text by tim rogers

★★★☆

“THE BEST GAME EVER MADE ABOUT A DUDE IN A T-SHIRT AND JEANS.”

I can’t precisely say that it doesn’t make me a tiny bit uncomfortable to admit that I so totally have nothing against actual dudes starring in videogames. The hero of Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune is a Guy in a T-shirt and jeans, with gun holsters over his shoulders. He jumps and climbs and shoots guys in the face. He never expresses guilt when he kills anyone, which leads us to believe that he might actually kill people all the time, which I suppose makes me feel a tiny bit like a Barbie-owning teenage girl must feel when her first boyfriend nonchalantly mentions after her first sexual encounter that the last condoms he used weren’t quite so tight.

Nathan Drake may or may not be the distant descendant of historical legendary explorer Sir Francis Drake; the game starts with him excavating a sarcophagus from the depths of the ocean at the precise point where Sir Francis Drake was apparently buried at sea. It doesn’t entirely make sense, though it turns out that Drake had faked his own death. There’s a girl there, whose voice-actor is not a professional by any stretch (every time she says “damn” or “hell” it’s like watching a whole little girls’ soccer team spontaneously combust seconds before the final whistle), and she complains a little bit. She’s filming a documentary or something. Seconds later, there are modern-day sea pirates shooting at you, so you’re shooting at them. There are a couple of cut-scenes, each of them directed competently, gently unfolding the B-minus-movie plot, and soon you’re on an island, with a jungle, and sunlight, and textures that look vaguely delicious, as much a treat to the refined eyes of an adult with a vintage AC/DC T-shirt collection as a bowl of Froot Loops was to the tongue of a fat ten-year-old; if you have a Very Expensive Television, you may soon be tempted, as I was, to finally remove the little strips of “protective” blue Scotch tape that were stuck to the corners of the display when the deliverymen dropped it off in your living room two years ago. Minutes after this epiphany, you’ve learned to play the game, and minutes later, you’ve sunk hours into it.

I heard someone call this a “videogame mix-tape”. I guess that’s right. Though everyone and their three-year-old sister are rushing to call it “Tomb Raider with a Dude” — or even “Dude Raider” — Uncharted is distinctly post-Gears (yes, we still consider Gears the Game of the Decade). It uses the Unreal Engine, it puts level design above all else, it has intense, cover-based firefights, and, more than anything, it stays heroically focused on and convinced in its hammy plot from beginning to end. That it also includes Prince-of-Persia-like climbing and platform sequences is absolutely essential to a post-Gears game design: you have to put something on the table. (When all is said and done, the third Prince of Persia game is still the king of tricky jumping puzzles. I’d love to see those guys make a game called “The Tower of Babel”, where all you have to do is climb to the top of one enormous tower. I’m sure they could make it work.) Uncharted also adds a nifty (mostly original) semi-rhythm-based melee combat system to the mix. It makes me think, man, as soon as someone makes a Dynasty-Warriors-style battlefield brawler with awesome music and rhythm elements in the fighting, the gaming press is going to stuff aluminum bricks and spray-paint them silver.

There’s really very little Tomb Raider influence to speak of, really. If you say Tomb Raider, I only have it in me to think of the first two, which were, if nothing else, enthralling (at the right time of year / lapses in medication) in the structure of their cavernous, empty, echo-y, massively puzzle-heavy dungeons. If Tomb Raider is “Indiana Jones”, Uncharted is “Planet Terror” — every time a puzzle comes up, Drake flips open Sir Francis Drake’s old notebook, and there’s the solution. Half of me wants to groan like a man groans when his daughter announces she’s getting married to a hobo; the other half admires the gall: because you know what? If big arcane tombs housing phenomenal treasure hordes were actually real, do you seriously think that you’d be able to get to the gold just by pushing a couple of blocks and lighting a couple of hecking torches? No, of course the solution is going to be literally impossible to figure out on your own, and if Nate Drake didn’t have that little notebook (must not wonder how Sir Francis Drake was able to figure out the puzzles in the first place), we wouldn’t have a videogame. Either way, you’ve got to really question the psychology of a person who would lock up a treasure horde in some big fascinating structure. It’s unthinkable in modern times, I guess — maybe way back before YouTube and “People’s Court” and “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?” the human race was graced with a significantly higher percentage of people who wanted to bequeath their legacy to someone who was smart enough to pull only the levers with star marks on them. What kind of evil, stupid, gimp-ass sons did some of these ancient kings have, I wonder? Either way, I’ve noticed that, more often than not, the fantastic artifacts are always hidden in such impregnable fortresses or tombs because someone genuinely wanted to keep the ancient artifact out of reach of future generations because it was dangerous. Microsoft Excel didn’t exist back in the days of El Dorado, so no one was able to plan up a schedule to illustrate that destroying the dangerous artifact (or maybe just dumping it into the infinite expanse of the sea) would actually take less time than enslaving a couple thousand heretics and forcing them at spear-point to build an elaborate temple dungeon.

