The adventures of Missy Dvorak; why Saints Row the Third is awesome.

When I enter the world of Saints Row the Third, I enter a new dimension. In this dimension, I’m transformed into the beautiful Russian gangstress by the name of Missy Dvorak. She is young, around 26, but has seen a lot of action in her life. You don’t become the head of a universally known gang without a few people noticing.

Today is a normal day for Missy.

She’s been busy trying to clean up a mess of rival gang activity in Steelport since the death of a partner in crime and The Third Street Saints’ idol — Johnny Gat. Missy has taken his place in all but name as the head of The Saints and is seeking revenge on three gangs who all coordinated the attack that led to his death.

Missy has her hands full.

However, she’s taking a day off from normal gang activity (whatever that means) to pursue some hired hits. She does contract killing on the side for cash and more local respect in Steelport. She has several contacts who email her descriptions of the targets, complete with photos, and how to best lure them out into the open for slaughter. Once a target is in the open, all bets are off. Missy can kill as she pleases. She can go point-blank with a shotgun, snipe from a distance, bludgeon with a baseball bat, run over the target, drop a helicopter on his or her face… the list goes on… Every once in a while, a target will require a little finessing with some stricter rules, but it’s never anything an experienced mechanic such as Missy can’t handle.

She opens her contract list and reads the first entry. It’s from a friend at their crib. Apparently the cable company is overcharging the shit out of them, and he won’t stand for it anymore. Well, she guesses he’ll stand for it until someone takes the cable guy out because he sure as hell isn’t going to do it.

Missy remembers a saying she learned after she came to America, “Never send a man to do a woman’s job.” Killing is her job, what she’s best at.

She stands outside of her penthouse and raises her phone from her leather street-biker pants. They’re black with hot pink and turquoise accents. She’s wearing a matching leather jacket that cuts above the midriff to show her toned abs and light blue star tattoos on the side of her torso. She phones in a maintenance request with the cable guy. Before long, he’s on the way.

He’ll never reach the penthouse alive — she thinks.

She stares off down the street, her eyes lined by Lady Gaga-esque mascara and topped with teal eye shadow. Her hot pink, side-swept bangs obscure her vision a bit. She sees the dirty cable van turn the corner and close in on the penthouse parking garage. Missy lifts a rocket launcher from the ground, raises it to her eye to aim, and fires a single rocket straight into the hood of the van.

The explosion launches the vehicle into the air.

“That was too fucking easy.” Missy mutters to herself.

She opens her phone to see what the next contract is — hopefully something a little more creative.

It is.

A woman is scheduled for pickup at an airstrip on the north side of town. She won’t come out of the airport until the private plane rolls up. Missy needs to be her surprise in-flight chauffeur. Little does the target know, The Saints actually own the airstrip she’s flying out of.

Missy glides off her penthouse rooftop in a helicopter and floats to the strip, an appropriate entrance after all, for the occasion. When she lands, she opens the hangar and steers her plane out of it. When she halts in front of the designated hangar, her target is escorted to the plane with two bodyguards. The guards stay back as she enters the plane. Dumbasses.

Missy proceeds down the runway, as if nothing were awry. When she ascends off the runway, she flies into the heart of Steelport. Just before the plane collides with a skyscraper, Missy pulls up and shoots it directly into the sky, like a rocket.

When Missy, the target and the plane are all high above the city, Missy bails out of it and skydives toward the freeway, — the target still trapped in the plane.

She opens her parachute to sail downward and watches as the plane glides down to the pavement and explodes upon contact.

Missy pulls back on the parachute cords just before hitting the freeway. She rolls out of her landing and stands up to brush herself off. She opens her phone again, but not for a contract. This time, she calls one of her homies to deliver something.

In seconds, a sexy friend of Missy’s, who’s wearing an elegant, violet evening gown with some gold bangles, rides up in Missy’s favorite street bike — a black, turquoise and hot pink, fully customized Kenshin. Missy takes the handlebars, turns on the neon blue underglow lights and rides off into the night as DeadMau5 pounds in her eardrums.

Just another day in Steelport.

2011 Games of the Year

A few weeks ago, I published my list of games I’ve played and beaten in 2011. From those, and only those, I’ve selected my top three of 2011.

I’m sure my personal game of the year will come as no surprise to anyone who has spoken/corresponded with at least a paragraph’s worth of dialogue to me in the past five months. I’ve already written the game to death in a blog series that I posted in September and October, so there really isn’t much more I can say. But I will try.

Game of the year:

Deus Ex: Human Revolution

Deus Ex: Human Revolution launched on August 23, 2011. I beat it about two weeks after that. I’ve thought about Human Revolution every single day since then.

Even though I do think about the quests, the guns, the sneaking and the plot, I think about other facets of the game much more.

Human Revolution‘s art style, visual design and ideas about where medical technology is going in the future stick with me more than anything. At any given moment when I’m at home or at work, I sometimes wonder if human augmentations (in Human Revolution‘s scope) were real, how we could use them to aid us in tasks. It even spawned a discussion between me and a friend about what aug we could pick if given only one choice. Although I couldn’t decide on one, he wanted a pizza maker implanted in his body.

“There’s never enough pizza this time of night,” he joked.

Everything about Human Revolution wasn’t praise-worthy, however. It’s been said before that the boss battles were a mess and the endings were lackluster, but they didn’t drag the entire game down for it. Eidos Montréal even fixed the way boss battles worked in its excellent downloadable content episode The Missing Link. The development team knows Human Revolution‘s bosses didn’t fit with the game and remedied it in the DLC.

Here’s what they were supposed to be like, Eidos Montréal seemed to say.

In my lifetime of gaming, my eras have recently become divided by games that show me new ways to go about what I think games can be.

Last year Heavy Rain said, OK, let’s put the story before anything else and then tailor the game around it. Let’s make the action personal and cinematic. Let’s open things up to let the player interact with the world how he or she wants. And we’ll take away Game Over screens. The game doesn’t end until it ends. And it can end a plethora of ways.

