When playing video games I’m kind of like flighty boyfriend. I’m rabidly loyal, but if you make me feel like you’re not giving me your all, I’ll take up with someone else just to make you jealous. Well, that’s how I’ve been with Sony since the PS3 hit. Oh sure, I kept her around, but I had to go somewhere else to get my needs fulfilled. That Wii chick who has been hanging around kind of creeps me out because she wants me, but she acts like she’s half my age. So I’ve been keeping busy with the girl who moved in across the street when I started seeing Sony pretty exclusively. Sure, Sony tried to win me back with Heavenly Sword and she almost tricked me with Lair, but her next attempt will be Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune.




On Thursday we reported the launch of Uncharted the free demo which is available at the Playstation Store right now. I’ve taken it upon myself to let all of you two timing gamers know if you should dust off that six-axis and try it out.

The answer is a tentative yes. To quote Inigo Montoya, “Lemme ‘splain. No there is too little time. Lemme sum up.”

This demo suffers the same problem that almost all PS3 demos suffer. It let’s you play twenty minutes or so of the game, but that’s nothing compared to the two hours, on average, that it will take to download it. I say “on average” because I had to download it several times after the demo would only succeed in turning off my PS3 after four minutes on a black screen once installed. So already (like the high maintenance girlfriend that PS3 is) what you get from it is nowhere near equal to what you put into it. However, once you’ve made that plunge and loaded the demo, for the fifth time, you do get quite a treat (say it with me: kind of like that high maintenance girlfriend).

First thing I noticed was the graphics. The in game graphics struck me as better than the cinematics. Unfortunately the kind folks at Sony felt the need to grace us with no sort of tutorial, but instead we get a control legend that you need an HDTV to read. So I was thrown to the wolves, again. That’s okay though. Once you figure out what’s what the controls are very intuitive and so is how you interact with your surroundings. The controls are very reminiscent of Indiana Jones and the Emperor’s Tomb, which makes me happy, except that the movement, aiming and damage engine are all cleaned up with a nifty over the shoulder shooter addition where you get to try out three different guns and of course, grenades.

As I had already mentioned; interacting with your surroundings is very intuitive, but for using that aspect of the game as a major selling point, I would think you’d get to do it a little bit more. Instead you get to try even more of the “take cover and shoot bad ethnic stereotypes” aspect of the game. Actually I was just stretching for a joke there. It’s not that offensive. It could have been Resident Evil 4 offensive.

My verdict is this: If you have a couple of hours to kill for twenty minutes of game play, this is a great way to spend it. If you have other things to do, just wait for the full game to come out. I’m looking forward to it and I’ll be in line on November 19^th to spend the sixty dollars I don’t have. Now if you’ll excuse, that dirty, dirty girl across the street wants me to play Halo 3 with her. What a nasty girl.

Share |