{"id":204,"date":"2008-03-09T06:17:23","date_gmt":"2008-03-09T06:17:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/decisionproblem.com\/seminar\/?p=204"},"modified":"2008-09-18T02:31:48","modified_gmt":"2008-09-18T02:31:48","slug":"300-words-about-uncharted-drakes-fortune","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gamedesignadvance.com\/?p=204","title":{"rendered":"300 Word Review – Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune"},"content":{"rendered":"

Uncharted<\/em> is a game that doesn’t know what it wants to be. Its spiritual cousin, Assassin’s Creed<\/em>, couldn’t decide whether it was an open-world game, a platformer, or finally, an ARG. Drake’s Fortune<\/em> on the other hand veers between over-the-shoulder shooter and CG film.<\/p>\n

As a shooter the game is competent but unimaginative, incorporating the controls and cover system from Gears of War<\/em>. Unfortunately, it fails to realize that what made the firefights in Epic’s game interesting was the strategy that went into moving from cover to cover, slowly flanking your enemy. Shootouts in Uncharted<\/em> are usually just a beautiful version of Hogan’s Alley<\/em>, with your character, Nathan Drake, taking shelter behind a box or pillar on one side of an area, and the enemies, hiding behind their boxes and pillars, exchanging volleys until someone peeks out at the wrong time.<\/p>\n

As a CG film it does admirably, creating likable characters and a story that feels like a loving homage to the pulp comics of the ’30s and ’40s. However, it’s the mix of the movie and the game that makes Uncharted <\/em>a little unsettling.<\/p>\n

There’s a reason that Indiana Jones uses a whip: it is very hard to feel for the plucky, underdog hero if he spends most of his time mowing people down with an automatic weapon. With each successive cutscene featuring a wry remark from our hero after narrowly escaping death, or flirting with his female sidekick, I became more aware that in my time playing him I had killed literally hundreds of people. As a rule I’m not against killing people in video games, but in the end it was the incongruity between my character’s portrayal and what I was allowed to do with him that left a bad taste in my mouth.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Uncharted is a game that doesn’t know what it wants to be. Its spiritual cousin, Assassin’s Creed, couldn’t decide whether it was an open-world game,<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gamedesignadvance.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/204"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gamedesignadvance.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gamedesignadvance.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gamedesignadvance.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/11"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gamedesignadvance.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=204"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/gamedesignadvance.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/204\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":435,"href":"https:\/\/gamedesignadvance.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/204\/revisions\/435"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gamedesignadvance.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=204"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gamedesignadvance.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=204"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gamedesignadvance.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=204"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}