Hullo! I have finished The Fires of Heaven (that’s the fifth Wheel of Time book) by the time this Note comes out, so go check out the Book Diary for the post on that.
I have also just read the library copy of Hexed for the next sporking; don’t know when that’ll go up, or if I’ll get another copy in order to do the sporking. Who knows! But that is being worked on, which is good because ImpishIdea right now is kind of… dead.
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Uncharted: The Nathan Drake Collection Talk
I wasn’t sure what to think when I got the Nathan Drake Collection for free when the Playstation Store was offering it. I didn’t know much about Uncharted other than that it was a series of action adventure games influenced by Indiana Jones-type stories about going around the world and looking for lost treasures. I knew that the first three games got a remaster and that was what I was about to play, and I knew that Nathan Drake claimed to be descended from Sir Francis Drake, despite the historical record claiming that Francis Drake never had any children (which is brought up more than once in the stories).
That’s kind of it. I didn’t know if they’d be my kind of games, but I had gotten them for free so I thought I should at least give them a try.
Good news: overall, I like them a lot. I was surprised at how much of the game is spent in combat, because while I knew there’d be shooting, I kind of assumed that the majority of it would be puzzles and racing through death traps and the like. But even though I wasn’t very good at it, I liked the combat when it worked (which was most of the time). It was a system that made sense, and when you made your way through a horde of tough enemies it felt rewarding.
I loved collecting treasure. Many times I would check out all the corners of every area looking for hidden sparkling treasure to add to the collection. If I went through any extended sequences without finding treasure I was always a bit disappointed with myself.
I also liked the puzzles for the most part. I really like that you have a diary in each game that you can consult for puzzles, and I really like that in the second and third games you can open that diary at any point and see all the notes that Nate made over the course of the journey, with fun little jokes and cool tidbits. I love that the games incorporate real world legends and history into the treasure hunts, albeit in ways that are obviously more fantastical than realistic.
They’re very good games, and they successfully give the impression of living through an adventure story. It’s a bit like playing through a cool action movie, though that’s also where the games run into problems. I had a lot less fun playing Drake’s Deception, the third game, because it felt like it was trying way too hard to be cinematic. It just kept throwing set piece after set piece, and while it was fun to watch, it wasn’t fun to play because I felt like the game wasn’t letting me breathe for longer than five minutes.
It may have been because I was playing the game on ‘Hard’--after all, if you complete the story on ‘Hard’ then you unlock the Unlimited Ammo and One-Shot Kills cheats. But even when I was sucking at Among Thieves, the second game (which I also played on ‘Hard’), I was still having fun and I wanted to revisit the game. When I finished Uncharted 3 I had very little desire to go back, even with the cheats I’d unlocked.
But I still liked the story, and I liked these characters. The games have an immensely likable cast, especially their lead. Nathan Drake isn’t the only protagonist of his kind--the adventurer who acts like an everyday guy and responds to danger with an air of something closer to casual annoyance than panic--but he is a very good example of the archetype. And it’s important when your protagonist and player character is a thief that he (or she) be likable and fun to play as, so that you don’t just throw him away as a terrible person.
And Drake… isn’t a terrible person. He’s not precisely a model of good behavior, but he makes a point to help people around him in need, and never leaves a comrade behind, even when the rest of his crew says they should. He even tries to save Eddy Raja, a man he hates, when the guy’s being dragged away by monsters.
Did I mention there are monsters? Yeah, there are monsters. I wasn’t sure if there were going to be supernatural elements in this series. I thought it was possible, considering the inspirations of the story, but I didn’t know for sure, and when it finally happened it was still pretty disconcerting, changing the combat from a cover-based shooter to something more frantic, where you’re desperately trying to not get killed by the creatures swarming at you.
I feel as if that might be a difficult thing to sell, switching to a slightly different form of gameplay suddenly, but it works because it’s not too out there (it’s not like you have to use swords instead of guns or something). And it’s not completely out of nowhere. Even if you miss the hints that there are monsters lurking in the story, there’s the creeping feeling and several indications that something isn’t right in all three games, that there is something else going on that’s beyond the scope of normal adventures.
It is a bit frustrating when we get to the second game, and several times someone says something like, “Let’s not get crazy, the supernatural isn’t real!” And, uh… like we had the whole El Dorado adventure in the previous game which seems to indicate otherwise. You were there, Sully! You saw the monsters too!
[I suppose one could argue that it isn’t actually supernatural, that we’re seeing--just something scientific that has yet to be studied or explained. But I’ll stick with the term ‘supernatural’ anyway because… well, it’s not explained.]
That’s a minor nitpick though.
I did not expect to like these games as much as I did. I don’t know if I’ll get Uncharted 4; if I find it on sale, it’s certainly possible, but as of right now I’m full of things to do. But I’m certainly glad that I got these games, and I’m even more grateful that they weren’t spoiled for me in any noticeable way. They’re hard, but they’re fun, and it’s a rewarding experience to play these games.
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