Uncharted: Drake's Fortune extended gameplay Video

Uncharted: Drake's Fortune is out in a few days, and I've played through the PSN demo a few times now. It's been fun experimenting with different ways of approaching enemies and such and I thought I'd share an extended video of part of a play through of the demo. The video is after the break.

The video is about five minutes long and takes place in the full game's fourth level. It gives a good idea of what you can expect from the gun play and hand to hand combat in Uncharted. One of the things that makes this game so fun is the way Nate says little things under his breath while fighting...when combined with the staggering number of animations he has, it all comes together to create a level of immersion that is very satisfying. Enjoy!

Iranian President reviews Call of Duty 4 - Video

Sorry, this video has since been removed. Gee, I wonder why?!

Iranian President Ahmadinejad (don't look at me, I don't know how to pronounce it) has taken some time out of his busy day building a nuclear weapons program to thoughtfully grace us with his opinion on Infinity Ward's latest blockbuster, Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. His video review follows after the break.

This is one hilarious video, and it's short. I wouldn't call it SFW, so you may want to wait 'til you get home to watch it, or at least shut your office door. Thanks Gametrailers!

Enjoy.

Don't forget to get Carcassonne for free while you can!

Don't forget to hop on your Xbox 360 today and grab yourself a free game. In celebration of Xbox Live's fifth birthday, Microsoft is stuffing your Christmas stocking early, but only for a limited time, with the board game turned turn-based strategy game, Carcassonne. I downloaded it a few hours ago and took it for a spin and it's quite fun.

Anytime you can get something for free, it's at least worth a look, and in this case, it's actually worth more than a look. A game of Carcassonne is played on a gridded board using 72 tiles as the playing pieces. These tiles have a certain symmetry to them, so you can create matching connections between them, with the objective being to construct self-contained cities, roads, farms and more. With the tiles looking like squares snipped out of Google Earth, they need to be rotated then placed on the board in such a way as to form the largest properties possible.

The tiles’ symmetry means that roads will line up, though a roadway has to end cleanly, such as an intersection. Each player has a certain number of “followers” that can be placed on contiguous land areas, roads and fields as a way to “claim” it for yourself. When an element of geography is completed—such as a city having a complete, unbroken wall around it; or a monastery piece being fully circled by eight other tiles—the followers indicate who is the owner, and therefore who’ll get the points.

The game is easy to learn and surprisingly full of strategy. The graphics are charming and up to par with most of the better XBLA offerings.

You have until midnight tomorrow night to get Carcassonne for free, so what are you waiting for? Go!

Read a full review of Carcassonne here.

Metareview - Kane and Lynch: Dead Men (Xbox 360, PS3, PC)

Nobody likes game delays, but sometimes they are actually a good thing. Apparently the folks over at Eidos don't concur with that sentiment as they clearly thought it was more important to get their latest offering, Kane & Lynch: Dead Men, to market in time for the holiday sales crush rather than release it later and give gamers a product worthy of their sixty bucks.

It seems the game's story is powerful, if under-utilized, while the gameplay is decidedly last generation. With a glut of great shooters already hitting store shelves this season, Eidos should have done us (and themselves) a favor by delaying K&L and heaping a few (hundred) buckets of spackle and polish on it.

1UP (75/100) So there are problems that prevent Kane & Lynch from fully realizing its potential, but its concept and execution are strong enough to survive them. We rarely see scenarios and story structure this good in a game, and that makes it easier to forgive some of the more hardcore technical game-design issues. It's definitely more of a popcorn game for the action-movie crowd than a hardcore shooter, but there's nothing wrong with that.
IGN (70/100) Foul language alone wouldn't be enough to make Kane & Lynch stand out from the myriad other titles looking to gain some notoriety. This is where Kane & Lynch earns its stripes. Rather than employing a series of cheap shock tactics as so many other games have, IO Interactive crafted an intense and visceral story to go along with the game. Say what you will about the language being over the top, but these anti-heroes are wonderfully bent. It's no easy task to create such despicable characters and then give them motivations and situations that allow even the holiest of us to relate to their situation and feel for them. These are hard men put in an impossible situation. Following them on their journey is a wild and bumpy ride. As well constructed as the plot is, one would assume the game would play smoothly. Unfortunately, it does not. Instead, it plays like a game that lacks focus and needs a few more months of polish. But then, most of the gameplay feels like it was pulled directly out of a game from the last generation, so perhaps more time wouldn't have done any good.
Gamespot (60/100) Kane & Lynch: Dead Men is an ugly game, and we're not necessarily talking about the graphics. This criminal tale is packed with a collection of completely unlikable characters with no redeeming value whatsoever. It's impossible to even root for them as antiheroes. Once you get past the messy, meaningless story, things don't get too much better because you're saddled with clunky artificial intelligence on the part of your allies and your enemies, as well as a core shooting mechanic that simply doesn't satisfy. The unfortunate part is that the game does have a few bright points and feels like it had a lot of potential that just didn't come together as well as anyone must have hoped.

