Achievement: Charted! (Videogame, Uncharted 2)

I finished a real console game last night!

In the usual sense, Uncharted 2 was the shortest console game I've played in a long time. After playing Horizon Zero Dawn for a jillion hours over a year and a half, I wanted something more digestible - leaping straight into Persona 5 for another 100+ hours seemed like a terrible idea. I started Uncharted 2 on Feb. 6th and finished April 11th, doing a couple hours every other weekend. Really, very short! The plot moves quickly, you can only go forward, and I didn't at all try to be completionist about collecting all the hidden treasures, just grabbing the ones I happened to see.

From another perspective, this is the longest it's ever taken me to finish a game. I first started this on the PS3 (Amazon says: Game of the Year edition, Sept 2014), and then I bought the remastered collection on PS4 years later and started playing it there in Feb., and finished on the PS5. 3 console generations, 6.5 years. The only thing that could beat this is if I ever finished playing FF6 which I started on the GameBoy Advance.

This game could have been finished in fewer sessions, but I only played at night because I didn't feel comfortable with the kids around. Horizon Zero Dawn was mostly OK, you were fighting robot dinosaurs and it wasn't graphic violence. Hades, you die a billion times but it's kind of cartoony and then you're better again. But Uncharted 2... the bad guy delivers the "we are not so different" speech at the end, and it rings truer here. You kill a lot of dudes in this game. Headshots, sneak attacks where you grab someone and silently break their neck, etc. There were also chapters where I died a lot, my corpse a contorted pretzel while your companions cry out. You are not, like the villain of the piece, trying to find ancient relics so you can make an immortal army and impress the ghosts of Stalin & Pol Pot, but you still kill hundreds and hundreds of enemy grunts. Not for kids.

One funny thing: periodically the game would pop up a window comparing my progress to Skwid's, since we're Playstation friends. How many treasures collected, how many stealth kills, etc. I'm sure he played this years before - will have to ask.

On to Uncharted 3 while my fingers still know how to work the controls!