And so is my wife

I was watching some old Doctor Who recently. It's what I do. It's not sad. You're sad.

Anyway. This is how not sad I am. I was watching a reconstruction of an episode which was deleted decades ago. Luckily there are some photos, taken off the TV in the 60s, which someone has synchronised with the soundtrack, which someone else has recorded off their TV, also in the 60s.

Thanks to these weird people, who spent the 1960s recording Doctor Who off the telly before it was technically possible to do so, I was able to enjoy a weird and only slightly tedious slideshow of the story Fury From The Deep. And in it, there was a man who had a wife.

I know he had a wife because he kept calling her "My Wife!" Even though her name is Maggie Harris. And even though she worked in the same place as him, and everyone there knew her, he would only refer to her as "My Wife!"

"My Wife has disappeared! Where is My Wife? I think the seaweed creatures might have kidnapped My Wife! I gave the secret documents to My Wife!" It was most disconcerting. Maybe he was just very excited about having got married. But it came across as weird.


Trouble and Strife

It led  me to reflect that having a wife, in Doctor Who in the 1960s, was unusual. People tended not to be married. They just hung around in space, or in Ancient Egypt or wherever, having adventures and getting shot by Daleks.

And then I thought that actually, having a wife was a fairly unusual thing in adventure narratives, in general. I remember watching Firefly in 2002, thinking how refreshing it was that two of the ship's crew were married, and that the marriage was a good thing. It was still unusual then, 35 years after the crackly studio bound nonsense of early Doctor Who. How odd.

Soaps and dramas are full of wives, obviously. But that's because the focus is relationship and emotion. Narratives involving action tend to be uninterested in married couples. A wife is a thing you might get at the end of the story - a reward, in some respects. But also a signal that the adventure is over. Because the protagonist is "a man", obviously, and part of being "a man" is being single.


Ex Wives

Marriage is the end of story, or so popular narratives would have it. They are the opposite of adventure. That's why Wash and Zoe were so unusual, in Firefly. They continued the adventure. Even in excellent, forward looking television like The Sopranos and Breaking Bad, there is a tension between the adventure the men want to go on and the fact that they are married. In fact, that's more or less the gimmick of The Sopranos, isn't it? He's a mob boss, but he's also a family man. How unusual and thought provoking. (Which, of course, it is, but why is it unusual to have such thoughts provoked?)

Uncharted 4, which I've both praised and moaned about recently, has a protagonist with a wife. Nathan Drake starts the story settled down, mucking about in suburbia with his wife, Elena. I sort of vaguely remember her from playing the earlier games, but I played 3 and 2 in the wrong order and so was utterly confused about who was who. And, to be honest, it didn't seem to matter much. All we did was run about killing people and watching temples explode.

The game does attempt to integrate Elena into the narrative, and she is clearly a capable and interesting character in her own right. But there is still an implicit tension between narrative excitement and domestic bliss. Nathan feels the need to deceive Elena in order to go on an adventure with his blokey mates. For much of the game she is a slightly nagging presence on a phone, lied to by Nathan in order to prolong the fun.

When she does turn up, she's a welcome addition to the hyper masculinity of the gameplay. Which begs the question, why wasn't she in this from the start? Why did the game feel the need to employ that tired old ideology - marriage is the enemy of adventure? They pay lip service, towards the end,  to the idea that their relationship is compatible with adventure, and I guess that's part of Nathan's arc. But that feels a little half heated when she's absent for so much of the game.

Still, at least Nathan does call her by her name. He doesn't just shout "Oh look, it's my wife!" all the time. So I suppose there's some progress.

Get on with it

I've finished Uncharted 4. Finally. Good grief, it takes its time to finish.

I kept thinking "This must be approaching the end. We appear to be wrapping up." Nathan would get to the Huge Amazing Temple where surely the treasure was going to be, and I felt like I'd been playing forever, so this was probably it. But no, pretty much every Big Final Place would end up being wrong. Just another clue leading to yet another Maybe The End place.

Don't get me wrong, I was having fun. Uncharted 4 is an incredibly enjoyable game, full of variety, wonder and excitement. The locations are spectacular both in terms of their aesthetic and their level design. But it all just felt a bit... much.

