Half-Tucked: Uncharted: Drake's Fortune (PS3) Review

Nothing dates a game quicker than its alignment with a fashion trend. Enter the half-tuck, a clothing statement brought to the mainstream by action hero protagonist, Nathan Drake in 2007 for his debut in Uncharted: Drake's Fortune (UDF). What exactly is the half-tuck? It's when you tuck in about half of your shirt, starting front and center, and continuing to tuck about 3/4 of the way back on one side. The rest of the shirt hangs loose. Nathan Drake wears a plain ol' grey long sleeve T-shirt in UDF, but the look can also be accomplished with a button-up for a more pronounced contrast between tucked and untucked.

The problem with the half-tuck is that it's an inherently conflicted fashion statement. It's a style that is visibly and hopelessly contrived, like sculpting your hair to look like you have "bed-head." You want to appear like you don't care about your appearance, but obviously you care a whole lot. The half-tuck is a signature of UDF, but it's also metaphor for the game's aspirations and shortcomings.

What are you supposed to think when you see someone sporting a half-tuck? Perhaps that even though they don't have time for fashion, they can still be fashionable. The half-tuck implies dressing with nonchalance or in a great hurry. They would have tucked their shirt in all the way if they simply had the time, but they don't and dammit they have more important things to worry about! Maybe they were even interrupted in the act of tucking and were so preoccupied that they never got around to finishing the task.

This is the dream back-story of the half-tucker, but in reality you're envisioning a desperate individual in front of a mirror delicately pinching tufts of fabric around their waistline, failing, and starting the process all over again, until reaching just the right aesthetic to illustrate the unspoken tall-tale. It's either that or it looks like the individual is just really bad at shirt tucking. Not helping matters is the half-tuck's frat-boy association as a cousin to the much maligned collar pop of the mid-00s.

The thing is, Nathan Drake, and the whole of UDF sort of pulls off the half-tuck, but not without revealing the artifice behind it. UDF is a gorgeous game, rendering ocean ripples, jungle foliage, and crumbling stonework in exquisite, realistic detail. Drake himself is a handsome guy, believable both as an adventurer and action movie star. There's a cocky swagger to the half-tuck that sets out to deflect focus from the contrivance of the situation. The pretty visuals and captivating character performances are essentially UDF's big, shiny belt buckle, doing their part to sell the whole ensemble. If the game wasn't otherwise so chock full of enemy bullet sponges and prescribed arenas it might have had me. Drake realizes and embodies the "interrupted" half-tuck fantasy as the whole game revolves around dudes with guns surprising him when he's going about his treasure hunting business. While this duality of activities suits Drake quite well as a character, as an interactive experience UDF feels torn between wanting to be a film and a game.

Surprisingly UDF actually has more problems being a game than it does a movie. The blockbuster action flicks that UDF tries to evoke (most obviously the Indiana Jones series) are delivered to viewers with a snappy pace and constant forward progress. The old 7-second shot length standards for film were brought to the fore in blockbusters to ensure that the film was holding viewers' attention, constantly offering fresh angles and scenes. Through UDF's cutscenes and more directed, narrowly focused adventuring bits, it possesses that blockbuster energy. However, when most firefights break out, that momentum slows to a crawl or stops entirely, like an ill-conceived long-take in desperate need of an editor.

Nathan Drake and that whole of UDF is in the constant state of interruption, and not to its benefit. While the incredible body count Drake racks up is truly preposterous and at odds with his archaeologist chops and nice-guy demeanor, gunfights also bog the gameplay flow down, like the game is stretching to fill time. There are a couple sequences where you navigate narrow waterways on a jet-ski as foot soldiers fire upon you and floating explosive barrels that line your path. Conventional action movie logic says that jet-skis should go fast, and if you can take out some key barrels and enemies on your way from point A to B, then you've got a potentially thrilling scene on your hands. The problem is that you'll die and restart the sequence from the beginning if you try to run n' gun it. In order to best the gauntlet, you have to treat the area like a stealth sequence, edging your way around corners, taking out nearly every shooter and barrel from a distance before treading out into open water. It's the wrong kind of nonsense.

The jet-ski areas are the most extreme example of the failed logic behind UDF's pacing, but this approach is apparent in nearly every instance where you enter a room full of waist-high barriers. The level design itself is actually quite inventive in most cases, but third-person shooting, when dialed to the repetitive settings of UDF, in incongruous with the cadence the game is otherwise going for. Is Nathan Drake an everyman or a super-soldier? Depending on which part of the game you're playing, either could be correct, but never both at once. You see where I'm going with this?

