Excuse Me While I Nerd Out

I know it's a horrible cliche but Naughty Dog has created the first truly "cinematic" game experience ever, and it really does feel like the long-awaited follow-up to the original Indiana Jones trilogy(we all know Crystal Skull failed us there). The graphics are obviously the best available right now but, more importantly, the painstaking care which went into the script, voice/motion-capture acting, cutscenes etc. is simply astounding. There's a whole feature length film in here - roughly 91 minutes separated into 3-4 minute shorts, impeccably directed chunks of ruthlessly efficient story exposition and character development, and it's all great fun to watch and re-watch (hell, even slightly moving at times, which is not something I say often about storylines in video games).

The cinematic qualities extend far beyond the cutscenes, though, and the single most amazing thing about the game is probably that virtually every gunfight (or puzzle segment, for that matter, though those tend to be relatively rare in the game) feels dynamic enough that it could serve as an elaborate set piece in a really good action movie. Rather than just spawning a few generic soldiers in an open space and have the player pick them off one by one, developer Naughty Dog throws in a helicopter, a moving train, a rapidly collapsing building or just about anything else that will make the action come alive and feel like so much more than just another room full of enemies. The effective use of scripted events in action-oriented 3D games arguably began all the way back in Valve's first Half-Life game, but never has it been done this ambitiously and with such amazingly seamless results.

The jaded cynic in me I kept asking myself "well, when is the game going to run out of steam and devolve into a standard action game?". The answer is that it simply doesn't; Uncharted 2 is an absolutely exhilarating experience all the way through the game's 26 chapters. If this is not a reason to own a PS3, I don't know what is...