This year, Deus Ex: Human Revolution said, OK, let’s make a game for gamers. Let’s pay heavy tribute to one of the greatest games of all time that this reboot is based on and make it accessible to this generation. And when Art Director Jonathan Jacques-Belletête stepped in he said, let’s make it beautiful and drown everything in the most consistent visual style a video game has had. Let’s take visual inspiration from things other than video games. Architecture, art, high fashion. It’s all There.

Thank the gaming gods for Jacques-Belletête.

I was live-streaming a session of Human Revolution to my friend Parker the other day. I was in Tai Young Medical’s upper office section, which is visually one of my favorite sections. I walked up to a desk.

“When I get a big-boy job, I want a desk like this in my office.” I said, crouching to inspect the polygonal drawers.

“That would be such an easy thing to overlook,” Parker said. At first I thought he meant for me to walk past and never notice it.

“No, I mean for a designer to overlook. Like, it’s just a desk. No one else would waste their time designing a desk.” He said.

Details like that are what set Human Revolution apart from any game I’ve played.

Honorable Mentions

Crysis 2

Crysis 2 launched early in 2011. Even though a fair amount of buzz swarmed around it, people seemed to forget it quickly.

I didn’t.

If I were forced to name a quality that gets me into games quickly, I’d say a predatory protagonist. Some of my favorite games (Hitman, Human Revolution, Splinter Cell) all possess this quality and Crysis 2 nails it.

Unlike games that ration out abilities, hand them to you in one level for you to conquer one goal and never use again, Crysis 2 gives you everything up front. Here you go, it says. Here are your guns, your invisibility, your super speed, your heavy armor, your slide and your high jump. Have a ball.

That, I did.

You see, Crysis 2 lets you be a predator, but it doesn’t stop there. If you want to equip your power armor, pull out the heavy machine gun and go guns blazing, you can do that, too. And if you want to sneak instead of stalk, you can move past numerous enemy encounters without touching a single person. The choice is yours.

The story might be dumb as shit and the characters and voice acting impossible to care for, but the game is fun.

It’s just fun. And beautiful.

Much like how Vanquish entertained me last year with its slick, fast and fun gameplay, Crysis 2 got me this year, but had me hooked for much longer. I ended up selling Vanquish, but I will never get rid of Crysis 2. It’s just too much fun, too beautiful and there are too many ways to play through scenarios in it.

It paces itself and lets you, for the most part, play at your pace. Deus Ex: Human Revolution did this, too and many games could learn from that pacing exercise. I don’t always (or ever) want to pay $60 to be beat over the head with waves of enemies for 8 hours and then watch the credits roll. Let me do things my way, and I promise I’ll stick around a lot longer.

F3AR

FEAR 3

I wouldn’t call myself a fanboy of the FEAR franchise, though I do like it. The story that’s strung over the games is pretty tangled, but it offers up slo-mo gunfights (a personal favorite), interesting weapons, reliable gunplay and sections of pure mindfuckery.

I also wouldn’t call the franchise very scary, despite it being titled FEAR. The first two games had their moments, but I was rarely scared. Then again, I prefer Silent Hill and Condemned-type horror that, instead of jumping at me, makes me terrified to step forward for what I might find.

When FEAR 3 came along, I was pleasantly surprised. It has a co-op hook, much like Resident Evil 5 (another not scary, scary game), but I played it by myself for my first time through. Although the third entry doesn’t really bring anything new to the table (other than co-op), I found that the developers, Day 1 Studios, (who ported the original FEAR to consoles) finally hit a sweet spot with the terror. Instead of shoehorning semi-terrifying moments in between intense gunfights, as the first two FEARs did, FEAR 3 has its own levels dedicated to horror.

Most notably is the Sam’s Club-esque bulk-item store you play through about a third into the campaign. Instead of armed soldiers popping out the whole time, an enemy doesn’t appear for a long stretch of the level.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is called pacing.

I spent at least fifteen minutes just wandering through the discount store until an enemy was even hinted to exist. After that, I could tell whatever monstrosity had taken over the store was funneling me into a trap, but I could do nothing but keep going. Just before the climax of the level, you’re placed in a huge, dark room and must navigate a maze of flatscreen TVs. On paper, it sounds lame, but it was extremely effective at cranking up the intensity. The TV screens flicker and change as you progress, some fall off their stands unexpectedly and, the whole time, you can hear the store’s demonic residents around you.

The entire level reminded me of the Condemned games, because it eschewed constant gunfighting for slower first-person horror and it stretched the pacing. There are a few levels in the campaign that do this and they’re some of the best for it.

It turns out that the co-op aspect of the game isn’t phoned in, either. The two characters, Point Man and Paxton Fettel have vastly different play styles. It’s nice to see a developer make a co-op mode that doesn’t consist of the main protagonist copied and pasted for the second character (such as in Resident Evil 5, Army of Two, Left 4 Dead, Halo, Rainbow Six … I could go on). Each character has his own unique abilities, which gives the otherwise linear campaign more replayability.

Point Man plays like an average FPS protagonist, with the exception of his slo-mo ability and some unique melee attacks, which include, but aren’t limited to the series’ staple jump kicks and slide kicks. Paxton Fettel, Point Man’s dead brother, (I said the story was tangled, right?) cannot hold firearms or slow down time, but he can possess enemies for short periods, explode their bodies from the inside out and shoot psychic blasts from his arms, among other things. It might not sound like there’s a world of difference between the two, but, in practice, there is. It’s especially fun to coordinate attacks if you’re playing co-op with a friend.

FEAR 3 also includes a Splinter Cell: Conviction-like in-game scoring system for certain moves. For example, you get points if you kill X amount of people with X attack, kill from cover X amount of times, possess X amount of enemies … you get the idea. At the conclusion of the game, it pits your score against your co-op partner’s, assuming you’ve played with the same partner the whole time. It’s a little gimmicky, but it got me to go back and play chapters again for different scores. Some achievements/trophies are also tied up in this system.

