Uncharted: Drake's Fortune

But I've played every Tomb Raider, and I've completed Drake's Fortune, and the similarities are way too great. I was trying to make a serious point (in a humourous way) that, in light of their being no "Real" Tomb Raider for this Christmas, Sony made a deliberate decision to create their own replacement. And they did a bloody good job. They made a great looking game, with a good story, and a good control method. But it was too short, and the puzzles were too few, and too easy.


Calling it a Tomb Raider rip off is not, in and of itself, hilarious in any way. That's why I tried to make it at least a little amusing with the whole late night war-room meeting and everything. What I didn't realise was that daring to give a game (that doesn't deserve 90%) less than 90% would make so many people react like I'd killed their dogs.

Being called an anti-PS3 fanboy, however, is entirely hilarious, considering the number of times I've been called an anti-Xbox fanboy. I own a PS3, and have written in its support on these forums many many times. I've been reviewing games for 17 years, so I'm far from an anything-BOY.

I stand by the score. If I'd paid £40 for this game, I'd be pissed that I could finish it at a single sitting. But despite that it is a really good game. It's a sad sad reflection on games review scoring when 86% is seen as a kicking.

When the journos of a gaming site start to refer to their readership as 'bitches', and their editors defend their actions on public forums, you know that they're in trouble.

I hope your advertisers do the appropriate thing and take their business elsewhere.

he was referring to a portion of the readership, and if the shoe fits.. i havent seen such a rabid sony fanboy grouping for a while, what brought you out of the woodwork? finally thought you all had a AAA title? :P

is it the same IP address for all these posts SPOnG? wouldnt suprise me

I'm pretty sure I know who it was who called you anti-Xbox and the two top suspects ('course I might be suspect mumber 3, it wasn't me was it?) are both 'boys of questionable mental faculties. I consider you to be one of the most objective voices around, anonymous bitches' opinions nonwithstanding.

Endeavor to perservere.

'Course I'm still not sold on the anonymous postings, there are few I've seen that actually contributed to the quality of the site, and many that degrade it. Any good reason why some of these (the blatantly spammy ones) posts aren't deleted? Does it serve any purpose to keep Disney films in the recent forum posts? I doubt very much if the spammers in question will read the edited version and realize the error of their ways.

As a PS3 owner I happen to think 86% is a good score, and I've never understood why people seem so obsessed with the magical 90% (9/10) threshold. Saying that though I think starting the review with "The most important thing to do when making a blatant rip-off of Tomb Raider" sets an initial derogatory tone, that could mean a reader dismissing the game from the outset if they couldn't be bothered to read the whole 5 pages.

There seems to be a belief that because current gen games look better than last gen games, they should be default receive better scores. This is rubbish, graphical quality should only ever be a peripheral concern in scoring a review, gameplay is utmost, and value for money counts for a lot. Drakes is too short, and the puzzles are too few and too easy - which mitigates against its value for money from my point of view.


It wasn't intended to be a derogatory tone, I was meant to be an incendiary one, designed to make people prick up their ears. What I underestimated was the puerile nature of very many Internet users. I didn't realise quite how timidly they herd together, scared of anything that challenges their dogma, afraid of individual thought.

But because a game is a rip-off of another game is not a valid reason to dismiss it. Very few games are truly original, most are influenced by another game, though not all are as heavily influenced as Uncharted is. But the point of my review is that I don't think this influence is at all accidental. I think that Sony is very aware that Tomb Raider has done a lot to sell both its previous consoles, and they wanted a Tomb Raider like game to bolster an otherwise weak Christmas line up.

But they are not our readers. They are people who saw the review listed on N4G,and came here to offer puerile and stupid comments, often without actually reading the review.


So, what you are actually saying there is because we have an opinion that differs from your own you want us to lose our livelihood. That's tolerant of you. I really wish you had the balls to say that to my face, but you don't and never will have.

It seems that these days an "average" game gets a score of 75% so to set a "good" game apart it must get 90% or higher.

When was the last time you saw a review that was less than 50%? When was the last time you played a below average game?

I'll bet the latter happened more recently than the former.

Yep it's stupid. But games journalists have made a rod for there own back over the years by over rating a lot of average games and also the mega hyped games (cough*** Halo 3*** cough)


I played the demo of Conan, it was s**t. A GCSE copy of God of War, with an 80 year old steroid abuse character as the main protagonist and Gamespot rated it the same as Ratchett & Clank. ???

I don't really trust anyone anymore.

There are still a few places you can find honest reviews of sub par games. Here in the States, G4TV's X-Play routinely hands out 1/5 and 2/5 to games that deserve it. SPOnG doesn't churn out nearly the volume of reviews, and the ones you do choose to review are usually not those games. X-Play on the other hand, reviews a large number of titles, and inevitably some of them are stinkers, but the majority of games end up with a 3/5 (which is as it should be). Bad reviews also make for some good TV. By sticking to the 5 point system (no halvsies!) they avoid some of the nitpicking involved. IMNSHO, a 100-point scale is too precise, not that I advocate change here on SPOnG (tradition counts for something), it just opens to the door to quibbling. (Not that I'm immune, I myself did a bit of quibbling over the Forza 2 score)

Perhaps SPOnG needs to add a bad game review feature, both to warn people off crap, and provide a sense of scale.