I can forgive any loop holes in the plot because I loved Indiana Jones as a kid, even though my brother insisted that he was going to grow up to be Indiana Jones, so I had to settle for James Bond, which was, believe it or not, the short end of the stick (it’d take a PhD thesis to explain why). My brother has three kids and two cars now, and I’m a videogame designer in a punk rock band that has actually never finished a song that’s less than seven minutes long, so I guess neither one of us is living the life of death-defying archaeologist. Either way, I can appreciate the jungly context in Uncharted. I see Nathan Drake as the kind of adult-looking guy who might have sighed and looked out the window when the big dude sitting behind me in algebra class slapped a fat wad of gum onto the back of my hair. He would have never kicked me down the stairs, though he wouldn’t have helped me up, either. He wouldn’t even think, “That kid’s got to fight for himself.” He would just turn away and keep walking. He’s the kind of guy who lacks crucial contextual tidbits, and he’s all the more of a dude for it. When Drake has his back to a big stone pillar and there are dudes shooting at him, he gets this look on his face — console games are still three or four hardware generations far from perfect photo-realism, though none of that matters to Naughty Dog: they give Drake actual expressions, and at moments, whether it’s one of the dozen or so unique stumbling animations that will occasionally occur as you climb stairs or the truly terrified look on his face while he’s being shot at, Nathan Drake rises above other videogame characters. He’s more than just a polygon man — he’s, like, the son of a real dude and a woman whose father was half-cartoon. And, whether he knows it or not, he is afraid of death. And not just in a “videogame character breaking the fourth wall” kind of fear of death. It’s just right there on his face. The game rolls right on to its conclusion, through spectacular yet reined-in vistas, increasingly difficult gun battles, tricky jumping puzzles, and even difficult battles while navigating tricky jumping puzzles (though I could honestly do with a little bit more of that last one). When the story manages to spring its “big reveal” on the player, it’s done with amazing nobility. It pulls no punches and makes no excuses. It’s just like, “There it is. Now keep playing.” And that’s what you do. It’s awfully sweet and kind of the game. There’s absolutely no shame about the open-ended ending, either. There’s no groan-worthy bad-guy hand reaching out from beneath the waves, triumphantly clutching air. It’s basically like, the girl says “That adventure was fun let’s go on another” and the hero’s like “Yeah sure”. I, too, was like “Yeah sure”. It’d be really nice if they could maybe write truly excellent dialogue for the next one, though I’m far from worried — if Uncharted is Naughty Dog’s Jak and Daxter for the PlayStation 3, I have high hopes for their Jak 2. I give their first attempt a healthy score of three stars instead of the two-and-a-half it probably deserves because I appreciate its awesome thoughtfulness, and I don’t want to be caught with my pants down when the sequel turns out to be truly excellent. In the meantime, hey, Naughty Dog: thanks for caring.





