Last night was my first real night of video game playing after our big cross-country move<\/a>. I fired up Uncharted 2 and was forced to spend 45 minutes downloading an update, during which time I played some Dragon Age: Awakening on my PC.<\/p>\n

It’s hard to look at Uncharted 2 and call it anything other than a great game. But I found myself repeatedly annoyed and frustrated with the game’s puzzles, camera angles, and especially the game’s controls. I hate running around for 5 minutes in a small room looking for where I’m supposed to climb only to receive a hint that I need to climb up to a ledge. Thanks. Might as well have had that hint read “win the game”. It’d be equally useful. I hate running up to a ladder and pressing a button to climb it only to have that button make me jump off a nearby cliff, falling to my death. I hate waiting 45 seconds for a guard to turn his back so that I can sneak up and mug him, only to have Drake dash to the other side of the doorway at which he’s hiding rather than through the door. A second attempt to go through the door made me dash back to my original position. It’s pretty rare that I get this far into a game without having gotten some basic mastery over the controls. And I hated some of the platforming for the same reasons that I hated the original Prince of Persia: Sands of Time<\/em>. I’d try a jump two or three times and fall to my death before deciding that the game wanted me to choose a different path. After a half hour of searching for another path, I’d find that the one I tried originally was correct. It’s just that the first few times, Drake didn’t jump hard enough or something.<\/p>\n

I really want to love this game. I’m partway through the train sequence, which I rage quit<\/a> last night at half past midnight after my fiftieth death on the same checkpoint. When I go back to the game, I’m going to try harder to enjoy it. Everyone else loved the game, why oh why can’t I?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last night was my first real night of video game playing after our big cross-country move. I fired up Uncharted 2 and was forced to spend 45 minutes downloading an update, during which time I played some Dragon Age: Awakening on my PC. It’s hard to look at Uncharted 2 and call it anything other […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,34],"tags":[240],"class_list":["post-2599","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ps3","category-rant","tag-uncharted"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/greghowley.com\/lungfish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2599","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/greghowley.com\/lungfish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/greghowley.com\/lungfish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greghowley.com\/lungfish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greghowley.com\/lungfish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2599"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/greghowley.com\/lungfish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2599\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2600,"href":"https:\/\/greghowley.com\/lungfish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2599\/revisions\/2600"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/greghowley.com\/lungfish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2599"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greghowley.com\/lungfish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2599"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greghowley.com\/lungfish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2599"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}