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Entry tags:	reviews, videogames

AV Club gives C grade to Uncharted 3; fanboys go ballistic
Scott Jones of the AV Club gave a mixed review of Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception, a hotly anticipated game for PlayStation 3. Jones praised the storyline and dialogue but criticized the gameplay mechanics:

[T]he story still zips and characters are still conflicted, but targeting is as twitchy as ever, bad guys still require three or four shotgun blasts to the head before they’re deterred, and the game’s star, Nathan Drake, still has no clue whatsoever about how to crouch. Two years after Thieves, Uncharted’s gameplay mechanics and conventions are no longer dated; they’re borderline archaic.

His final grade for the game was a C.

In the comments section, things started out innocuously enough. There was a minor kerfuffle over whether the game's protagonist was a serial killer. A couple of people speculated about what would happen when the review showed up on Metacritic. "Frankly," said one, "if I had the power to fuck with metacritic like this, I don't think I'd be able to resist giving an F to every single triple-A title. It's like having nuclear launch codes for internet fanboys."

And the internet fanboys did not disappoint. You see, elsewhere on the internet, game critics were creaming themselves about how wonderful Uncharted 3 was. Every single other review on Metacritic was positive; Jones's review was the only mixed one. When the Uncharted fanboys saw the AV Club review, they realized that one bad review was not a threat to their beloved game franchise, and moved on with their lives.

--

Just kidding. They registered for the AV Club so they could comment about how Scott Jones is WRONG WRONG WRONG. The sarcastic hipster types who populate the AV Club comments section were only too happy to bait them.

Some highlights:

Let me tell you how much I don't care about this review! (p. 2)
"Another worthless 'review' by Scott Jones. This guy is a troll and a pure idiot and it's unfortunate this this reviewer and website get attention, hits and web traffic that it doesn't deserve." (p. 2)
A surprisingly thoughtful thread on grade inflation in game reviews (p. 2)
An AV Club staff writer responds to a stupid comment with an allusion to Shakespeare. Unsurprisingly, the commenter doesn't get it. (p. 2)
"It just sounds like DRand is pissed off that this review doesn't spend 6 paragraphs blabbering on about how amazingly well the light bounces off Nathan Drake's immaculately modeled crotch bulge." (p. 2)
I am better than everyone else here because I am a second year med student. (p. 2)
People make fun of IGN's sycophantic reviews and grade inflation (p. 2)
"You are not the Roger Ebert of computer games" (p. 3)
Some asshole named Eric D. Molino doesn't understand formatting or threads (pp. 3-4)
Everyone likes a good Commie joke (p. 4)
I know the gameplay is good, because I watched a walkthrough! (p. 4)
"I could pull a bunch of hard facts out of my ass to prove this guy is an idiot, but I'll just state my opinion." (p. 4)
Microsoft or Activision must have paid Jones to give this game a bad review! (p. 5)
"Sony is going to sell millions of PS3s with this game and you losers will still be in you're moms basement... HAHAHAHAHAHA" (p. 5)
"Are you insane? And by 'insane,' I mean clinically, non-ironically, eat-your-own-shit-and-strangle-kittens batshit nuts." (p. 6)

Here's the best part: the angry comments were posted on October 30 and 31, but Uncharted 3 wasn't released until November 1 (November 2 in Europe). That's right: these valiant fanboys were defending the besmirched honor of a game they'd never played. Except for this guy. Maybe.

EDIT: I just realized that my links to "highlights" aren't working. That's just the AV Club comments system being difficult -- I can't link to anything past page 1. I've put in some page numbers to help out a little.

Also: Eurogamer, which published an 8/10 review of Uncharted 3, has also been overrun with angry fanboys lately. 8/10!

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kedase_derragar
2011-11-03 11:50 am UTC (link)

Oh man, fanboy rage is the best rage.

I have to admit to not knowing that much about these games, other than that Drake is often used as a prime example of the "grizzled brown-haired witty guy" main character trope that's been going around for a while, and that I remember having to change the language to Spanish halfway through the demo of the first game because the enemies' accents were so stereotypical and Drake's English voice was starting to tick me off (I can only take so much Nolan North at a time).

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	braisinhussy 2011-11-05 08:42 pm UTC (link)
	(I can only take so much Nolan North at a time) That's gotta be hard. Isn't he in every game these days? (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

kedase_derragar
2011-11-05 10:12 pm UTC (link)

It helps that my tastes don't run toward FPSs and other shooters, which are where most of his big roles are.

It depends on the role and the writing, too. I like him as Desmond in Assassin's Creed, for example, because he doesn't try to be witty or come across as smarmy most of the time; he's a more subdued character. The fact that I like everything else about Assassin's Creed games probably has something to do with it as well - my dislike for the Uncharted demo's mechanics made me more annoyed at Drake than I would have been if I'd liked them.

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mcity
2011-11-06 02:25 am UTC (link)

>Drake is often used as a prime example of the "grizzled brown-haired witty guy" main character trope that's been going around for a while,

Here's the thing; he's not so much an example as the codifier. Naughty Dog seemed to be going for an updated, amoral combination of Lara Croft and Indiana Jones, and were immensely successful. It's like the flood of animals with attitude games after Sonic, WW2 games after Medal of Honor, the sci-fi shooters after Halo, the modern military games after Modern Warfare, etc. The "unoriginality" stems less from the originals (and sequels) being unoriginal, and more from everyone else imitating them.

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