They're here.... And now they're gone!

Well, the undead have finally arrived in Uncharted: Drake's Fortune. I'm kind of sad about how the 6-axis functionality was incorporated into the game play (shake the controller when one of them jumps on your back) but it's not awful. Unlike the melee combos (which I could never master and thus never do hand-to-hand combat) I needed to figure out this maneuver in order to complete the initial encounter.

Oh -- and they answered the "how am I going to find guns in a dungeon with populated by the undead from the time of Sir Francis Drake". Nazis discovered the dungeon during WWII and left some sweet weapons and ammo behind. Say hello to my little friend... The MP40.

Then back to humans and... we're done.

Great game. Definitely Hudson Hawk with strong elements of Indiana Jones. It also made me think of how much cooler Crimson Skies could have been and makes me sad that there won't be a Crimson Skies II. I still remember cringing at one of the original visions for that game where you "play the movie" -- and now I'm with the impression that I did just play a movie and it was a great gaming experience.

I'd really have to put this game in the category of Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay and Eternal Darkness. The game mechanics in both of those games were fun. Not great, but fun. Yet both of those games really made me feel like I was in the middle of the movie and able to guide the lead with my thoughts and button presses.

Could the combat have been better? Yep. The puzzling? Definitely. But I developed an attachment to the main characters of the game that was as deep as in any movie. The ending was truly satisfying (in terms of the story resolution moreso than the final battle) and left me looking forward to the sequel.

Uncharted: Upon further review

I'm quite enjoying Uncharted. I'm a little sad that I mostly fight humans and that I never feel very smart for solving puzzles because inevitably I bump into more humans guarding the areas I figured only I would be clever enough to find. Then again, I'm not sure how the fiction would work if I found myself in ancient crypts surrounded by undead with ready caches of bullets and guns.

It seems that the folks at Naughty Dog are doing their best to keep things varied under these constraints. I recently discovered the sniper rifle and my human enemies are becoming much tougher and have cool laser sights and such.

Really, the combat and puzzle solving isn't any better than, say, Tomb Raider or Prince of Persia: Sands of Time. But the story telling techniques used in the game are quite well done. I actually care about the characters. And, even though the plot seems to be a somewhat recycled version of Hudson Hawk (which I say in a good way -- I am one of the 5 people who loved that movie), the production values put into the game shine through in a way that I haven't experienced to date.

It's really worth going on the "Technical Dives" that are offered as unlockable extras where the developers go into how the cinematics were created. A couple of things worthy of notice:

• Cut scenes are filmed in one take with minimal props and standard mocap equipment. It's kind of like watching a play.
  
• Final rendered sequences then digitally edit the scene together with standard 2-shot and other film conventions to make it feel like it was actually shot like a movie (with multiple takes from different angles). It was a total "eureka" moment for me: Because the actor data were captured via mo-cap, the scene could be rendered in 3-d and cameras could be placed anywhere after the fact in post production. Very cool. This means that the cost of filming all the live actor data had to be minimal -- no moving of equipment... Just shoot it all in one take if possible.

I have a feeling I'm getting close to the end. The game seems to be foreshadowing some unholy enemy goodness, so I imagine it's going to start getting even more intense.