Recently, film critic Roger Ebert said (again!) that “video games can never be art.” He has obviously never played Uncharted 2: Among Thieves. It was one of the best games i’ve ever played. If I’m not going to say it was the best i’ve ever played, because it did have some repetitive things and some other weird issues. But this game is art. There’s no way it can’t be. As much as I respect Roger Ebert, he’s just plain wrong on this one.
The voice acting was probably the best in any game I’ve ever played. The story was pretty good, part tomb raider, part Indiana Jones (minus the aliens). The story telling was awesome. The transitions between “chapters” and sections was great. It really did feel like a movie that i was in control of. There’s a PS3 commercial that makes fun of it looking like a movie, and when i started playing Laura even asked what i was watching, because she didn’t think it was a game.
Some kinda spoilers, so…the font’s going white on white background here, so highlight it to read it. not sure what RSS feeds and/or facebook will do with this, but I’d presume you’ll see it… 🙂
potential spoilers:
What the hell is up with going through all these puzzles that nobody else has ever figured out only to find that a bunch of nazi’s got here before and left all their ammo with their dead bodies? and its all still good? yeah.
Or i have to figure out some complicated puzzle, and it just opens a frigging window so i can see somewhere else, and that area’s out in the open and bad dudes are already over there looking for a secret entrance?
And why is everything all rickety, but the badguys can just walk over there? As soon as a good guy wants to go there, stuff starts falling apart!?
And what is with train scenes? don’t bad guys know you just unhook the cars you don’t need? Why do the bad guys always take trains?
My biggest complaint is about load times before the game even starts. Why do games these days take a full minute to get to the actual game? when you start uncharted 2, you see an empty black screen for 5+ seconds, then like 15 seconds of a spinning dagger. Then it shows you the logo for the developer. Press start a few times, and you wait for it to load with that spinning dagger again! Thankfully, once you actually start playing, you never see that stupid dagger in that context again. Load times pretty much disappear, or are invisible to you because they’re happing during cut-scenes that you actually are interested in seeing.
I was tempted to bring down my NES and a little TV, put in Mike Tyson’s Punch-out and see if i turned them both on at the exact same time, could i enter the code to jump to Tyson (it has been burned into my muscle memory since i was in like 6th grade) and beat him before i could actually play in game in Uncharted 2 Some games, like the call of duty series, have always been awesome about that. there’s little or no waiting, you can skip through all of the title screens, etc. you press A a few times and you’re loading or matchmaking in multiplayer. Valve (Half life, Left 4 Dead, etc) is always one of the worst offenders on this. why the hell do you waste a minute of my life loading some animated 3d scene to show in the background of the title screen that i’m only going to see for 2 seconds before i press start?!?
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