PS Eye user created possibilities astound

Sony's PS Eye for the PS3 is a very nice camera, and it offers gaming possibilities far beyond just video chat. Just how far beyond may surprise you.

Playstation.blog filmed the creation of some tech demos created by one of their new programmers to demonstrate the PS Eye's potential as a tool for making user created content for use in games in real time. The videos show some pretty incredible (and incredibly fun looking) stuff.

In one example, a staffer draws a spaceship and a planet surface on a sheet of paper and the PS3 generates an impromptu game of Lunar Lander with them on the fly. In another, a Combat-style game is interrupted when a player decides to scan his own hand-drawn tank into the game. Another guy takes it a step farther by having the "Eye" scan an actual model tank.

So far, this is just some fun R&D for the boys, which is why they have only focused on simple games that they can code for the PS3 in a day or so, but clearly the potential for this kind of thing is huge! Even though these games are pretty old school, they look amazingly fun again when you get to add your own content to them. The multiplayer possibilities alone are mind-boggling.

Apparently the PS3 can add physics to your content as well, making things even more interesting! (say it with me...Little Big Planet!) I was impressed with how fast the PS3 was able to scan the images and objects and then almost instantly add them into the game for use in real time. It was very cool. I want this, and I want it now!

via Playstation.blog

Uncharted only tapping 30% of PS3's SPU

I am somewhat reticent to post any story comparing the power of one console to another. But with the release of Uncharted: Drake's Fortune only one week away, Playstation Universe took the opportunity to chat up Co-President of Naughty Dog, Christophe Balestra and question him on the technology behind the game. Some interesting tidbits are unveiled, including how important the Cell processor and Blu-ray were to the development of the game. He does not specifically mention any other console, but he does say he thinks the game could only have been made on the PS3. Whether or not that is actually true is for more technically knowledgeable people than myself to judge, but it makes for an interesting read.

According to Balestra, "The main thing about the PlayStation 3 is the Cell processor and more specifically the SPU's. We are only using 30 percent of the power of the SPU's in Uncharted. We've been architecting a lot of our systems around this and we were able to take full advantage of that power. A big part of our systems is running on SPU's: scene bucketing, particles, physics, collision, animation, water simulation, mesh processing, path finding, etc. For our engine, the cool thing about having the SPU's is the fact we can minimize what we send to the RSX (the graphic chip), it allows us to reject unnecessary information and get the RSX to be very efficient." So, essentially, what he is saying if I'm understanding correctly is, the size of the Blu-Ray disc allows them to feed information to the SPU's and hard drive to take some load away from the underpowered RSX GPU.

If he is correct about Uncharted using only 30% of the PS3's SPU, then I would assume that means we could see some incredible stuff coming down the pike; at least from the developers that fully understand the console's architecture.

Via Playstation Universe

Uncharted: Drake's Fortune Metareview

Sony and their fans have had a tough year with lost exclusives, delayed blockbusters and a continuing stream of top flight games appearing on non-Sony platforms. Now, Naughty Dog, the developer responsible for the Crash Bandicoot and Jak and Daxter series' is giving those fans one last basket to place their remaining eggs of hope in in the form of Uncharted: Drake's Fortune. Gamers want to feel like the $600 they spent on a PS3 was not wasted, and Sony needs to move consoles this holiday season. To say there is a lot riding on the success of Uncharted would be a major understatement. Can it fulfill the vast promise of the beautiful screenshots we've been ogling for the last six months? Our metareview has the answer!
IGN (91/100) A lot of times we as an industry like to wax on and on about how videogames rival movies, but rarely do we have an example as well done as Uncharted. Nate is funny as he laments over yet another wall he needs to scale, Sullie is loveable as he tells the same traveler's tales over and over, and Elena's fire for her story and give-and-take with Nate is endearing. When these characters interact and you watch their relationships grow, you feel like you're part of their circle. You feel like they're your friends. Uncharted does what few titles manage -- it completely immerses you in its experience. From the moment the game begins with a sweeping camera move through the waters off Panama, a rich score and the words of Sir Francis Drake etched on screen, Uncharted will have you hooked. It'll maintain that hold with its story, style and gameplay.
Eurogamer (90/100) In a game where the split between combat and platforming is about 50-50, you don't want one aspect of the game to be any less fun than the other. Such imbalances nearly always cause you to resent the disparity, and it's evidently something that Naughty Dog has worked extremely hard to avoid. Rather than the game's ongoing narrative and action feeling like a sequence of vaguely connected set-pieces, most of the chapters in the game flow expertly into one another. It feels like a journey, albeit a particularly fraught and dangerous one where imminent death lurks around every crumbling corner. By starting with a great control and camera system, building on that with excellent combat and a wonderful spin on Ico's platform adventuring, and then topping it off with a decent storyline, Naughty Dog has cooked up one of the most relentlessly entertaining, fat-free games to emerge in ages. Topped off with the most stunning use of the PS3's underused technical prowess yet, Uncharted: Drake's Fortune is, for my money, the first must-have PlayStation 3 title.
Gametap (90/100) The game borrows platforming elements from the Prince of Persia games (minus the wall running), shooting mechanics from Epic's Gears of War, and the subject matter of a Tomb Raider game. Visually, it's a stunning game, with extraordinary textures. Drake's character is fascinating to watch, and he's full of gestures and quips motivated by context. When he walks the wrinkles of his shirt move and crease appropriately. When he swims, all the material gets wet, and eventually dries off. He even breathes heavily from the workout a swim gives him. And those are just the surface details--it's the nuanced features that make make you appreciate Drake as a human being. He curses and gets visibly irritated when he runs out of ammo in the middle of a firefight. When he's hiding behind cover, he flinches as bullets graze the wall he's hiding behind. And thanks to an innovative technique that blends various animations together at random, when Drake shoots and takes cover, the pose he comes back to tends to look a little different each time. When all of these details accumulate, it makes for a pretty rich experience. This game is one of the most immersive gaming experiences I've had this year, and it's definitely a great reason to own a PS3. The mix of platforming and gunplay worked really well and left me craving the next title in the series. Hear that, Naughty Dog? Get to work!

