I’ve been FFXIV-clean for nearly a week now, which will change when the weekly reset happens tonight and I need to log on and spend about three hours doing stuff that I will then be locked out of doing again for a week.  It’s kind of a nice design for an MMO in that regard.

Anyway, I have been finding other games to play.  I wound up playing through the entirety of Lifeless Planet again after mentioning it in my last post, I am trying to get to grips with New Super Mario Bros. U Deluxe, and I started Uncharted 4.

Uncharted 4 is pretty good! I have a couple of quibbles with it that I will get to in a few sentences, but it really is a textbook example of how to bring a character out of retirement after the very satisfying conclusion to Uncharted 3.

So.  I started Uncharted 4 two nights ago, got up to the beginning of Chapter 5, decided it was a good place to call it quits for the night, and then did not play it last night.  I was watching some anime instead.  The way I spend my evenings has not markedly changed since I was sixteen, and I acknowledge a certain lack of maturity here.

So, I’m not sure whether the email I got from Playstation this morning was based on “Person has started playing a video game” or “Person started to play a video game and then did not play it the next night, let’s give them a subtle prompt to get back to it”, but…

I’ve mentioned before that I think the best thing about the last couple of generations of consoles is that developers are able to use metrics to design games that people will play and finish, as opposed to front-loading everything with in-house play testers. This sort of thing is great in my books.

Yes, admittedly, a little creepy if looked at through a certain lens.

Anyway.  I mentioned a couple of quibbles with Uncharted 4.  Really, it’s just the one quibble, which is the grappling hook gadget that they added to spice up the traversal actions.

Nate is amazingly well-animated – all of the characters are – and it’s obvious that the Naughty Dog mo-cap team worked a lot of long nights getting everything to flow like you were controlling a real, if impossibly athletic and fit, human being.

Then they added the grappling hook, which has these impossibly fast and physics-defying animations whenever it’s released from a hold.  It’s a dumb thing to be bugged by, but just stands out in a bad way.

And yes, that is the worst thing I can find to say about this game.  Maybe it will have a super annoying level later on that I can complain about.  There’s already been an underwater level, if we get an “underwater level BUT WITH SHARKS” I already have about half the rant post written in my head.

I don’t like sharks.

Until next time!