Uncharted

I can say, hands down, that Uncharted is my favorite video game series of all time! 

And here’s why…

Already going into it, I had faith in Naughty Dog to delivery - at the very least - an enjoyable game.  Naughty Dog is a studio that has a committed themselves to one series per console generation.  For the PlayStation 1, they only made Crash Bandicoot games.  For the PlayStation 2, it was Jak and Daxter.

Walking away from Jak 3, I had this aching for another game because of how great the franchise was.  Naughty Dog was smart though, and ended the series while they were ahead, rather than dragging out the story and the quality by rehashing the tale over and over again.

I have full faith that they will leave Uncharted be after this last, third game - as it should be.  I find that I am still a fan of a the classic trilogy design.  Fire out three solid stories, then cut it off, so that instead of running people ragged, they come back to the world over and over again, wanting to relive it.

In many ways, Uncharted is a modern day Indiana Jones, or an American Tomb Raider, however you want to look at it.  Being a video game, I automatically compared it to Tomb Raider.  Even before I picked up the first game, I asked myself, “Why would I want to play a Tomb Raider knock-off?”

The answer to that, of course, is “It’s made by Naughty Dog.”

From playing the first Uncharted, what grabbed me the most was the intensity of the game.  Gunfights, exploding cars, vehicle chases, moments where you don’t know how much of what’s happening is your own skill, or rigged by the programming to just make you look that damn cool!

The opening sequence of the second game is Drake trapped in a train car that is dangling off the side of a mountain cliff.  As you’re trying to climb out of the train, the boxcars are shifting, sliding; chunks of the mountain are braking off; parts of the train are snapping off under your weight.  The dramatic camera angles damn near give you vertigo.  You have no idea if the train will slide off the mountain, or how much time you have to get off the thing.  Its easy to forgot that the guy you’re controlling isn’t actually you on that screen!

When I participated in the 24 hour Extra-Life charity event last October, I debated what game I was going to play.  I had Uncharted 2 sitting unopened on the shelf.  Remembering back, it occurred to me that the first Uncharted only took 12 hours of actual game play to complete.  Most video games nowadays require, and are expected, to take 40+ hours to possibly beat.  Fallout 3, for example, took me 70.5 hours. 

Any Uncharted takes between 12-15 hours of real-time to finish, depending on your skill and the difficulty level.  Assuming this ahead of time, I picked Uncharted 2 as my staple crop for the Extra-Life event.

I’ve gotta tell ya, there is something amazingly gratifying about being able to start and finish a game all in one sitting.  I know it goes against the standard now, and I have heard many people complain about the game being “too short.”  I agreed with the sentiment, thinking that for 60$ I better get my time’s worth… until I played Uncharted 2 the way I did.  Afterwards, I knew that I would not want to play Uncharted 3 any other way.  With a game that high paced and intense, you don’t want to interrupt that.  It’d be like stopping an action film halfway through it and then coming back the next day to finish it.  You lose the momentum.

I have also discovered - especially after having followed Uncharted 2 with two months of Fallout 3 - that this series has changed the way I weigh and choose my games.  I was always a guy who looked for every last treasure, attempted to find all the glitches in the game, figure out the programming of all the AIs, and locate all the secrets.  But when you do that, I think you loose that.  You’re not having the experience Naughty Dog is trying to give to you.  Yes, you can deconstruct the game to your benefit, but you lose the magic, the rush, the intensity.  Its better, I think, to understand what they want you to do, follow it, ride that wave to enjoy the ride they built for you, and not obsess with every detail of how the wheels turn.  I did that with Fallout 3, and 50 hours in, I felt like I was ruining it for myself.  I don’t think I’ll pick out, much less play a game the same way again. 

If I find another game I can play in a day, then here’s my 8 hours of PTO; where’s my controller? where’s my whiskey? and my DiGiorno?  Fire up my surround sound, and I’m good to go.  Give me that adventure.

If you’ve never tried playing a game that way before, I highly recommend it!  And if you need a recommendation, I’d start with Uncharted.