I continued that last campaign off-stream, and sadly it didn’t go well for me. But that’s to be expected of a roguelike. It just means we start over.

Fortunately, I was able to get past the first showdown before I hit Record.

I’ve hit the point in this roguelike where I haven’t beaten a campaign yet, but I feel like I have the skills and tools necessary in order to do that. Part of that was built in with my map knowledge from all the time I’ve spent in the World of Assassination trilogy, but the rest is coming from the many runs I’ve made both on and off stream.

For example, I didn’t know about the guard in the security room of Dubai that always holds a silenced SMG until I realized that guards weren’t being alerted by the gun I stole from him. These days, I try to start off in Dubai if at all possible simply because I want a silenced gun and I know that’s always available.

It’s a feature of the genre, and part of what I love about it.

We’re packing it in. Drake’s done with this adventure, and he wants to go home. I have no doubt that it will be as simple as stealing a boat and running off.

What do you mean we still have hours of the game left!?

I miss the days when we used to cheat like Weapon Select, Infinite Ammo, or Invincibility by beating video games. Looking at the Extras menu here in Uncharted 1 brought that thought back to me.

I remember replaying this game with Eddy’s Golden Gun and the Dragon Sniper, having access to both over the entire adventure. It made going for treasures and beating the game on the hardest difficulty worth doing.

Achievements are nice, but they aren’t the same.

Well, that didn’t go quite as planned. No matter, on to the next round!

As an interesting “side effect” to the way I played Hitman, I never grew terribly well acquainted with non-silenced weaponry. That means that I’m learning how far gun noises travel, and what guards do when alerted by loud gunfire live only now, despite playing missions in this engine since the 2016 Hitman game.

It’s honestly fun to realize even after all this time there’s a whole layer of systems and interactions that I haven’t yet mastered. It’s going to keep me coming back for sure.

Our progress through the fort is going smoothly. Hopefully, we’ll be able to catch up with Elena soon!

I like the minor detail that Nathan Drake is fluent in Indonesian, especially since we’re about to introduce a character in the next batch of episodes that he has a history with. It’s yet another way the writers communicate details about him without having to explicitly spell them out. Whoever this person is, he’s well-traveled and can handle himself in difficult situations as if he has some experience doing so.

And fun fact: When I tried to search “Buka Pintu” to double-check the translation, Uncharted was the first result. I suppose it’s become a minor meme in the Uncharted fandom.

Well, we’ve got our map back, and a lead as to what might have happened to our favorite journalist. The trail is starting to warm back up!

It has admittedly been a very long time since I’ve watched Zero Punctuation, but when Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune came out, Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw made a point in his review of the game that I do think about when I replay it. The vast majority of the people we are killing in the gameplay sections are various non-white minorities.

By no means do I say that with the intention of passing judgment on Naughty Dog specifically, because that was far from uncommon in the mid-to-late 2000s era of game development, especially since the “war on terror” was still firmly in the hearts and minds of Americans back then. It is still a point worth dissecting for how it tells us more about our culture than we’d be comfortable admitting to.

To Naughty Dog’s credit, this is something that gets addressed(?) in later entries, but it’s still a reminder of how much the industry has grown, despite how much more room it has left to grow. We are making progress, even if it’s at a frustratingly slow pace.

Our last run went well, but sometime after the stream ended I continued that run and failed in the attempt. Now, we’re making a fresh start, from the beginning. Let’s hope that this one is more successful.

It’s hard not to notice that Freelancer is appreciably more difficult than a regular run of Hitman, simply because there are so many variables that it’s difficult to control for them. And yet, the core of learning any roguelike is mastering the systems so that we can control the variables. To a large degree, I’m still working on that.

Another aspect of it is that I trying to remember details about each map that have been buried in my mind for quite some time. At some point, I stopped logging in to take on Elusive Targets, having already obtained all the suits I want as rewards from that mode. For that reason, I’m actually far rustier than I assumed I would be, and a lot of what I’m doing is coming from learning the systems again.

Thanks to the power of memes, we successfully got the guards to Buka the Pintu. Let’s find out what awaits behind the Pintu.