The original Crysis, Deus Ex and FEAR were all staple PC games when they launched in their respective generations. The franchises haven’t (yet) spawned yearly sequels and each have a ways to go before hitting an absolute sweet spot in their overall packages. However, they represent the most entertaining of games that I got my hands on in 2011.

What I played in 2011

Last year I wrote about my favorite and least favorite games I played during the year. I started by attaching a list of the games I played during 2011 to the “best of” blog (because it was first) and then a standalone “least favorite” blog after. This year, I’m publishing the list of games I played as a standalone before the other blogs.

Without further ado, here are the games I played, the amount of times I beat them or the approximate amount of time I played before I stopped. Only a select few, Red Dead Redemption and Deadly Premonition, I think, are pre-2011 releases.

Crackdown 2 – 2 hours

Bulletstorm – beat once

Dead Space 2 – beat once

Homefront – 2 hours

Portal 2 – beat once, played a few co-op chapters

Deadly Premonition – 3 hours

Red Dead Redemption – Beat once

Red Faction Armageddon – 3 hours

FEAR 3 – beat twice alone and played the entire campaign with a co-op partner.

Brink – 2 hours

Alice: Madness Returns – beat once

L.A. Noire – 1 hour

Catherine – 3-4 hours

Shadows of the Damned – 3 hours

Resident Evil 4 HD – beat once

Crysis XBLA – beat once

Crysis 2 – beat 3 times, with some extra chapters replayed here and there

Rage - 4-5 hours

Goldeneye: Reloaded – 4 hours

Battlefield 3 – 4 hours

Deus Ex: Human Revolution – beat 2.5 times

Also played MIssing Link DLC 2.5 times

Batman: Arkham City – beat once, with Catwoman DLC

Metal Gear Solid 2 HD – beat once

Metal Gear Solid 3 HD – beat once

Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker HD – 2 hours

Uncharted 3 – beat once, beat online co-op campaign and played some online co-op arena

InFamous 2 – 2 hours

Shadow of the Colossus HD – 4 hours

Need for Speed: The Run – beat once, and played a few arcade races

The Fast and the Infuriating

I would never call myself a fan of racing games. I can only think of a handful I’ve played. I tried Forza back on the original Xbox, I’ve dabbled in some of the many Need for Speed games and I’ve spent a handful of hours with the Project Gotham games.

I’ve never loved a racing game as much as Need for Speed: Underground. It’s still the quintessential racer to me. It launched as a pseudo-supplement to the blockbuster film The Fast and the Furious, at a time when everyone wanted an expensive tuner with secondary-colored window tints, side decals and bright neon underglow kits. With Underground, they could have them. I spent as much time customizing and painting cars as I did actually speeding through the slick, urban streets. Sort of like people (AKA, my brother) who would masterfully build and design a house in The Sims and then barely play the actual game.

Perhaps my second favorite feature in Underground (second to the car customization) is the track layout. Unlike every other racer I’ve played that has X amount of unique tracks, Underground had X amount of track pieces, but they were sewn together in different variations to make the tracks themselves. Some might call this unimaginative and repetitive, but I call it a lower barrier of entry for nonracing fans and a way to keep me familiar enough with the tracks as a whole to lessen my temper from getting my tailpipe handed to me in races.

And that, I did. I remember getting far in the Underground campaign (which felt never-ending) before I stopped playing it. I can’t remember why I stopped, either. It was probably because I had already spent tens of hours into it and new games started flooding in around me. Or because I finally reached an unbeatable race. Who knows?

Since I left Underground, I’ve played some of Underground 2, Most Wanted, Carbon and several Playstation Portable versions of the games.

I remember some of the PSP games grabbing me, because if that awkward handheld were designed for something, it’s racing games. Other than that, I hadn’t legitimately been excited for another racing game until I watched The Run’s 2011 E3 trailer.

Something about it appearing to have an actual campaign, mixed with the objective of getting from California to New York had me intrigued. It seemed I’d no longer be racing for the sake of racing.

I received The Run in the mail from GameFly on a Friday, and I spent the weekend playing it. I sat 2 feet in front of the TV with the surround sound blasting for the entire experience.

Before I started playing, I started a timer on my phone to record the racing play time. According to some rumors, the campaign only consists of 2 hours of actual racing, and I wanted to set the record straight.

My findings led me to a two-fold answer. The first is, yes, the game clocked me in at beating the campaign in just 2 hours and 18 minutes. Although the game features additional races in an arcade-style mode and online offerings (only with EA’s online pass, though), this was hardly a $60 product. Then again, most games aren’t.

My second discovery of the campaign time is that the game only keeps count of how long it takes you to beat a race and adds that to the overall time. So if you mess up, restart or use checkpoint resets (more on that later), that lost time isn’t counted.

But I counted it.

The official campaign might only be 2 hours and 18 minutes, but it took me 3 hours and 48 minutes to finish it.

I don’t know whether to be glad the campaign is twice as long if you can’t beat every race in one try or be sad that I spent an hour and a half fucking up in it.

As I played The Run, I learned why I don’t love racing games more than I do. They’re too black and white. You’re either winning or you’re not. Happy or mad.

In shooters, action games and adventure games, it’s a lot greyer. Depending on the situation, you can salvage something from it, and carve a victory. In racers, it’s pretty easy to tell if you’re going to win or lose, no carving necessary.

And I lost, a lot. One of my new theories about racing games is — it’s either one thing or another — that will cause your demise, that is.

If it’s not an opponent’s better car, it’s a sharp turn.
If it’s not a breakable guard rail on the side of a mountain, it’s an unbreakable lamppost.
If it’s not rear-ending a civilian car, it’s running headfirst into one.
If it’s not an empty nitrous bottle (which, after the years, I’ve decided does not actually increase your speed, seeing as I never get a leg-up on my opponents from using it), it’s a police car ramming you.

There is always something that will keep me from winning whichever damn race I’m on. It always seems that way until, of course, I win.

