Drake’s Fortune: Naughty Dog’s Pilot [Part Two]

This Game Still Does Bad Stuff

Beauty and spectacle aside, it really is fun to watch this game battle against sins of gaming’s past, only to then fall into the old trappings at points. I think folks who play games accept the exploding barrel as a harmless novelty, like moviegoers accept the person walking away from an explosion (without dealing with the immense heat or flying debris) in slow motion as dumb but still sort of cool. However, there’s a reason stuff like escort missions or turret-based sequences have really cooled down over the years, and it’s because that sort of stuff wasn’t dumb but harmless. Instead, those things were actively infuriating much of the time.

You come to a part in this game where Elena rescues you, but then you have to escape via getaway Jeep. You use unlimited grenade ammo on a slew of oncoming pirates to pull this off. It’s all very bland and uninteresting, even with the dope explosions. Now, to be fair, the other Uncharted games do this sort of sequence as well to break up the type of action you’re dealing with moment to moment. It’s just those later moments got better because of the beauty and absurdity of them. With that in mind, I can accept the escape mission as a testing ground for future cooler versions of this sequence. After all, what are new IPs but testing grounds for the hundred iterations that will come along soon after?

…Sorry that was really pessimistic, I take it back!

So really, what this comes down to are mother-fucking jet skis. I used to ride jet skis a decent amount. I never thought I could hate jet skis. This hypothesis is proven false by Uncharted — and I seriously don’t know how I forgot about the jet skis in this game, especially because you have to drive them twice. Deux fois. Merde.

Sweet, sweet death will save me from all of this.

What makes this even better is it’s not like the developers figured out jet skis the second time around. The second jet ski sequence is not a mea culpa. They just learned new ways to do dumb stuff with jet skis.

The first sequence you’re being shot and trying to avoid exploding barrels while shooting back. Then during the second sequence you get the exploding barrel origin story as you travel against the malicious current to see barrels being dropped into the river to travel downstream. See y’all, there is a real reason there’s an infinite number of barrels here!

It doesn’t sound that bad, but it’s truly awful (you can see why if you watch the YouTube clips). The controls are more or less the biggest culprit. In the first sequence, the best strategy seems to be drive for two seconds, then stop and try to shoot the barrels you can see, as well as the spawned bad guys. You can’t drive and shoot because that would make too much sense, and there’s no way to aim while driving. You’re also controlling both Elena and Nate during these sequences, which also does not really make sense. Why not just control one or the other so this job isn’t so needlessly tedious? Why make me do this at all?

The second sequence just adds to the bad ideas. You have to stop and shoot still, but now let’s add a crazy current so you’re indestructible-except-for-explosions jet ski can bash off the rocks in ridiculous fashion while going upstream.

Yeah, no this is fun. I’m having fun right now. This is what fun feels like, I know it.

Yeah, no this is fun. I’m having fun right now. This is what fun feels like, I know it. If I were able to time travel, I have no doubts I would go back and watch some randoms bash off rock walls at Naughty Dog’s studio during a play test.

Nate, can you sum up how I feel about jet skis?

Thanks, man.

That messy business aside, a lot of the other “bad” in the game is really just goofy stuff where you see the Uncharted developers trying to wrangle Nathan Drake into the video game universe:

“People always ask me, ‘tell me something nobody else knows about you.’ Well how about this: I can scale the unimaginable, but falling in a body of water from 12-15 feet kills me.” – Nathan Drake

The same thing goes for the fisticuffs. Mashing the square button is your best bet in hand-to-hand combat, but the developers tried to create a basic “square, triangle, square” timing sequence to create a more powerful combo. The only problem is the combo is wildly inconsistent:

I try three times to get the “triangle” timing of the punch there, but no dice. Finally, on the fourth hit the enemy just goes down. If I recall, by the time Uncharted 3 came out, the developers had gone to a Batman-style counter punch system that still wasn’t amazing but was way better than this novelty item.

For more of Chase’s work, you can find him at @ChaseBecotte on Twitter. The final part of “Drake’s Fortune: Naughty Dog’s Pilot” will be posted this time next week (Tuesday, November 21st).