In any event, I agree that people have become accustomed to superlative scores for games that are merely above average.

I find a 1-5 score system has too few levels, you basically have Useless, Bad, Average, Good and Excellent. Logically, you should get a statistical bell curve and have only two or three 1s and 5s in a year with many more 2s and 4s and a huge number of 3s.

That means you can't differentiate between games that are average but enjoyable and average but annoying. This, I find, leads to a flattening of the bell curve and a more general spread, i.e. more non-3 scores than there should be.


Well, if you can remember that far back, we used to use an A-F grading system that allowed for +/- modifiers, but nobody understood it. We originally went for that because it's less precise and also less open to quibbling over tiny percentage differences in opinion.

We moved to a %age system because it's more universally understood. We did toy with the idea of a 0-10 scale, but then you will eventually get a game that's really a 6.5 and it's a slippery slope to a 0.0-10.0 scale which is effectively a %age system anyway.

The problem with a %age system is that there is the underlying issue that 100% should be perfect, can't be beaten (for now if you take time context or hardware generations into your reckoning) and that 0% should be something that won't even load. Again the bell curve should come into it, but you and I know that on balance the curve these days is centred around 75% or so.

It seems games get a free 50% for loading, having some sort of control scheme and graphics that don't rip your eyes out and stamp on them.

This is assuming you review a large, representative sample of games. As I have noted SPOnG does not fill either one of those criteria, for good reasons. As far as having too few levels...game reviews are obviously subjective, eventually people are going to have to make up their own minds. I think the five categories you listed above are exactly the kind and level of information people require in a quick score. Useless speaks for itself. Bad, only if you're a completeist fanboy. Average, you have to decide for yourself, but pending the actual review, it might be worth a look. Good, better than Average. Excellent...its merits far outweigh any flaws.



You differentiate between them the same way you differentiate between two games with similar scores under ANY system. You read the review. It takes a certain kind of courage (or an unassailible position) to keep churning out 3/5s...X-Play has devoted an entire episode to explaining their rating system for the mentally challenged. But once again, given the games that SPOnG does choose to review, the 4s and 5s would be disproportionaly represnted, and 1s not at all, for legitimate reason. (Can't be bothered with rubbish)



Oh yeah, I do seem to recall this. Actually I don't thinnk much has really changed...more on this...



I know now know why the curve centers on 75% or so...took you mentioning the old "grading" system. Seems obvious to me now, everyone is interpreting the percentage score in terms of marks (I believe thats the term you Brits use). Where 50% isn't average, its a big fat FAIL. Might as well go back to the old system, I think they understood it just fine...they're still using it subconsciously.

That's an interesting thought, but I think there's more to it than that. If we are talking of academic grades, etc. then it's usually assumed that under 40% is a fail and 70% and over is the highest grade.

For example (and this may have changed since I went to University) it was always explained to me that BSc grades were similar to the following: <40% Fail, 40-49% 3rd, 50-59% 2.2, 60-69% 2.1, 70%+ 1st. As you can see that follows a bell curve centred on 50%.

If we followed that scoring system (even subconsciously) then we've just given Uncharted a better than best score. On the other hand, if we think of 40% as the rock-bottom score that even a completest would not consider buying below and 70% as the ceiling of good but limited appeal games, we may have a system.

In this system, if a game has over 70%, the chances are you will like it, whoever you are, the higher the score, the more likely it is that you will. A 90% score would be for an almost locked-on everybody will like it game, but there are some issues that stop the game from being perfect.

The problem with that system is that very few games will get over 70%. I'm not a huge fan of FPS games and there are those that actively hate them, so Halo 3 wouldn't be able to get much over 70%. Imagine the furore if a site game Halo 3 a 75% and said it was an excellent FPS, but had limited appeal to those outside the fans of that genre.

As you say, scoring is subjective, but at the moment there appear to be many more games scoring very highly on average than there are scoring lower. Maybe we are going through a time of gaming excellence and each and every game deserves over 50%. In which case, surely it's time to re-evaluate our scoring criteria?

I think perhaps grading is different in the UK than the US but over here the standard is 100-93 = A, 92-83 = B, 82-73 = C, 72-65 = D and anything 64 or below is an F (though some places use the more clean 100-90=A, 89-80=B, etc...). This is indeed closest to the generally accepted meaning of the percentile system used in most game reviews. Personally even just having played the demo of drakes I feel like the review score given is pretty fair. It does plenty right but does feel a little loose and fidgety in spots. Tis a shame really as I just purchased my GF a PS3 banking on her interest in this and ratchet and clank. Sadly she didn't take to the later and this, while a good game, doesn't have near the draw necessary to yank her free from assassin's creed's clutches. But I'm sidetracked as usual. I think a grades system based on the US grades system would be the easiest and 'most' universally understood. Though it would still require an explanation on the site, if not at the end of every review, just in case.
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Yeah, I was indeed referring to the US standard (which might explain the phenomena over the wider Internet, but not here)...I was unaware of the enormous difference between the grading systems across the big pondy thing. From my fuzzy memories of skool, 75% was a C...nothing special, but not a D (which was like a High Fail) or a Failure. I'd guess and say that Japanese grading systems share more in common with the US standard, while I assume the rest of Europe might use something more in line with British standards.

I hardly think a UK site is gonna go for a system whose rationalization is based on a US school grading standard.