The Run employs two systems that make sucking it up in races a little less infuriating, Resets and unnamed reset-like things that aren’t explained. I’ll call them Flashbacks for now, though that’s not official.

You get five Resets per race and they are mainly automatically triggered when you crash or get busted by the police. You can also manually trigger them to reset you back to a checkpoint to redo a section if you didn’t perform well. Resets require a short loading-esque screen before it sends you back to the last checkpoint (5-10 seconds), and it resets all the racers back to the exact moment that checkpoint originally hit.

Flashbacks are unlimited and get you back into the race immediately. Your car flashes and you’re invulnerable for a short Super Mario-like time upon re-entry. These are always automatic and usually activate when you run off the road or accidentally take a wrong turn.

Both mechanisms have their ups and downs. Resets are great because you don’t have to restart the entire race if you completely mess up one section. The downside is you only have five and you have to wait through a short(er) loading screen to get back to the race. Lastly, if you cross the finish line and aren’t in first place, you can’t reset back to the last checkpoint. You have to do the entire race again. I wish a finish line Reset existed for the hairier head-to-head finishes.

Flashbacks are great because the game doesn’t penalize you heavily for accidentally going a wrong way or taking off into a field, and there’s no loading screen before you reset. However, the flashbacks don’t reset the other racers so if you’re ahead of an opponent and you ride off into a Nebraska field toward the beautiful sunset, you’ll most likely respawn back in behind your opponent(s). Also the period of invincibility sounds nice, but it made for some awkward situations when my car re-solidified while it was inside another car.

The banana peel under my wheels about these two features is the lack of line between them. Sometimes when I ran off the road, a Reset would be used and other times a Flashback would. I never knew exactly what I was risking if I made a bad decision mid-race. Also the grey area between the road and the surrounding track area is vast. Sometimes, My entire car wouldn’t be off the street and I’d flash back in. Other times I’d be 30-feet off the track before the game noticed. I could never wrap my head around it.

If you play The Run, make use of these instead of pausing and restarting the entire race because, I promise you, I spent just as much time racing as I did looking at loading screens during the game. If I had thought ahead, I would’ve recorded how long those were. For a game that’s based entirely on speed, Black Box and EA didn’t bother speeding up the load times.

Speaking of loading screens, I’ve made a new rule for racing games. The rule is, if it offers car color and body type options, don’t make the game take forever to load in my car under each individual option while I scroll through them. Make the switch instantaneous. I often would scroll through my cars, then scroll through the paint colors and body types while deciding exactly how sexy I wanted my car to look. Every time I scrolled to a new color or body type, it would take 5-10 seconds to load in my car model. For each option! Are you kidding me?

And when you select what car, color and body you want, you better make the decision as if your life depends on it because you can’t switch out cars between each race. Because the game is supposed to be one long race, you stop at gas stations mid-race (almost like pit stops) to switch out your car. There aren’t gas stations in every race, and the game barely warns you before you zoom past one at 120+ mph. At one point, I was stuck with a Lamborghini I could barely control for an entire leg of the campaign because each race in it either didn’t have a gas station or the warning before it was so short and unnoticeable that I didn’t slow down to pull into it in time. And if you miss it, your only options are to use a valuable Reset to checkpoint back to before it or restart the race and sit through an eternal load screen to hit it the next time.

That’s some excellent game design right there, Black Box and EA.

I certainly hope when they decided on that system, realism and flow were the deciding factors, as if the rest of the game follows suit. Expecting every gas station across the country to have all of your cars in their garages is pretty realistic, though. What is this, Resident Evil?

Last, but certainly not least, I’ll end with some notes that encapsulate how infuriating I found many of the game’s races to be.

In the last quarter of the game, a race takes place on a wide-open highway. I’m going 150+ in a Lamborghini I can barely control because I haven’t encountered a gas station in several races. I’m behind a car I can’t seem to pass no matter how long I hold the nitrous button. I’m weaving around what seems like an infinite number of cars on the highway, and if I hit any of them at the speed I’m going — I’m toast, for sure. This highway also has, like any normal highway, hairpin turns. As if this isn’t difficult enough, someone I’m racing against hires mobsters in black SUVs to kill me. So, to add insult to injury, one or two SUVs ride up alongside my expensive exotic and pump machine gun bullets into it. If I’m under fire for more than about 3 seconds, my car explodes and a Reset is automatically used. So not only am I racing in a very difficult race, I have to dodge machine gun fire and try to ram these SUVs (which slows you down), that can miraculously race up in an instant next to my Lamborghini that completely outclasses them. And sometimes I was lucky enough to get a mob helicopter to shoot at me, too.

The police seem to only be worried about the street racers, not the rifle-equipped mobsters who are offing racers. I came to the conclusion that the police and mob must be working together because they largely employ the same strategies to stop you. The most baffling of which is driving head-first toward your car and then E-braking in front of you so that you T-bone them, because nothing says, “We win” like letting an exotic car going 150+ mph ram into the side of your halted vehicle. These cops and mobsters really put their lives on the line to stop you. Bravo. Spike strips are overrated anyway.

Another thing that baffled me during the campaign were the Rival Races, which give you somewhere between 5 and 10 miles to pass an “aggressive” boss-type driver before the end. During the game, there are about four or five Rival Races throughout. At the end of the game, when you’re in the top 10, you race almost all the rivals that you beat way back in the game a second time. So somehow, racers you beat around the 150 mark got back in front of you for you to beat again. It made no sense.

Despite the downfalls, I cannot let this game go without a small recommendation. It’s not worth $60. Hell, it’s not worth $20 unless you love playing online — but it is worth something.

The tracks are all sprint-style (my favorite), there is great variation in them, lots of car and body options (though it lacks deep customization) and for every 10 frustrating experiences, there’s a moment of pure bliss as you’re passing opponents in tight turns, barely dodging civilian cars as they pull out in front of you and avoiding the police when they try to ram you off the road. However, in a genre that is so black and white, these thrills more often than not end up turning into disasters that send you permanently to last place or cause you to restart the race or use Resets. Throwing away 90 percent of a race to T-bone a car in the home stretch and having to restart the race or reset a checkpoint (if you have Resets left by the end of it) is not fun.