Are the AI enemies in Call of Duty 4 cheap?

Call of Duty 4 is a blast to play, there is no doubt about that, but it's not perfect. Chewing Pixels has posted a nice piece about the enemy AI and coding techniques used in Modern Warfare. Is it cheap to have enemies seemingly spawn endlessly just to increase difficulty? Does it really make a difference?

From Chewing Pixels: "In CoD4 there are sections where enemies just keep re-spawning until you pass an invisible trigger point. In one night-time escape mission from a crashed helicopter I took out the gunner in an enemy gunship stalking my team - at great risk - only for a new one to appear ten seconds later. I did this six or seven times to see if there actually were a bunch of spare gunners waiting in the back of the helicopter or if they were just spawning there to artificially keep the difficulty up. It is, regrettably, the latter."

I am also playing COD4 at a higher difficulty level (hardened) and find some parts of it do seem to be unfairly difficult, not due to any fantastically advanced AI, but due to an endlessly spawning stream of enemies. I have also found myself wondering, like the writer, whether it wouldn't just be smarter to run forward a bit to trigger the next script.

Like I said earlier, Call of Duty 4 is a blast to play for the most part, but things like this do tend to break your suspension of disbelief and hurt the immersive quality of the game. With the power of these new consoles, there has to be a better way...right?

PS3 firmware 2.0 causing hardware problems?

Even though Sony still hasn't managed to incorporate any in-game XMB functionality, I've been otherwise pleased with the PlayStation 3's most recent firmware update. Although I don't use the Remote Play functions, I love the added user customization options. Unfortunately, according to an Official PlayStation Forums thread, quite a few people are having problems with the new firmware version. The reported problems range from disc-read errors (remember the PS2's disc read problems?) to lagging performance and even problems booting the console at all.

These reports are a bit disconcerting, especially considering Sony's recent denial of reported high hardware failure rates among the new 40GB PS3's.

Of course it's impossible to know what percentage of PS3 owners are experiencing these problems. Personally, I applied the update the first day it was available and since then I've watched Ratatouille on Blu-Ray (which looks great btw) and played a lot of Ratchet and Clank Future: Tools of Destruction with no problems...knock on wood! Now that firmware upgrades seem to be a standard part of console maintenance, problems like this are likely to arise, at least once in a while.

2K Games says PS3 Bioshock not gonna happen - period!

PS3 owners are desperate for some quality content for their console of choice. After all, we can only play Ratchet and Clank Future: Tools of Destruction for so long, and seeing all those sweet titles on the Xbox 360 is beginning to get a bit aggravating. Well, clearly Bioshock publisher 2K Games doesn't care, and they are sick of people asking if their "Big Daddy" will stomp onto the PS3.

Despite rumors suggesting the atmospheric story-driven FPS might be coming to Sony's console, 2K Games representatives are adamantly insisting that no such port is in development, now or ever. While we understand they are trying to be clear and decisive, unlike Konami regarding Metal Gear Solid 4. Unfortunately, 2K comes off sounding more than a bit like an angry parent telling their kid "no" for the umpteenth time. Their official statement on the 2K Games forums was, "There will be no PS3 version of BioShock. It has been explained time and time again." Wow, I think we get it.

At least they aren't waffling. Those looking to get their plasmid fix will have to turn to the PC or Xbox 360 versions of the game.