Today’s idiom of choice is the idea that if we all saw the world through rose colored glasses, society would enjoy an age of peaceful agreement for the wearing of them. Sure life would be tedious and boring in the absence of disagreement, but perhaps we’d accomplish more for the lack of arguments in that trippy hippy daze.
Philosophical detours aside, I’ve been thinking that a rosier tint might also assist me in playing Naughty Dog’s latest release in the Uncharted series the way they intended me to.
Over the last few days, I’ve watched Nathan Drake die a thousand deaths, all of them unnecessary if I’d only been capable of knowing exactly what the developer required of my admittedly awkward hands. As Nathan is chased across rooftops, there’s a very direct path toward the cinematic cut-scene I’m meant to reach, and dark suited adversaries do their best to herd me toward the point. But despite those efforts, I continually seem to make mistakes, take the wrong turn, plunge to my death or get caught for being too slow to deduce the way forward within the proper window of time. And this is problematic, because it breaks apart the cinematic flow of action in a game meant to be witnessed as an unbroken chain of seamless action sequences.
I can’t help feeling broken, like a child in the middle of a very important and carefully arranged production, underfoot and tripping up the performance. And it’s frustrating, I don’t want to ruin Naughty Dog’s shiny game, and I certainly don’t want to be driven into a corner where I must conclude that at times Uncharted 3 is the Dragon’s Lair of its day. That’s entirely too simplistic an appraisal of the work here, but there are occassions where I must repeat a sequence so many times over that such comparisons bear some fruit.