It might not sound like a recommendation, and it’s not the next Need for Speed: Underground, but if you’re not looking for something as taut as a driving sim, such as Forza or Gran Turismo, The Run has some golden moments. They might be buried under the grime of difficult races, unfair opponents, machine gun-wielding mobsters, ruthless cops, a short campaign and QTE-laced cutscenes, but they’re there.

Uncharted 3: Drake’s safe repetition

This post has spoilers. So there.

Nathan Drake is a nearly perfect human being. He’s multilingual, has a vast knowledge of historical explorers, he probably knows where every country, capital city and street is in each continent and he’s not even 40 years old.

But wait — the list gets longer.

He’s also an expert climber. If he were placed inside a 50-story, wet paper bag, he could climb out of it. He doesn’t use ropes, harnesses or any other safety equipment. His fingers are vice grips.

Drake is proficient in hand-to-hand combat. He can punch, kick, dodge, counter and throw any opponent in any weight class that comes his way.

He knows parkour, so he can chase someone through any terrain, whether simple vaults or complex rooftop jumps are involved.

He has a sense of humor. He can make a joke in the gravest of situations, which shows he’s an optimist with heart, charisma and attitude. He never gives up. These qualities allow him to charm more than one woman to his side and male partners to help him out no matter how dangerous the situation might be. His slender build and good looks certainly don’t hurt in this department, either.

He has book smarts, despite not maxing out in formal education. He solves centuries-old puzzles internationally at the drop of a hat.

Last, but certainly not least, Drake is a master gunfighter. You can put any weapon in his hands and he’ll aim it with excellent accuracy, reload it in a flash, climb with it in his hands and even shoot with precision while hanging from ledges.

Nathan Drake might be the perfect specimen.

But a great action game, does not a flawless hero make.

Uncharted 3 is a beautiful, cinematic game that plays like a 6-hour-long Indiana Jones movie. It features chase sequences, crumbling building escapes, vast landscapes, clever dialogue and enough shootouts to keep arms dealers in business for decades.

Uncharted 3 also features a story that fakes you out when you think it’s going to run deep, disjointed gameplay segments, red herrings that make no sense by the game’s end, numerous gunfights thrown in for the sake of gunplay, insta-kills and copied and pasted story segments that repeat over several chapters.

From the beginning, Uncharted 3 had a lot to live up to. After all, Uncharted 2 was a blazing success. It nabbed Game of the Year awards, reviewed superiorly and featured some of the best sequences in action game history. Uncharted 2 is the pinnacle of Naughty Dog’s adventure career. Although it’s not without its faults, it’s something to be proud of.

After that, I’m sure Naughty Dog’s team spent weeks in conference rooms, trying to craft the next story that would top 2‘s, with bigger, better action scenes, more chases, more gunfights, more high-stakes situations and more witty banter.

Exactly how could they top Uncharted 2 was the question. My answer is — they couldn’t — without switching gameplay mechanics or imagining the gameplay in a different way.

Because the Uncharted series has high strengths, it makes its weaknesses much more apparent.

I would consider it to be one of the smarter series out there. In a lot of games, we let things slide and suspend our disbelief because, hey, it’s a video game. Of course eating a sandwich will take you from 2 percent health to 100 percent. That’s the way things work in this universe.

Uncharted 3, though only semi-based in realism, had a lot of game-y things that stuck out to me, but only because it’s a pretty smart series.

For instance, in multiple chapters, the game copies and pastes the exact same situations into them.

1. Enter new location
2. Explore
3. Climb to the destination
4. Solve a puzzle (or two)
5. Find the treasure you’re looking for
6. Bad guys show up
7. Long gunfight with bad guys
8. Overarching boss shows up and takes the treasure you just found via a cutscene
9. Side character tells Drake the mission is too dangerous, but he doesn’t step down
10. Exit level
11. Repeat steps 1-9 in the next chapter

Only a select few chapters (most near the end) vary the recipe enough to really change anything. But the variations only include bigger escape sequences, longer chases or (mechanically unsound) escape sections where you have to run toward the camera.

Everything felt too repetitive and safe to keep me interested in playing.

I normally find pleasure in forwarding the stories in Uncharted games, but I found myself not interested in most of 3‘s. It starts out on a high note, but quickly devolves into varied, disjointed set-pieces, tangential chapters and long, pointless gunfights.

Story segments that I found interesting, such as Drake’s childhood; how he met Sully; Marlowe (the diabolical villain this time around) and her history with Sully; and Drake’s real past were never expanded upon after the game teased to them during a few chapters in the first half.

It was made painfully obvious that Nathan Drake isn’t Nathan Drake’s real name, and that his childhood was rather rough after his mom killed herself and his dad gave him up to an orphanage. These details are never fleshed out.

Also, I was under the impression that the reason why Drake is on this game’s mission is because he wants to track down Sir Francis Drake’s travels to pinpoint his own existence from Francis Drake’s lineage. The whole thing is very close to home for Drake because whenever every side character annoyingly tells Drake to back off from the adventure when things get too dangerous, he is reluctant to. Something deep is driving him to finish the quest and we never get to the meat of it, or how it ties into his past. Drake never explains himself. Instead the game wraps itself up with the discovery of yet another lost city (much like in Uncharted 2) and an escape from the city.

It could all be a setup to Uncharted 4, but at this point, I’m finding it hard to care about the characters’ motivations after finishing a 6-hour story that didn’t bother to dive into those motivations. The next Uncharted will have to move things in a different direction for me to care about it at all.

Drake and company’s imperfections start to show during points in the game that had me banging my forehead on my coffee table.