I played the region-free US version of Uncharted on my Japanese PlayStation 3, and I didn’t notice that the game had been “heavily censored” until my friend Spencer Yip pointed it out to me. How weird is that? Apparently the Japanese version of the game manages to scoop out all of the blood, gore, “impaling deaths”, and even the god damned rag doll physics — and even if you play the uncensored American version of the game on a Japanese PlayStation 3, it somehow manages to censor the game just as though you were playing the Japanese version. Curious! Before learning this factoid, I had played the game for four hours, and never once thirsted animalistically for blood, nor had I even once wondered why people weren’t gushing gel-like red ooze all over the place whenever I touched them. I had, however — only twice — wondered why the enemies all do the exact same “Matrix”-ish arm-flail-swooping animation whenever they get shot. Where’s the real-time flinching, popularized by such games as Turok 2 on the Nintendo 64? At first, I thought it was a design choice — and I managed to applaud it. (This happened late at night.) In Gears of War, your character can completely heal to full health after being shot something like thirty times. All he has to do is crouch by a wall and wait, and then he’s healed. This makes the game about moments, yes — about staying in the zone, about multiplying the rush as you stay in that zone. Though ultimately, if you suck at the game, it comes to look exceedingly silly. If you’re careful enough to survive through three staight levels, you have to wonder how a guy can keep running like that — he must have at least a thousand rounds of ammo embedded in his muscles. The weight in lead alone should keep him pinned to the floor. Yet Gears was — as Uncharted is — a game where the idea of “suppressing fire” works as both a concept and a method — it’s not like Brothers in Arms, where the enemies’ “suppressed” circle turns red if you shoot in their general direction enough. The abstraction is kept to a minimum by the sheer power of the concept, uh, literally working. Here I was thinking of how clever it was that neither Drake nor his bad guys ever got hit by a bullet unless that bullet was the killing bullet. I mean, it’s a pretty brilliant concept. It’s like, as the look of fear grows to encompass Drake’s face, it’s not because he’s getting hurt, it’s because he’s getting scared, and thus getting sloppy, and that’s why that last bullet — that last tick off the hidden “life meter” in the sky — manages to hit, and kill. This was a really healthy way to think until, well, I looked up some videos on YouTube and was like, dude, it actually looks cool when people are getting shot. You have to wonder, why allow people to die in a game at all if they’re not going to at least look a little dead? I mean, why not just make them throw down their guns, surrender, and run off into the jungle with their hands gripping the backs of their trousers whenever the PlayStation 3’s CPU registers a “killing shot”? I could be a millionaire with these ideas.

text by Theodore Troops

★★☆☆

“ABOUT AS GOOD AN INTERACTIVE REPLICA OF A 30'S PULPY ADVENTURE SERIAL AS ROGUE SQUADRON IS OF A STAR WARS FILM.”

With Uncharted, Naughty Dog lays its cards on the table, and hedges (or at least shrubs) its bets that this moment in history, right now, is the one when realistically proportioned, ordinary human beings can exist in a videogame without shame, after years of spinning orange dreidel dogs and elves with limbs of a strange elastic composition. Squaresoft laid those cards in 1999 with Final Fantasy VIII, and swept them away in 2000 with Final Fantasy IX. Valve laid them in 2004 with Half-Life 2, and did their sweeping in 2007 with Team Fortress 2. (Well, Valve never actually removes any of their cards. They’re the kind of players with multiple decks, if you know what I mean.) Even now, with five hundred and twelve whole megabytes of RAM, and more cores than an applesauce factory, there’s a certain god-defying arrogance in men making men out of polygons. Consider that Pixar, a company housing the finest animators on earth, equipped with its near-unlimited computational and financial resources –– render farms that probably stretch farther than some real ones –– still hasn’t attempted to depict lifelike human beings with computer animation, so many years after The Spirits Within. I suppose the argument can be made, why spend ten million dollars per scene making what is essentially possible with a twenty-thousand-dollar camera and some million-dollar actors, and I suppose that argument would win out with just about everyone, including me.



If Uncharted were a movie, it would not be CG. It would be made with the filmiest film, all the stunts would be real, and the sets would be honest-to-god jungles and temples and airplanes. It would probably be a better Indiana Jones movie than that new one that’s coming up around the bend. But alas, it is a videogame. Thus it is about as good an interactive replica of a 30’s pulpy adventure serial as Rogue Squadron is of a Star Wars film. You’ll shoot a small country’s worth of pirates in this game. You’ll scuffle across chasms, and you’ll die half-way through and break the pacing because Ubisoft has a patent on The Dagger of Time®. There are gates to be opened by hammering Triangle. There are puzzles with statues to rotate between trips to GameFAQs. It all feels like it belongs, because the story is telling you what you should be doing at this moment or that, but we can’t help but wish the game would play itself for us; eventually, we wish it wasn’t a game at all.

The combat is a more desperate, slippery, improvised take on Gears of War‘s soldierly, methodical, almost Tetris-like, take-cover-and-kill mechanic. Nathan Drake is an ordinary man, an adjective so crucial to this game’s success that it’s there in big letters on the back of the box. He wears a white shirt and jeans, his hair is just kind of there. All his moves have little imperfections in them: he leaps onto ledges and scrapes his forearms, he flinches and winces when bullets puncture the rock he’s hiding behind. He peers out from safety, releases a few nine-millimeter clacks with the R1 button, and snaps back, amazed he’s still alive, as South Pacific accents taunt him with one of ten cocky phrases.

