tell me about it

I am now playing Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune!

It’s all the fault of comicker Tim I-don’t-know-what-his-last-name is, of webcomic Ctrl-Alt-Del fame (ah, poor PC users, when wilt thou see the light of day? Verily, the greatness of Jobs shines forth, kneel and accept enlightenment in your lives). Now that I have easy access to a PS3 console *beams brightly at Puppy* and since I have purchased and bribed my way into using said console with a new DualShock controller and two games, any news posts on worthy PS3 games quite quickly catch my eye.

And so when Tim posted this gushing game review about Uncharted, I promptly went and salivated on Puppy and said we have got to get this game oh please oh please oh yes *spasm* yes! And being the warm, loving gamer boyfriend that he is, he gamely (see what I did there? See the pun? The Pan!) paid for half of the game (thereby purchasing and bribing his way into attempting to beat me at said game as well. I say attempt. He may well have a different story, but surely you will dismiss his laughable claims that he’s actually better at the game than I am. Pffft. ‘Girl gamer’, my ass).

Uncharted is an amazing game. I’ve never played Tomb Raider, but I’m pretty sure Uncharted (even though it lacks abnormally distended mammaries, or perhaps because of this lack) beats it pants hands down. I’ll unwillingly admit that it took me awhile to get used to the platforming and controls but it’ll likely be instinctive for most people familiar with the console. Having played mostly Final Fantasy and Final Fantasy and Final Fantasy and Katamari Damacy on the PlayStation, I’m used to the leisure and slow pace of turn-based combat. Which meant that when I got into my first gunfight in Uncharted, I screamed a lot like a girl and died countless times shot wildly in the air for awhile before learning to breathe slowly while kicking Puppy in the leg for laughing at me. Hmph. The real-time combat is bloody addictive. After getting used to the fast pace, I’ve actually started to enjoy the adrenaline rush. How good it feels to take a pixelled enemy out with a carefully placed head shot!

The storyline is captivating - hook, line and sinker, which is the key for ensuring that I stick with a game. Nate Drake, the protagonist in the game, is also rather dashing, with a close resemblance to Harry Kewell; the girly heroine, Elena, is real kickass, and I bet Puppy wouldn’t dare call her a girl gamer to her face. Double Hmph. You only get to control Drake though. He’s a real monkey, what with ropes to climb and ledges to dangle from and vines to swing across. His snarky “You gotta be kidding me!” emerges often as wave after wave of faceless shooters swarm out to attack - it gets me every time, because I’m often screaming the same thing, exhausted after countless rounds of careful shooting are wasted at the last minute by some idiot with an Uzi.

The most fun bit so far has been an energetic car chase. Elena drives a jeep hectically through a jungle, narrowly avoiding bits of cliff along the way, while you operate a mounted turret out the backseat to bomb jeeps and bikes racing after you. The graphics are amazing - the rendered water glistens and reflects back at you, palm fronds wave in the breeze. The voice acting is spot on and realistic as hell, with everything shot with motion capture.

The only gripe I have so far is that the SixAxis controllers don’t seem to be utilized for their full value. The whole point of the SixAxis motion sensor feature is the ability to sense both rotational orientation and translational acceleration along all three dimensional axes. However (maybe due to Sony’s late announcement of the inclusion of this feature in their controllers) this isn’t really integrated into the game, except for once where you open a wheel-lock door by rotating the controller, and to maintain balance when you walk across logs. Too arbitrary, like they put those in at the last minute, trying to find places in the game they could actually use the feature, but didn’t really care too much about doing so.

Anyhoo, that’s an issue I have with Lego Star Wars too, so it’s not really a problem; just that I feel it could be integrated more into the game for a fuller experience.

For PS3 owners (aren’t we just so cool?) who might be interested, here’s the opening clip of the game (no spoilers, I assure you; however please don’t go read the Uncharted Wiki page like I accidentally did :( Much spoiler action, waily waily waily!). Enjoy!

Disclaimer: Fine. I admit it. I am a Girl Gamer. Puppy is obviously much better at the game than I am. And he also got me through some of the shoot-em-up parts that I just couldn’t bring myself to slog through for the fifth time. :D