In one part, Drake is in an airplane hangar with a side character and they have to push a Jeep-looking vehicle up an incline, so he can climb on top and jump to a window. The side character opens the car door and says s/he can put it in neutral so they can push. Once they get it to the top of the ramp, the car starts sliding backward, and it becomes a timed climb-and-jump puzzle. I kept wondering why the side character didn’t just get in the car and put his/her foot on the brake to keep the car steady. Or perhaps one of the characters could’ve boosted the other one to the window and eschew the car altogether.

In a section shortly after, another car rolls up and bad guys get out to initiate a gunfight. After the fight, Drake and the side character push the car back out of the gate it came from. One of the enemies who got out of the car had to have had the keys on him. Why not just grab them and ride out?

In yet another section in the same level, after a long, unnecessary gunfight, I had to climb on top of a car to get to a low roof. When I got to the roof, the side character asked me to wait because I was getting too far ahead of him/her. So I waited for the character to catch up. When s/he did, I jumped back up onto the roof and the side character was insta-killed for no reason.

I turned the game off immediately after that and waited a few days to play it again.

In another level, after a daring escape from a capsizing cruise ship, Drake jumps off of it, and the screen fades out as he’s left in the middle of the ocean, by himself, floating toward a plank (to keep him afloat?). When the screen fades back in, he has magically washed up on the shore in the town Elena is staying in. He immediately wakes up and goes to her place. Yeah, right.

In a much-publicized section toward the end of the game, Drake is wandering in a desert after a plane crash. He’s alone and has no idea where to go. He sees mirages and ends up collapsing after two days of searching with no food and water. In the middle of his searches, he finds a well that’s dried up. A day later, he stumbles back upon the well and curses himself for going in circles. At this point I looked up and said, “OK, so the world’s greatest treasure hunter doesn’t know what a compass is?”

After surviving for two days in the desert, he finds a town and enters it, only to climb, fight and shoot at more enemies, as if his exhaustion and fright from the lonely desert trip immediately vanished. Bogus.

Games that score perfect 10s and GOTY nominations shouldn’t have boneheaded problems such as these.

Perhaps my biggest problem with Uncharted 3 is its constant shoehorning of gunfights into situations. I suppose Naughty Dog did this to appeal to a wider audience of shooter-lovers, but Uncharted has never been made better by its gunfights.

I have to hand it to the bad guys in the game, though, they are seriously dedicated to bringing Drake down.

There’s a section where you’re escaping a burning building. It’s crumbling down with every step and, guess what, enemies are still lining up to pump you full of lead. In the airplane sequence, when Drake is climbing onto the back of the plane while it’s on a descent into a desert, enemies are still shooting at him. When a ship capsizes, and it’s filling with water as it sinks to the bottom of an ocean, enemies are still shooting at Drake. They are the ultimate mercenaries. They risk their lives for their employer, at any cost. I hope Marlowe has a good benefits plan for them.

The enemies are all clones, too. Remember how I said the game-y parts stand out in a detailed experience? The lack of attention and variation in the bad guys is apparent. For most of the game, you’re fighting the exact same enemy in a black suit and red tie multiplied by 100 for whatever set-piece. I’m really disappointed Naughty Dog didn’t make more visual enemy types.

Boring.

Naughty Dog have proven that they can do gunfights, chases, exploration, intricate set-pieces, story-driven adventures, puzzles and over-the-top escape sequences. It’s time to try something else.

If Naughty Dog dialed everything back for the next Uncharted, it would push the game in a new direction while allowing it to stay in the same genre.

Enough with every ledge Drake grabs crumbling, every floor he steps on collapsing and him surviving every 30-foot drop. Enough with the “Oh crap!” catch phrase, pulling the pin on enemies’ grenades before kicking them away and delivering finishing blows to the balls.

Enough with an invincible Nathan Drake. It’s hard for me to believe he can really survive all that stuff and then die after a few gunshots mid-gameplay. I turned the difficulty all the way down to Very Easy in the middle of my playthrough and still had a hard time in certain combat sections. Enough of that.

Make Drake have weaknesses beyond his mouth getting him into trouble. If he really is driven by some inner need to see if he’s related to a treasure hunter, take that somewhere instead of teasing to it and never coming back to it before the game’s finale.

Tomb Raider had six games before Crystal Dynamics gave it a light reboot and then another two before the reboot that’s due next year. Uncharted has only had three games, and I’m ready for a reboot. The next Tomb Raider looks as if it’s going to make Lara Croft look more vulnerable and human. This is what I want to see out of Uncharted. I’m tired of the Nathan Drake (and his entire secondary cast) that can do anything. I want him to have some weaknesses.

Photos from Naughty Dog’s Flickr

Why did DICE bother making this campaign?

I just switched off Battlefield 3‘s campaign, and it’s the last time I’ll ever play it. No, I didn’t beat it, nor did I finish a 100 percent achievement run. I turned it off because I believe it’s one of the most unoriginal, cheapest, tacked-on campaigns I’ve played. It deserves no more of my attention at all, whatsoever, when I have about six games that eclipse it in greatness sitting on my shelf next to it.

I didn’t think I would dislike it this much, as it’s my first time playing a Battlefield game. I always knew the games had a heavy multiplayer component and fan base, but being the single-player champion that I am, I wanted to give its campaign a shot.

Originally, when I put it in for the first time, I was immediately blown away.

When this happens with a game, I always hear Yahtzee Croshaw’s voice in the back of my mind saying that it’s OK to assume a bad game won’t get better, but also remember a good game might not always stay good. If I had a dime for every time I played a game that started great and went downhill, I’d have a few dollars in my wallet.

Battlefield 3 is no different.

First things first, though — I was totally onboard from the second, literally the second, I turned on the game. The title screen was engaging and the menus were very slickly designed. I’m not always one to critique, or even pay attention to, a freaking menu of all things, but it’s all part of the package, after all. I give Battlefield‘s menus and title screen a hearty thumbs up.

When I pressed the Start New Campaign option, I was immediately immersed. The game cuts frames in of a train running on tracks with spliced in black frames that feature EA and DICE’s logos. It was all well put together, and it flowed with a sense of urgency. You see through the eyes of an unknown character as he runs down a street toward the side of a bridge. It’s nighttime with an urban backdrop.

