Like a lot of kids my age that had Macs in their homes, my only experience with DOOM is the shareware demo, but I played the helllllllllll out of those shareware demos. DOOM 3 didn't seem like my jam. Like others have commented in this thread, I bought this game solely off the effusive praise of Giantbomb staff members and I'm very excited to find the right time to play it (my girlfriend doesn't mind that I play games but she does mind constant gunfire which hurt her enjoyment of what she saw from Uncharted 4).
One reason, and something I meant to comment on the Quick Look, is that Ratchet and Clank gave me a real weapon lust and non-cover combat thrill that I haven't felt in a long time. I find it very novel that one of my favorite gaming experiences this year will likely be a cartoonish remake of a ~15 year old game and a demonic not-so-but-kinda-remake of a ~25 year old game.
@mike123jen: I buy this complaint for live action but it's irrelevant to me for animated works. As mentioned above, black men have played white men before and brunettes have played blondes. Troy Baker would NEVER play Joel in a film version of The Last of Us but his voice (or, a version of his voice anyway) matches the art they designed for that character perfectly.
I realize you're likely not asking that Sucker Punch track down the worlds only English-speaking raccoon if they ever reboot Sly Cooper but it's an odd slope to go down IMO.
Most of my history classes revolved around general history and moved fairly quickly. Spending more than a week on a given decade was kind of odd. During elementary school, each grade would roughly focus on different periods throughout human history with 6th grade essentially being a look at contemporary history and some famous wars throughout time. 7th grade was European history which was essentially a two-month look at several major countries/regions (from what I recall, we did France, Germany, the UK, the USSR, Italy and a look into colonization ie. Africa, Australia).
8th grade and 9th grade were US history but mostly redundant. 11th grade was also US history but focused more on Big Topics (ie. Should We Have Dropped the Bomb, What Fueled the Slave Trade, and a LOT of civil rights discussion). 10th and 12th grades did not have required history courses.
All that said, history was not my field of study so I didn't retain much of it beyond the big lessons (ie. we're all human, war have mostly been terrible, and the second half of the 1900s perpetuated a great distrust in the American government throughout our peoples). I can tell you Huey Newton was a man but I can't, without looking it up, tell you why his name still rings out today. I can tell you the Treaty of Versailles was a thing, but I can't tell when it was signed, why it was signed in France or what the significance of it was.
@mems1224: Now that you mention it I do recall people being more than a little up in arms over UC3's aiming at launch. I actually didn't play games much during that generation until PS+ got fully swinging in late 2011 (I was a part-time cook and full-time music critic from 2009-2013, not much time for them sadly), and I didn't play the Uncharted series until I believe spring/summer 2013 when UC1 and 2 were bundled for like $20 and then UC3 went on sale for $10 or $20 as well. I played through them all in about two weeks and found each one a significant improvement on the prior in each category you'd judge a game by.
If the aiming really was as bad as some old articles / forum threads imply, though, that's a shame.
It's a little shortsighted to say a game being silly is justification for any and all levels of silly, there's an art to every style of game. In this case there's a very particular way Uncharted just lines dudes up for you to mow down one by one, coldhearted in a way that leaves room for only the blackest of comedy if there's any hope of its protagonist remaining "silly and relatable" by game's end.
To me, and evidently a fair number of others, it strikes an awkward balance of grit and irreverence that doesn't jive with the level of violence.
PS: ludonarritive dissonance is the best term I know to describe this, largely because it's the only term I know to describe this.
I don't find this true. Have you played the Remastered Collection? I just finished Uncharted 2 and there were several instances of early-2000s ragdool physics occurring. Havok was having a field day with certain enemies, honestly. I killed a guy with a pistol and his body slumped onto the stairwell he was walking up, apparently clunking against a forgotten bit of code that then launched him into the air, momentarily resembling a wavy tube man.
I've also found the series decidedly anti-violent in ways that make the gameplay less satisfying or responsive; particularly, enemies do not respond to bullets the way human bodies respond to bullets. There is a mid-game boss in Uncharted 2 who wears nothing more than a combat vest and takes double-digit shotgun rounds to defeat. The late-game is riddled with shotgun wielders covered head to toe in armor that take nearly all the ammo you can possibly carry to defeat just one of them.
These hapless, innocent mercenaries Drake is mowing down throughout the game (and let's be clear, I do agree there are TOO MANY BADDIES in these games, but that is for gameplay reasons as much as narrative ones) often come across as superhuman when alive and comically rubber-like when dead. None of that feels gritty or violent. Play an hour of Grand Theft Auto V (or IV, for that matter, if you want to be contemporary) and then an hour of Uncharted 2. In the former, a shot to the head registers different to a shot to the arm in both animation and damage. In the latter, damage is undoubtedly indebted to the head but enemies die in canned motions irreverent to the player's own intentions. A headshot isn't actually any more brutal than a foot shot.
Again, I DO AGREE that Drake kills too many people in his games. But I feel that from a gameplay perspective, ie. this fight could be five minutes shorter and these enemies could be five bullets less spongy, not a narrative perspective.
I have always thought Uncharted a vastly overrated but enjoyable series. I am okay with it being more of the same. Decent shooting, great eye candy graphics, and a ham fisted summer blockbuster plot all work well. Unfortunately it sounds like they haven't ditched the slow busywork climbing or the its plainly obvious what to do but its going to take me five minutes to do it puzzles. I will definitely be playing it in a few months.
yea, pretty much how i feel. its video game junk food. always enjoy my time with them(except fuck the ship graveyard) but when im done i pretty much forget most of what just happened and have no real desire to ever do it again.
Always surprised by this. Ship Graveyard is possibly the only truly great combat map in the series. I've said it over and over on this site but I enjoyed the combat so much in UC3 that I actually went back through it on Hard (and that's how I'm starting my play through on PS4 just now) immediately after beating it on Normal.
The other two games had such egregiously cheap combat I knocked them both down to Easy for their final chapters and didn't even bother with Normal on the PS4 remasters.
I suppose we'll see if my memory of UC3 holds with reality but it was a much more open-ended game than the other two in the combat scenarios (actually, UC2 was better about this than I remembered after blazing through its second half today, even if it was on Easy) and the ship graveyard was the perfect example of how. It was the first time in the series I came upon a challenging skirmish and never felt cheated when I died, I just needed to solve my own weaknesses.
@39 minutes in: "That's where you put a collectible..."
Man, Ratchet & Clank revived by collectible lust and I totally agree. I've been trained by years of game design to wander into the useless nook for the eventually useful glowing item. Don't tease me, game!
Weirdly enough, after so many hours spent in Phantom Pain, and all this time having passed since I last touched it - watching this series always makes me want to play it.
I'm still trying to unlock mission 45 and 46 (if it's true you need all MB platforms to access 46 then I'm about 2.5 hours from finally having it) so I've been stockpiling these extended episodes and essentially using them as a Metal Gear podcast to listen to while I take down armored infantry and tank units mindlessly.
It's one of those games where I'd feel pangs of jealousy toward someone who was just booting it for the first time, while also feeling bad about how much they'll have to deal with online-wise. Unlike Dan and most people who were obsessed with the game I gave it a good break once I ran into the first 50%-likely Battle Gear dispatch mission and my squad failed at least four times (aka something like 10 hours of gameplay just running side ops) so when I finally gave it another go most of the shitty stuff Drew is experiencing I've also dealt with. It's a real shame because that September I pounded through 90% of this game was incredible.
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