon to me a third red ring of death. I had a weekend with nothing planned, maybe I should play something on my PS3? You see, playing stuff on xbox had that nice bit of ‘distance’ from work, different controller or whatever, achievements to be earned and what not. Another way to rationalise my chosen method of wasting time. So after work (I worked lates, so finished at midnight) I wandered into ASDA on Smithdown Road and picked up Uncharted at pretty much full price - which is a big deal for someone who has worked at Sony for so long and used to heavily discounted staff sales and the quarterly free games allocation - my previous free copy I probably sold on - again I digress.

I reached about the same point as I did during my shift of familiarity and called it. I had enough of this game. I didn’t like Drake, I didn’t like the gunplay, I found the platforming really frustrating and I just couldn’t buy into the premise. Wait, these treasure hunter groups have private armies? They have Anti Air guns now? What the fuck is going on?

***I never sussed out the hand to hand combat - even on normal this game can be pretty challenging and unforgiving***

The only other uncharted game I played was 2, reached a point in it where a bit of exposition was going down and I was feeling like “I’m starting to get into this!” Lets call it here and come back to it. I didn’t come back to it - I never was in the mood to revisit it.

Now, I’m not going to say that the game is shit and everyone is wrong. If you know me well, you probably know I like to joke about the uncharted games, “It’s just a box pushing game”, it’'s fun be contrarian sometimes. Having spoke with a few folks I think personal mood and state of mind is important when tackling an uncharted game. Some folks say they hated it the first time round, but got into it when they played it again a few years down the line. I can echo that experience, it’s been like over 10 years since I last played it, but I’ve finally finished uncharted 1. I finally was in the mood.

I didn’t hate it, sure bits are frustrating, let me tell you something; watching Drake fall to his death again and again *never* gets old. And we as a medium hadn’t figured out checkpointing during combat yet by 2007 so plenty of pain points there as well. But I didn’t love Uncharted, it’s not the right kind of brash, simple idiocy that I crave. Now I love stupid shit & Uncharted is full of it but to come back to ‘mood’ and the tone of it all - it’s just off here. If it was more like cartoony, sci-fi, hell with the amphomorphic cartoon characters I’d probably be all over this. But Schwarzenegger’s 1985’s classic “Commando” is far more believable to me than this treasure hunting world Uncharted’s Dreamworks face afflicted cast exists in and that’s a film where a man throws a steel pipe clean through another man bursting a pipe filled with super heated steam…

***The amount of barrels of explosive fuel in this game would put a small petrostate to shame***

Perhaps it is about that mood though, where you can switch of your brain and just get on with a videogame. Don’t think about where all those explosive barrels came from, enjoy a finely crafted game made by a few hundred committed, dedicated, talented people. Stop thinking and stop complaining.

That said, I love a good moan.