In fact, Drake's half-tuck is perfect, too perfect. It remains in immaculate order throughout the entire game despite numerous climbing and jumping sequences that would surely untuck a lesser man's garment. Over time, the half-tuck becomes more of a running motif than a simple costume accessory. At every vault, splash, and shimmy, the half-tuck defies the laws of physics and remains in place, an unflinching facade. While that dedication is something a script supervisor could be very proud of, it's all too telling of UDF's style-over-substance approach to game design. On occasion, exceptional style can be enough to go on, but with UDF, we're not talking about high-concept fashion. We're talking about the half-tuck.

Ever-Present: Proteus (Mac) Review

Your eyes open.

You're standing on water, but can't look at yourself to see how it's possible. Moving forward in a smooth, hovering fashion, an island appears in the distance. Music manifests out of the air and from the living plants and creatures on the island. You hear the sound of cascading flutes and sliding, almost theremin-like, synthesizer tones interjected with arrhythmic bells and chimes. You proceed further into the island. The trees are lush with pink flowers. Frogs, squirrels, rabbits, and crabs are just some of the active wildlife you encounter; each goes about its business, only scurrying away when you get close. It feels like springtime and the island is so teeming with life, it's singing.

Eventually, the sun disappears beneath the horizon and night falls. Shooting stars paint the deep blue sky with streaks of light. In the distance you notice a swarm of twinkling sprites hanging low like a fog. Egging flickers beckon you nearer, showing the way. You come upon the glimmering mass above a circle of gravestones. You cross their perimeter and the lights begin to swirl into a spinning hoop near the ground. The music flurries with excitement like a Four Tet track coming to a head. You look up to witness day and night cycles speed past in mere moments, like the view from the surface of a globe as someone bats it with their fingertips at full force. The sun and the moon take turns flinging from east to west. You enter the cyclone and everything turns white.

When you come to, you notice a new, drier color palette and bizarre flying creatures whose chirps sound like wood block strums. The whole island has transitioned to another phase. Spring has given way to summer.

This is likely how the beginning of your first run through Proteus will go down. The game does not pedantically tell you what you need to do, but it does imply direction through visual and audible cues. Most importantly, it invites you to play with locative music systems in a retro-fantastical environment. There is a minimalist narrative and a definitive end to Proteus, but due to its brief duration, you'll want to play it multiple times. Like a live stage performance, many elements of Proteus' island will reappear on successive playthroughs, but always in a slightly tweaked arrangement.

Proteus is a game that values the present above all else. The island is procedurally generated when you click to start play, and will render uniquely for every new beginning. With any real world location there is an implicit history and an undetermined future, but Proteus' island is your ephemeral playground –born into existence at your whim, and gone forever when you're finished. Even if the island had a life beyond your play time, your presence has no empirical effect on it. There's no evidence that you actually touch the island; you begin Proteus in the ocean and end it in the sky.

Your life in Proteus is ultimately transient, drifting through the seasons until reaching the game's inevitable finale in an hour or less. You can avoid the sparkling portals and remain in spring for as long as you want, but the transports will remain, persistently summoning you to march onward with their tantalizing chimes and magic potential. At some point you'll run out of things to do and succumb to progression.

There's no turning back from the decision to shift time forward. Once the season has changed, it's impossible to reverse it. However, since Proteus can have such a brisk run-time, there's no pressure to see everything in one go. Each successive playthough is likely to reveal something new about the island that you didn't come across before. You're part of the island's live act, and it's a venue that prides itself on improv.

The locative sound and music design in Proteus is a hybrid of live performance and musique concrète that pushes you to compose music instead of merely listening to it. To play Proteus is to be a kind of live found-sound DJ. Everything and everywhere on the island is musical. Muted horns bleat from hilltops at all times, awaiting your open ear, and dull bass rumbles emanate from gravestones as you pass each individually. The possibilities for music composition in Proteus are meant to mimic what it's like to listen to the world around you, like a virtual John Cage experiment.

Speaking again to Proteus' impermanent tendencies, there is no way to record music mixes in-game. If you want to listen to the sounds of Proteus, you have to get in there and actively trigger them again. This is not such a bad thing since, pleasant as Proteus is to listen to, the music works best as an accompaniment to the pixelated island. Removed from the computer screen, your score would still sound like a component of a larger work. When you play Proteus, you generate (or curate) sounds as part of the whole experience; it's not a stand-alone music production tool.