We had a very good conversation in the stream chat during this segment about how the way reloading works encourages us to constantly hot-swap to whatever guns happen to be lying from the goons we killed. It’s faster to pick up a new weapon, one that’s always guaranteed to have a full clip, than it is to reload our weapon in hand. So the optimal strategy isn’t to hoard clips, but to constantly scavenge weapons from the ground.

This is why we have to choose whether or not we pick up ammo instead of automatically siphoning it up once we run over it. To some extent, the intent is to mirror what a treasure hunter like Drake might do in that situation. Rather than keep an arsenal of weapons on hand, we’re constantly pilfering our enemies’ arms and improvizing our way through tight spots. It’s also why we’re only allowed to carry one pistol and one long gun on our person at a time. Unlike Ratchet, for example, Drake is no walking armory.

It’s interesting how small decisions like this can have huge impacts on the fundamental gameplay loop.

We’ve found our first clue, and that means it’s time to begin the hunt for fame and fortune.

It’s interesting to go back to Uncharted in light of the criticisms that Naughty Dog has received over the past few years regarding their style of game design. Drake’s Fortune wasn’t the game that set them on the path to “cinematic” games. (That was probably Jak 2.) It is the game that cemented that style as the studio’s identity.

The big critique is the story and plot of Naughty Dog games are segmented off almost entirely from the playable aspects of the game. Neither section contradicts the other, but neither do they complement each other. One can watch the cutscenes of a Naughty Dog game, and nothing else, and still have a strong idea of what’s going on without watching a single section of the gameplay. In a medium where the most distinguishing factor is interactivity, there’s a strong argument to be had that just making “playable movies” isn’t doing enough at this point. Maybe it never was enough, we just didn’t know any better back in 2007.

That said, I can’t deny that I loved all of these games back in the day, and still do even now. It’s nostalgic, reminding me of the old high school days.

I don’t brand this site or my YouTube channel as nostalgia/retro focused, but it’s no secret that a lot of games I play here are from my childhood. As a completely unrelated fact, the PS3 came out in 2006, making it technically old enough to be considered a retro console.

Additionally, that means titles like Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune, a game from my high school years that happens to be the one we’re starting today, are also considered retro. Do you feel old yet? I certainly do.

What stands out to me open this opening section of Uncharted is that it wastes no time telling us everything we need to know about our central cast and their relationships with each other. Within the first fifteen minutes, through a combination of well-structured lines and excellent performances by the central cast, each of them forms a strong identity that carries them throughout not just this game, but the rest of the franchise going forth.

We’re immediately introduced to the central hook that Nathan Drake is allegedly descended from Sir Francis Drake, who was after a treasure that will be the focal point for our adventure. His early dialogue about pirates and his lack of permits also introduces the roguish mischievousness of his character and his ability to handle himself in tight situations.

By contrast, Elena is almost his polar opposite. Working a legitimate job as a journalist, she’s visibly out of her element, yet perceptive and flexible enough to figure things out and do what she has to as she goes along. Though Sully has less screen time in the first scene, our trek through the jungle with him does a good job of establishing who he is and how he’s more interested in the financial rewards than the archeological. None of this is expressly said but nonetheless made clear and obvious simply by how the characters react to the situations they’re in.

Props to both the writers and the actors in pulling that off.

This run has gone significantly smoother than the previous one, and now we’re at end of the first syndicate. Hopefully, it will go a lot better than the last one.

One of the coolest aspects of these “boss battles” is that we have to deduce, using the profile we’ve been provided by our intel, which of our suspects is our true target. It’s similar to Elusive Targets in that we’re running on limited information, but more forgiving in that we’re left with more information than a typical Elusive Target briefing. We have a set of possible targets to sift through, rather than a whole map.

Lucky for us, once we’ve done that, we don’t need to worry about witnesses. As long as we can escape, it doesn’t matter how public our assassination is. It was a little touch and go there. But once we took care of the immediate area, we were able to stroll right out of the facility to freedom.

I look forward to playing more Freelancer.