There’s a difference between murder and shooting an alien punk who’s holding a gun on you and has just announced his intention to kill you, even if he hasn’t started shooting yet. In fact, waiting for someone to start shooting before you defend yourself is the literal definition of terminal stupidity.

Also, a T-shirt doesn’t glamorize anything unless it’s being worn over a nice set of tits.

I did laugh out loud, however, when Lazarevic in his, I’m the last boss and you’ve beaten me, but we’re not so different you and I speech, says, “How many men have you killed? Just today!” I checked the handy Statistics screen to be sure. 1034.

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What’s interesting is that in the sequel, they actually seem to acknowledge the fact that Drake is, by all accounts, a mass murderer, and actively going out of their way to compensate for that. In fact, they do it quite nicely by making the main bad guy a Certified Rotten Son of a Bitch, which I think is a good way for games in general to establish a connection with the main character.

For case history, Nathan Drake is far more, shall we say, charismatic than someone Mark Hammond in The Getaway, but I very much cared about that character because:

a) Charlie Jolson, his nemesis, is a CRSoB, and…
b) Charlie Jolson kills his wife, takes his son, and that’s just the warm up. Mark Hammond is trying to kill what was then perhaps the baddest CRSoB of the console generation, ergo, I am rooting for him.

Ditto for Nariko vs. Bohan in Heavenly Sword. That game’s entire storyline was a fat goth chick’s (who may or may not be *obsessed* with vampires, per se, but definitely wore out the laser on her DVD player the week Twilight came out) freshman year college writing final, but I think we can all agree that Bohan was the shit, and gave that game an honest to god incentive to see it through to the end.

I guess the question at the core of your argument is, in Wolfenstein 3D, can you say B.J. is a mass murderer? Yes, he kills lots of fleshy beings, but those beings are Nazis. Note I didn’t say people, because Nazis were perhaps the last example of a true enemy that could legitimately be dehumanized without the use of rhetoric, propaganda, and tiny capsules as stage props before the U.N.

The Uncharted games go out of their way to tie things to the Nazis (I more than II), but while Lazarevic is not a Nazi himself…

1. His name is Zoran Lazarevic (LAH-ZAAAR-AHH-VICH). I defy you to find me someone with a name like that who DOESN’T start their day by waking up and kicking a kitten into a sawblade.

2. He is a bald muscular man covered in burns and scars, especially on his face.

3. He is a billionaire. Further, he is a billionaire responsible for a trail of genocide behind him as he exploits local conflicts to find a stone he believes will allow him to become the next Hitler, Pol Pot, or Ghengis Khan.

4. On that note, he actually NAME DROPS Hitler, Pol Pot, and Khan in one of his evil genius monologues.

5. His partner in crime is a guy with spiked blonde hair (probably bleached), a douchebag accent, who probably wears Affliction T-Shirts when he’s not aiding genocidal billionaires with a first edition of Mein Kampf.

The men under Zoran’s command aren’t necessarily soldiers in a WWII game sense, but look at it: They are probably members of a PMC (which, in the minds of a lot of people, already put them on equal footing with Nazis), who chose to specialize in killing as a means of profit.

They have chosen to work for a man named Lazaravic, who has a stated goal of finding a rock he thinks will let him take over the world. I don’t care if every one of those men had 3 kids, a trophy wife, and a dog back home. They knew what this was.

If I’m not mistaken (it’s been a while, so I may be), Uncharted 2 avoids its predecessor’s pitfall of making the mercenaries you kill en masse Local Savage Types. If you’re the sort of person who spends time pondering these things (and the reviewer here obviously is), it’s not much of a stretch to assume the heavily tanned men with guns who shot at you in U:DF were basically forced into The Life because of Global Inequality and Exploitation, etc.

U2 has no such conundrum. Every last one of the men you kill in that game could have gone for an MBA. They could have become lawyers, doctors, or business executives. Instead, they join a known torturer’s entourage as a paid thug.

Uncharted 2 also delineates between People Who Deserve to Die and People Who Do Not. The very first mission sees you get assaulted by security guards in a museum, but through various Plot Rails, you only can shoot them with a tranq gun. Mall Cops do not deserve The Treatment, but Blackwater Goons in the employ of a psychotic billionaire shitbasket do.

The bottom line is, I’m okay with the set of morals Uncharted 2 establishes right from the outset.

A last point is that U2 does a lot more to lighten the amount of blood directly on Nate’s hands. Through much of the game, you’ll find yourself with one, even two companions, who will actually shoot at things and hit them. This way, it feels a lot more like a group of people fighting for survival, rather than one man with a lot of guns, killin’ everything all willy-nilly.

So I ain’t got nothin’ against bashing those guys’ skulls in with a gravity gun propelled toilet.

My issue with Uncharted is that it lacks context, and the characters’ behavior and actions don’t ring true. I’m not opposed to gunning down goons as a mechanic — when it fits. It’s a mechanic the game needs to be built around. Gears of War and its sequel accomplish this. Uncharted doesn’t.

With Uncharted, it’s clear the developers had intended to make an Indiana Jones-style adventure. (I even seem to recall the developers saying that the game’s focus would be primarily exploration, followed by puzzle-solving.) Such a game would benefit from realistic human characters. Then years passed and Big Cash Money was spent and it was determined that the game must sell. Gears of War was big, so they soldered on a similar mechanic and shipped the game out. The game wasn’t envisioned around this mechanic, and it doesn’t fit.