Maybe I'm just in the wrong demographic now. AAA titles like this are aimed at players who spend many hours on their games - an audience that tends to be younger than me. People of my age, even those without children, tend to have less time to play. And maybe even when I have the time, I feel a little guilty about spending hours and hours pretending to be a man swinging around a jungle.



Balancing act

But I'm not sure it can be just age. I've played plenty of other games for longer. Metal Gear Solid V took many, many hours of my life - far more than Nathan Drake's zany adventures. And I happily spent whole evenings on Deus Ex, and even snapped up the DLC as soon as it came out.

So it must be something to do with the game itself. As I've noted in a previous blog, there is a decent variety of things to do in the game. Driving, climbing, shooting, sneaking and puzzling are all seamlessly integrating into the game's narrative and the timings are very smart. A frantic combat section will be followed by some calm exploration, which will then lead to a dizzying climb across clifftops.

But as well balanced as the game is, there is a limit to the amount of times you can pull the same stunts. Everywhere Nathan goes seems to be utterly impossible to get to, without leaping across chasms and clinging onto tiny ledges by his fingertips. It's fun, but it gets old after a few dozen repetitions.

So I started to experience some level of fatigue with the mechanics. As brilliant as the level design is, there's only so many times you can hear Nathan saying "Oh no, a dozen more bad guys got here before us! We must now sneak about strangling them all one by one," without starting to lose interest.

And then there's the narrative issues.


What are you doing here?


It's very apparent that the Uncharted series is not leaning heavily on 'realism' as its main selling point. Part of the joy is the ludicrous nature of the situations Nathan finds himself in, and the insane good fortune he has when swinging from collapsing roof to burning forest.

But I still want to feel like things matter. And it's the small things.There are so many places which are simultaneously:

a) Full of enemy soldiers and
b) Utterly impossible to get to without leaping across crumbling cliff faces.

How do the soldiers get there? Do loads of them die, every day, just trying to get to work?

Not a big deal. But I like the world to feel real. The Last of Us did a much better job of making the situations feel believable and lived in. Different tone, I realise. But maybe that's why I've played that game three times through and would play it again tonight. I believed in the world.


In conclusion

Uncharted 4 is certainly a good game. It has many exciting sequences and well designed experiences. But it's very linear and gets repetitive. So it's not a great game. I want a little more control, please.

Next up, Until Dawn. 

Uncharted

I've been full of cold this weekend and have played a lot of Uncharted 4 in direct response.

It's a very beautiful game, and it's very pleasing to play. This is hardly news to anyone, of course, as it is an incredibly popular tentpole release, building on an already massively successful franchise. But then, there are plenty of games that are also mega popular and somehow, strangely, suck. So I guess popularity isn't all that big a deal.

Anyway. I like it. I like that it has a few core mechanics which it uses in a variety of creative ways. You can climb stuff. You can sneak about strangling people. You can do shooting. You can solve puzzles. Just enough to keep the gameplay varied, but not so much that the overall experience ends up feeling fragmented.

Nathan Drake - our cheerful, murderous protagonist - spends an awful lot of his time jumping about, grabbing hold of impossible ledges and swinging about in a wildly improbable manner. And, when I'm playing him, plummeting to his death on a regular basis.

Excitement! Adventure! Really wild things.

Most of the time this is thrilling and fun. There are two primary pleasures here. One is that you feel smart - each sequence of rickety rope bridges and jagged rock faces is a puzzle to be solved. It looks impossible, but there's a way through. And when you solve it, there's a little rush of joy at being so very clever. Apart from all those times you died. Let's forget those.

Then there's the vicarious thrill of being, for a little while, strong and dextrous enough to skip across ravines and swing from rope to rope. I can barely get off the sofa without going momentarily dizzy, so it's fun to feel like a strong, fit, impossibly agile hero as I skip lightly across a cliff face.

I do get slightly irritated with the game occasionally, when Nathan's ability to catch hold of things decides not to kick in. The problem with a protagonist who can grab onto the slenderest of ledges is when the game suddenly decides that no, that wasn't the kind of ledge you grab - that was a bit of ungrabbable scenery. The guys at Naughty Dog have tried hard to differentiate between 'game' ledges and 'aesthetic' ledges, but once in a while the difference is minimal, and I was left cursing the makers as Nathan plunged to his unreasonable doom.