SCEA’s marketing department had the unenviable job of making this everyman character cool. We are used to commercials telling us YOU ARE THE PUNISHER, and “supersoldier” is, to us, as common a compound noun as “salaryman.” When the first trailer of Uncharted was released, back when it had no name, I read a post in which someone called the protagonist a “bland, candybar-looking motherhecker.” Maybe they were expecting the kind of half-knight, half-marine, half-quarterback heroes of Gears of War (three halves a man)? Maybe they just didn’t see enough zippers and buckles and asymmetry. (“Character Design” is an awfully limiting term. It reduces people to pewter statues.) Everyone in this game is as ordinary, and genuinely relatable, as Drake. There’s Elena, a videojournalist who’s chasing the story of her career, and Sullivan, Drake’s gentlemanly adventure buddy, with a mustache and a cigar, and debt. They are all perfectly cast, and act almost alarmingly like actual human beings. When Elena drops her camera into the abyss, the one that had been preserving hours of discoveries of El Goddamn Dorado, you can hear the frustration simmer in her teeth, before she just lets out an agonized “Shit!”

We don’t doubt for a moment that these are real people, and, more than anything, we wish the game wouldn’t keep throwing these gamey constructs at us so that we could just chill with them. Even just to walk from place to place, looking around. After all, the subtlety of just the walking in this game is breathtaking. (It makes jealous all those MMORPG’s in which walking comprises half of the gameplay.) With people and places that come off as so natural, it’s the game itself that gives off the biggest stink of artificiality. It’s not like removing the HUD would’ve made things any better. The constant need for twitchy little challenges and two-bit puzzles just isn’t realistic. Even on a cursed island. Even in an Indiana Jones movie.

Interestingly, all the cutscenes are of realtime footage, but exist in the form of compressed FMV. I understand they needed to fill the Blu-ray Disc, and this helps to reduce load times, with the bonus of making them all selectable from a menu after you’ve finished the game (effectively turning it into a movie). But seriously. In a game that’s already so disconnected from itself, it begs the question, why not just use some beautiful, beautiful CG. heck, why not use real actors, like they used to do back in the Command and Conquer days? Of course, going that far threatens to reduce this $25 million production to complete irrelevance. (It also makes the guy working on rock shaders really angry.)





To turn this game off after the credits and go play Team Fortress 2 to blow off some Steam is kind of a revelation. TF2 was built in the Valve tradition of functionalism: it was cartoon-like because online players do hilarious things to each other in multiplayer matches. The exaggerated proportions help players pick out silhouettes of the characters. They know big characters move slow and take a lot of damage, and thin ones can run really fast. All the characters were designed in such a way that the player is able to instantly see what team they’re on, and their eyes are drawn to the weapon they’re carrying. Only once they were all established as iconic little stamps, as elements of a videogame, did Valve go embellishing them with voices and animated personalities. It’s a bottom-up approach.

The best games are drawn this way. Mario’s design is a direct result of pixel limitations. In Halo, the grunts are tiny triangles with smurf voices to contrast them against their larger masters (whose deaths will send them scattering); the sniping jackels have big neon circle shields so that you can spot them at a distance. The very idea of cyborg player characters was done to excuse statistical elements on the screen — lifebars, radars — and things like batteries and recharging shields grew directly out of that. The Gears have weapon slots in the back of their armor that mirrors their D-pad assignment; their big meaty shape is such to imply that they can take so many bullets, and also so that they fit snugly in the blocky, geometric world in which they exist; their little blue lightbright highlights on their chestplates is so you can tell what team they’re on even in the shadows of the highest dynamic ranges. And their selectable races — The Nigger, The Spic, The Chink, The Supposed Midwest Racist, et cetera — are direct concessions to the Xbox Live userbase. (There’s no Jew, though. Gears of War 2 should give us a big-nosed, big-bearded Othodox Jew who says “Shalom, bitches!” when he curb stomps.) Even old fantasy archetypes like rogue, orc, wizard, and the like have staying power precisely because they are readable and understandable in an abstracted reality, whether textual or graphical.

Uncharted is a game that dares not to think about decades of videogame design heritage, and there’s no question that it’s worse-off because of it. Apparently, they’re working on a sequel. Maybe it should be direct-to-theater.