“It’s not a brown desert…” I thought, pleased with the setting.

The character then vaults over the side of the bridge and lands on the moving train.

“This is just like Mirror’s Edge!” I thought, not expecting to see any trace of a previous DICE title here.

That small dose of Mirror’s Edge kicked my interest in the game up a bit. I certainly wasn’t expecting any of Battlefield to transform into a primary-colored parkour playground, but the similarity in that sequence alone gave me hope.

As I paced through the train, blowing enemies away with a Beretta I picked up off a dead body, I kept noticing how great everything looked. DICE sure wasn’t fucking around with visuals.

After the subway shootout, which concluded with a cliffhanger, I was flashbacked to what the meat of Battlefield consists of — military shooter in a desert landscape. I wasn’t thrilled about it, but I kept playing. I mean, really, I didn’t expect the entire game to be in an urban setting.

In the next level, things heated up again.

There’s a section where you’re walking up a flight of stairs in an unstable middle eastern building with squadmates, and the lights keep flickering. You’re not exactly sure what’s at the top, and gunfire is rattling outside the thin walls around you. I encountered a sense of fear that I don’t normally get in military shooters. Battlefield was doing something right. I think the visuals and the excellent sound design helped fuel my dread during the sequence.

As I pressed on, the game got less interesting. It became a follow-the-leader simulator with almost every waypoint being “follow” or “move” after someone in your squad. It contrasted heavily with the dark, redemptive, lone wolf opening. And it was for the worst.

This is what Battlefield 3 became to me: some interesting moments wedged into boring missions.

I never felt like an important piece in moving the nearly incomprehensible story along, either. Whenever all you’re doing is following orders and following your teammates, as you control an entire roster of different, nonspeaking people, it’s hard to feel important.

What baffled me most was the intense contrast between the main protagonist, Blackburn, in the prerendered cutscenes and Blackburn in the missions.

The story is a cliched interrogation sequence where as you tell your higher ups what happens in overarching, between-mission cutscenes, you play through Blackburn’s explanations as the missions. Every once in a while, you play as someone else who has a side role in the plot. I suspect these sections are here to pad out gameplay because they consist mostly of terrible, boring turret sections or tank driving missions. They drag on forever and serve nearly no purpose to gameplay or story, other than feeling like slightly playable cutscenes.

Anyway, when Blackburn is being interrogated in the well-directed, prerendered cutscenes, he is active, argumentative and has an attitude. When you play through his eyes in his multiple missions, he never utters a word. The least DICE could’ve done was baste some of that personality over from the cutscenes to the gameplay. That at least would’ve made his attachment to the numerous soldiers he fights alongside more engaging. As it stands, there is no attachment, and I realized this during a sequence where a few soldiers die around you. The game action pauses as a friend mourns over them. I didn’t realize I was supposed to remember, much less care about, the people who died.

“Boo hoo,” I mocked. “Let’s get on with it.”

Battlefield also has the problem where it chases after realism so hard that it’s completely unfair. I’m not opposed to having a character who dies after getting shot about four times. Rainbow Six: Vegas is one of my favorite shooters, after all. I am, however, opposed to enemies who are unreasonably accurate shots at all ranges with every weapon and who know exactly where you’re standing behind breakable walls when they fire through them. And I could do without enemies that are designed to look bafflingly similar to your AI-controlled teammates.

Put the fragile player-controlled character together with the ultra-accurate enemies, teammates who I swear picked up blanks off the truck instead of live rounds and a busted checkpoint system that places you multiple minutes back most times you die and perhaps you will understand why I have no intention of turning it back on.

What hurts more than anything is that this garbage campaign comes from the same people who developed one of my favorite games of all time — Mirror’s Edge (which also had cheap moments in its campaign, I’ll admit).

I felt like DICE lead me on during sections of the campaign, too.

The visual design is strikingly similar to Mirror’s Edge in some parts, including a lengthy indoor shootout when you play as a bad guy. Well designed offices are washed out and punctuated with bright, primary colored walls and pillars. Even the desert scenes are more white and blue than brown.

There are also vaults that seem like they’re ripped straight out of Faith’s (runner) bag of moves. I didn’t mind.

It’s like people on the Battlefield team also wanted to make another Mirror’s Edge instead of the umpteenth multiplayer-focused military shooter and they pulled every string they could to get those similar details in there.

If nothing else, I appreciated them.

What kept me playing past the aforementioned office level was the hope that more Mirror’s Edge design aesthetic would pop up. Save for some vaultable objects here and an overall washed-out palette, nothing else caught my eye.

For what it’s worth, the least Battlefield did was give me a few intense moments here and there surrounded by a thick fat of monotonous shooting gallery sections.

At least now I know what the next Mirror’s Edge will look like.

For those of you wondering exactly what sent me over the edge, and made me stop playing:

I was at the end of one corridor with enemies spawning continually from a door in the back. Once it was cleared, no thanks to my teammates, I proceeded to a shooting range where real enemies popped up alongside paper ones. I died twice in here due to the enemies’ laser sights always landing, with pinpoint accuracy, in both my character’s eyes at the same time, ergo blocking his vision. Both times I died, I had to fight through the long corridor of enemies because, in a move of pure and simple bad design, a checkpoint wasn’t placed just before the shooting range area, even though there’s a significant break in action before it.

My third time through the range, I slowly and carefully cleared all the enemies out. As I breathed a sigh of relief, I turned to my left just in time for an enemy to rush through the door at me.

In Battlefield 3, every time an enemy comes within a five-foot radius of you, an unstoppable sequence happens where the enemy pulls a knife and stabs you once, causing you to die immediately. There’s no way to counter this move, even though most player-controlled characters have a quick-time-event-laced hand-to-hand fight with an enemy at scripted points. This unbreakable stab happened at the very end of the range scene, and I spawned, after a loading screen, back to the beginning of the long corridor of endless enemies.