You may not be able to record your musical performances in Proteus, but you can actually save your progress using the game's Postcard system. To generate a Postcard you can press F9 to snap a screenshot containing code-embedded pixels that the game can use to rebuild the island depicted in the image. At first this may seem to disrupt Proteus' transient motif, but consider that these save states are called Postcards for a reason. Postcards, in Proteus or otherwise, are meant for sharing. Traditionally when you buy a postcard, you write about where you are and what you've been doing recently on the back and mail it off to a friend or loved one. You'll probably never see that postcard again, but will potentially always remember the events that you wrote about. Likewise, you'll recall the first time you see an aurora borealis in Proteus, but to return to that moment via Postcard removes the euphoria of discovery from the equation. Your save state is interactive nostalgia, and only a facade of what you remember.

In 2007 French house music duo Daft Punk embarked on a much-lauded live performance tour. They garnered a great deal of attention for their accompanying light show that included multiple layers of LED-laced gridwork, complete with a glowing pyramid for the band's cockpit. The visual show was a vital part of what made the tour special, even though the music itself had its own constant stream of highlights. A live album was released, but never a video supplement. Band member Thomas Bangalter addressed the curious omission, saying "the thousands of clips on the internet are better to us than any DVD that could have been released." Basically, you either had to be there or the closest you're going to get to the feeling of the show is the shaky, blurry phone camera footage of fans recording as the dance in a crowded pit full of raw energy.

Proteus is a far more subdued undertaking than a Daft Punk show, but the notion of presence, the physicality of sharing a space with a spectacular event, is equally resonant. Proteus' island is not a front for developer-mandated objectives, it's a place that you live, and life is short. The fleeting, untouchable nature of Proteus is a call for action, participation, and creation. Enjoy it while it lasts.

Recap: Chris Melissinos at NYU Game Center

The term "enthusiast" gets thrown around a bit when talking about people who write, discuss, and make videos about video games. Chris Melissinos does not work in the gaming press, but he may be the truest form of video game enthusiast that I've encountered. The man, a guest curator for the Smithsonian Institution's The Art of Video Games exhibition, loves games, and the excitement and optimism he has for the medium is palpable. A couple weeks back, Melissinos gave a lecture at NYU Game Center on the rise of video games as a cultural power and a postmortem on the Smithsonian show. Full video of the talk and Q/A is embedded below.

Chris covered a lot of territory, but one aspect he returned to a few times was games as a part of youth culture. He recounted his own first experiences with games and the magic of programming, even from an early age. He referred to the generation of kids that brought video game consoles into the home environment in the 70s and early 80s as "bit babies." According to Melissinos, bit babes were largely misunderstood by older generations that didn't play video games and were mystified by this emerging medium that had seemingly hypnotized young people. The situation has changed now that bit babies have grown up and many have children of their own. Melissinos admitted he and his family play games almost every day, and is elated to see his kids discover facets of games that resonate strongly with them.

In Melissinos' section about The Art of Video Games, he again touched upon the powerful impression that games leave on youth. He observed the ways that families navigated in the exhibition. Children often lead the way at the beginning, powered by the excitement of seeing games that they recognize and may even own on display in a museum. Remember, these are kids that are more or less growing up without physical arcades to frequent, so having a real space for video games is a kind of novelty in itself. Eventually families would reach the room with the historic timeline of game consoles, and here the parents are reminded of the games they used to play. They point out titles on decades-old systems and explain them to their kids. The parents may not have played Pitfall! or Missile Command in over 20 years, but the photographic recollection of how mechanics work and tales about their social interactions with games often came to the surface.

Many of the video games that I remember from my youth (a child of the NES) may not have been aspiring to be viewed as artworks, they were just fun to play. Melissinos noted that while social betterment and self-reflection are worthwhile pursuits for games, we shouldn't discount those games that simply set out to provide joy for the player. He goes on that when a game is able to make you smile, or pleased with what you have accomplished, that sometimes that's enough. Makes me wonder what I'd think of games like Bubble Bobble or Marble Madness if they debuted in 2013.

Chris Melissinos' The Art of Video Games exhibition is currently on view at Seattle's EMP Museum. To read my thoughts on the show, check out my review from last March.



:top image by Dave Edstrom: