So I finished Uncharted 2 this week. Here comes my stream of consciousness...

I was surprised that it wasn't better than it was. It's probably that whole "uncanny valley" problem... it's sooo good in places that in the places it's not so good, it really sticks out.

Uncharted 1 was a really good game, but I found the combat to be really boring. I was getting into the gymnastic navigation and the puzzle solving and then the room would fill with bad guys and I'd say, "*Grumble and moan*... I guess I have to shoot these guys so I can go back to playing the game." I'm not sure what was wrong with the combat, but it was more of a chore than it was "fun." Whatever it was, they seem to have fixed it in Uncharted 2 (throwing grenades is very different, and better, but I can't put my finger on what else). The combat, the navigation and the puzzle solving seem to be equally engaging. I played on "Normal" and found the game to be engaging and to provide a challenging firefight every now and then. I probably could have handled "Hard" well enough, but with more dying. The game took me about 10 hours as it was, so I'm pretty content with my choice.

The biggest two issues I had were these:
#1: The more a 'game world' ressembles a 'real world' the more it needs to offer 'real world' options, I think. In one part of the game, I was stuck in a courtyard and allegedly supposed to climb to a second story window and continue on my way. In real life, Nathan Drake could have climbed to the second window in 6 or 7 different spots. In the easiest/most obvious spot, there was some 'debris' that 'blocked' Drake's ability to climb. In actuality, the debris formed a since ramp of things to walk up/climb to get to the top... but debris is a videogame staple of "you shall not pass" so I knew not to try too hard. In the end, I spent an actual 10 minutes trying not to figure out how Drake could get to the 2nd story window, but where the game developers intended for me to get up there. There was only one path up there, and it was mostly arbitrary and pretty well hidden. I do want the game to engage the logical part of my brain and not just hand everything to me on a platter... but I don't want to play "guess what the developer was thinking?!?!?" either. This happened to me maybe 5 times in the game.

#2: The story is really front and center in Uncharted 2... And it's not confusing, at least, not from a "who's the bad guy, what's the point, and what are we doing now?" kind of perspective... But it's really just a series of scenes and a slow progression towards the ending rather than a "story-story." Now, I'm slightly torn on the issue I'm about to bring up here...

Does every story have to confine itself to the 3 Act structure?

I'm not sure. I think there can be stories so interesting, so well told, or so avant garde that they can get away from the standard structure, and not only survive, but succeed. I'm not sure the story in Uncharted 2 is this way. Uncharted 1 suffered from a similar fate, I think. The storytelling didn't do a good job of communicating to me, the audience, what it was ultimately all about, and therefore what was required to let the story end. It felt like a series of scenes that were all in the pursuit of some magic artifact and that the story could have existed with any subset of the scenes.

Maybe this isn't a problem particular to Uncharted. I guess you could summarize Raiders of the Lost Ark in similar way. No doubt, due to the fact that much of Uncharted 2 seems to be based off of Raiders. I think BioShock 1, also, seemed to have this "problem" as well, but I didn't mind it as much in BioShock. In BioShock, the protagonist seems to be eternally just around the next corner from his objective: to escape. One more task, you think to yourself, and I'm out of here. Then the ceiling caves in and you spend an hour looking for a way around it. Now I'm free, you think. And then some poison gas goes off and you have to switch it off before you can continue. That takes another hour and it's time to get out of Dodge, you think. And then something else happens. 20 obstacles and 20 hours later, you manage to find your escape.

But it bothered me in Uncharted, for some reason.

This is somewhat minor, and more to do with my preference for the 360, but I was also annoyed by the controls. Why PS3 games still insist that you shoot with the smallish button above the "trigger" like button is Beyond me. (see what I did there?) I have a Shadow 6 controller for my PS3 so it is more consistent with the Xbox controller, and that helps... But you still have to shoot with the top button! Uncharted allows you to switch R1 with L1 and R2 with L2, but not R1 with R2 and L1 with L2. I found myself mashing the wrong buttons all of the time.

All in all, I was frankly just 'whelmed' by a game I expected to overwhelm me. It was the clear winner of the gaming press's game of the year and I'm not sure it made my list of top 10 games I played last year. People told me it was worth $460 it cost to buy this game new and the PS3 to play it on. I borrowed it from a friend and I can say I'd have been happy to spend $30 on it, but not much more. But I'm also a cheapskate and wouldn't be happy paying more than $30 for much of anything.

Next: BioShock2.