There are a handful of moments in games that I'll never forget playing for the first time. Waking up on N. Sanity Beach. Playing the Tony Hawk's Pro Skater demo over and over. Riding the tram into Black Mesa. Aeris' death.
And then there is Uncharted 2.
I'll never forget watching in awe as I clambered my way up that carriage, bloodied and bruised, stumbling through the snow amidst the carnage of the train wreck. From that moment I sat glued to the TV for 8 hours, and for many hours more I've played others online probably just as stoked on this game as myself. Needless to say, Uncharted 2 is one of my favourite games ever. Now, It's that time of year again when games are crowned game of the year, so it seems only natural to look back on the undisputed game of 2009. First things first:
Dat ass
Ryan said:
" There's an early cutscene with Chloe where Nathan rests his hand on her ass, there's a natural nonchalance to that; that basic motion tells a whole story in of itself, you then know the history between these two characters just because of that. "
To expand on that, a film lecturer of mine once said the best way to set up a movie is not with words, but images, citing Rear Window's intro as an example. That cutscene with Chloe, the way Nate hesitantly touches her ass, that is a good example of this theory and it's actions like these that goes a long way towards bridging the Uncanny Valley, towards making the world of Uncharted 2 and the characters that inhabit it more real, more human.
"Incoming!"
In an age of tacked on multiplayer, Naughty Dog could've just easily did a half ass job, or not included multiplayer at all, and nobody wouldve cared. The single player easily warrants the price of admission, but as it turned out, the multiplayer was just as good. While most people were busy playing Modern Warfare 2, and seemingly hating it, I was having fun not dying from campers, because the game just doesn't lend itself to such a tactic - well, the shotgun and pistole are pretty cheap, they kill you in one shot - but generally it takes a few rounds to bring down people. Just enough to get shot in the back but still survive, make it to cover and watch as the guy who was just shooting you unknowingly runs over the grenade you dropped.
Besides King of the Hill, all of the modes were really fun and it was refreshing to find team players in most games more concerned about winning than their k/d ratio. I guess because the multiplayer never really took off (it peaked at about 90,000 daily users), it kinda weeded out the dicks. Literally. There's a higher ratio of girls playing this game than any other game I've played online. And their good, perhaps too good. I hate losing to women.
Nathan Drake is a murderer
Across the course of Drake's Fortune and Among Thieves, Drake has killed almost as many dudes as Sully has fucked women. Pirates, mercenaries, slippery naked dudes, helicopters, a demonic yeti, guardians - everything is fair game for Drake, even an innocent man just doing his job. (6:05)
That's right, our wisecracking "hero" just killed some poor guy in the most humiliating way possible, a pull down, and didn't even give a shit. At no point during the rest of the game do we see Drake feel any remorse for his actions, and with his impressive bodycount, we can only assume Drake enjoys killing people and his real motive isn't finding treasure nor saving the world. In fact, it's the exact opposite. He's killing off the world one innocent man at a time.
Was it all a dream?
Prison can break the toughest of men, even Drake. After 3 months locked up in some seedy Bornian cell, Drake is a shell of the man he once was. Reduced to shadow puppet theatre it's fair to say Drake has well and truly lost his shit. Thus, is it possible Sully and Chloe never came back for Drake? Is he still locked up, imagining all this?
Was Uncharted 2 just another one of his shadow puppet shows?
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