Take that, evil doer

The combat mechanics are fine and one of the nice things about gameplay is the way that a stealth scenario can turn unexpectedly but seamlessly into a firefight. But I always feel a little like I've failed when that happens. I'm at my happiest sneaking around a graveyard, avoiding the patrolling soldiers and knocking them off, one by one, like an archeologically inclined Michael Myers.

The stealth is pretty good and the AI of the enemy units is convincing. I've spent many happy hours crouching motionless behind a wall, observing and calculating the patrol patterns of the soldiers below, formulating my murderous plans. The character animation makes them all seem pretty believable - an illusion only spoiled by the fact that they don't seem to notice all their friends silently disappearing, one by one. You'd think they'd wonder to themselves, "I'm sure there were seventeen of us a moment ago. Why has it gone so quiet?"

The puzzles are probably my least favourite part of the game, as they were with previous Uncharteds. I get why they are there, and they are impressive in how they've been worked out. But it all feels a little trial-and-error in the execution and I don't have that same sense of satisfaction as I get from traversing a tricky ravine, or taking out a bunch of bad guys without being seen. Maybe I'm just bad at puzzles.

So. A lovely game, which is giving me great pleasure. It looks good, too, and the dialogue works pretty well. I'd recommend it, but what's the point? If you're going to play it, you've already decided.

It's nice to know that in the world of AAA franchise games, there are still things of beauty to be found.

Breaking up is hard to do

Sad Adam Jensen.       Sadam Jensen.

So I've finally finished Deus Ex: Mankind Divided (until the next bit of DLC comes and waves its cybernetic tassels in my face). Overall it was pretty good, and I'm definitely going to play it again at some point. But not for a while. I teach games, so I need to play more games. Otherwise every session will be about Deus Ex, which isn't really in the best interests of the students. I know - I asked.

So now I'm faced with what to play next.

The answer should be obvious. I've got Oxenfree, sitting on the dashboard of the PS4, looking at me with adoring eyes. OK, yes, I told it I loved it. I played it for a while and got all excited about how beautiful it is and how atmospheric, and ooh the soundtrack. And I do want to go back to it.

But, promiscuous tease that I am, I went and downloaded Uncharted 4 the other day, because the PlayStation store had it on sale. So now that's sitting next to Oxenfree, pushing it's manly chest out as if to say "Come on, we both know I'm next."

And Oxenfree is looking a little alarmed, if I'm honest. Yes, it's pretty, and intelligent, and fun to be with. But Uncharted looks so damn exciting. And I'm so very weak.

My biggest fear is that Oxenfree will talk to the other games on the console. Those games that got pushed further down the dashboard as new games came along. Unfinished and unfulfilled.

"Oh yes," spits Invisible Inc. "He told me he loved me too. Until that whore Adam Jensen came along, and suddenly I'm sitting here with a bunch of saved games that he says he's definitely coming back to."

"He never came back to me either," sniffs Soma. Who might be tearful, but might just have a cold because the entire thing is set underwater and makes you feel wet and shivery and hang on I'm remembering now why I stopped playing.

Other games mutter and sulk from their dark corner of the game library. Will I ever finish what I started with Beyond Two Souls? I did get very annoyed with how it kept changing its mind about what mechanics to wear. Then there's a bunch of games who I haven't seen since we had a furious row about an unreasonable difficulty spike. And some who just seemed too high maintenance. Don't present me with a load of rules on the first date and expect a second.

And I'm sorry Ethan Carter. You're beautiful, but you're dull. Yes, you too, Everyone's Gone to the Rapture. I could look at you all day, but I'd be thinking of Metal Gear Solid's excellent stealth mechanics and emergent gameplay.

But no. I'm going to play Oxenfree. It's probably not that long, and it's perfect for Halloween month. Uncharted 4 will wait.

Oh, hang on. I said I'd see Virginia again this week.

And what about Volume? I never called Volume back.

And didn't I just download the remastered Resident Evil the other day?

And Dishonored 2 is out in a bit.

Sigh.