“Fuck this game.” I said and turned it off. If it weren’t for my boyfriend wanting to play online multiplayer I probably would’ve destroyed the disc.

All photos from Battlefield.com

I’ll tell you exactly what kind of game Rage is

If you’re curious about or haven’t played Rage yet, I’ll tell you exactly what kind of game it is. These are my impressions from about five-and-a-half hours with it.

Rage is like a “lite” version of Fallout 3 and Borderlands. It has a quest system, which is very similar to Borderlands‘ (down to the text menu that pops in, asking you to accept it), looting, different ammo types, weapon/armor/vehicle upgrades and an interface to build items, but they’re all lacking the depth that’s found in the other titles.

It’s in an open, post-apocalyptic setting, but it doesn’t encourage you to explore. It also doesn’t aspire to get past brownish-orange in its art direction. It’s save system is exactly like Fallout’s, in the sense that it only saves when you enter a settlement or exit back into the wasteland. You can save at any time, but it’s easy to forget to. The first time I died, I had to play nine minutes of gameplay to get back to where I was. This immediately set off my WTF alarm.

It wasn’t the only time.

My WTF sense tingled again when I discovered you can only have your own weapons in the game. In the opening section, you’re tasked with entering enemy territory and killing bandits. I had this shitty starter pistol (an id staple), and I kept killing bandits who were equipped with these sweet-looking 1911-style pistols. I wanted one, so I looted the enemies I killed. In Rage, the looting process is simple. You kill someone, press A over his or her dead body and you receive — with no menus required — usually money or ammo. It wasn’t until I downed a handful of enemies when I realized their weapons fade away when their owners die.

Yes. Rage is that kind of game.

It’s also the kind of game that doesn’t think headshots are one-hit kills. I know, I know … bear with me.

I was pew-pewing away at enemies who were shotgunning me down, and I couldn’t take their weapons after they died. Great. Worse yet, is the lack of explanation for this. I know id wants me to play by its rules and use the in-game currency to buy weapons and ammo from shops, but the writers could have at least made up a reason for the disappearing guns. In Metal Gear Solid 4, it was explained perfectly why you couldn’t use soldiers’ guns. Oh well, no one at id bothered to write a cohesive plot, so I probably shouldn’t be concerned with the finer details.

Rage is the kind of game that looks pretty from far away, but breaks up close. Every time I turn my head, textures pop in — no exaggerations. Rage’s dusty brown wasteland looks well rendered as a big picture, but when you’re running around in the thick of it, it’s easy to spot low-res, ugly textures everywhere. And ugly textures look even worse when they’re right next to detailed ones.

Rage spreads itself over many facets of gameplay instead of nailing a single one. It also imitates a lot of games, but isn’t as good as any of the games it mimics. It’s part first-person shooter, part open-world, part RPG and, oddly enough, part racing and vehicle combat. I get the feeling from reading interviews and previews about Rage that id put a lot of its eggs in the combat racer basket. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but combat racing isn’t exactly the golden ticket id hoped would separate it from the rest of the brown, post-apocalyptic first-person shooters on the market. A great story could have done that, but it seems those are rare in the genre.

On that note, almost hours in, there is no story to be found. At all. You, the nameless, voiceless protagonist, were put into a cryo-like capsule to survive a meteor on its way to Earth. When the meteor hit, the capsule malfunctioned, and you wake up way after your scheduled time. People in the capsules around you died, and there’s a stagnant battle happening between civilized people and bandits outside. Without having any idea who you are, someone from the closest human settlement rescues you, puts a gun in your hand and asks you to do important missions for his town that no one else can handle, without backup. Apparently, some governmental task force known as the (creatively named) Authority exists, and they’re repressing the people. There is no evidence of this repression in the game world, aside from people telling you. I’ve had no contact with any arm of the Authority in my five hours of playing.

I’m amazed that in 2011, companies with AAA, colossally budgeted games can’t muster up even a hint of a story. It’s a shame that people who spend their $60 on games stand for this. It’s very possible that I just haven’t made it far enough yet for things to kick in, but I don’t care. In the first half hour of Bioshock, you’re introduced to the main antagonist and the most immediate main threats of the game. Get on with it, Rage.

I can only assume a chunk of the buyers are in it for the gunplay, which isn’t even that stellar, either. Among the popular comparisons to Borderlands and Fallout, I’ve detected two other games that I wasn’t expecting — Bulletstorm and Timesplitters.

One class of enemies always runs at you with sharp, melee weapons. The way these characters are physically designed and programmed reminds me of the endless drones of melee-based enemies in Bulletstorm. Rage also has Bulletstorm‘s rather frantic gunplay. Enemies move quickly, so I’m constantly spinning and trying to get my sights on them before they cut my balls off. It also takes a massive amount of bullets to kill each enemy. I’d kill for a boot-stomp-like melee attack in Rage instead of its delicate gun-butt thrust.

Because aiming down the sights doesn’t seem to do shit for your accuracy, I fire from the hip most of the time. Mechanically, this reminds me of Timesplitters, an excellent FPS that was born before they all became gun sight museums. Rage also has a slightly cartoony look to it, which further reminds me of Timesplitters and Bulletstorm. They’re all paced similarly, too. Even though id wants you to take Rage seriously, I can’t. Bulletstorm also had this problem.

Despite this entire entry containing complaints about Rage, I have to end on a baffling note — I’m enjoying the game more than I dislike it. The design decisions that rub me the wrong way really bother me, but not enough for me to put down the controller. For the life of me, I can’t quite articulate why I’m still playing it. It’s something new, and I guess I need something to play now that I’ve beaten Deus Ex‘s first DLC add-on.

I have a feeling I won’t beat Rage. It’s a novel, yet flawed, game. It’s the type of game I know I’ll get tired of soon if it doesn’t show me something new and interesting. The way it’s going now, I predict it probably won’t. It’s another brown, first-person shooter in an open world no one asked for. We needed another of those like we need another zombie apocalypse game.

Where is Doom IV?

Photos from Rage.com