Naughty Dog

In a cinematic action game, the player needs to keep moving forward because the intent of the game is to both tell a story and excite the player. Viewed as a question of design alone, difficulty that forces several replays of any section is undesirable because it gates progress and converts the game into a movie that is merely very inconvenient to watch.

Deceptively Good Despite its Flaws

HIGH That stunning horse-riding sequence.

LOW Too many questions without answers, and a plot in search of a soul.

WTF Drake barely survives the desert, but is apparently hydrated enough to run and jump around like a monkey.

You aren't There

HIGH The hallucinatory sequences in Ubar and Yemen.

LOW Gunfights on the water and in a sandstorm magnify the significant deficiencies of the gunplay.

WTF These guys are really staying in a burning building to shoot at me?

The iVideo Game Apple would've Made

HIGH My son telling me to jump back onto my horse after I chased down a moving truck with it, jumped into the back, and took out a bad guy.

LOW You’d think Drake has Wolverine-like healing powers after crashing through the floor for the umpteenth time.

WTF A middle-aged Sully convincing a teenage Drake to stay with him. There has to be some international law against that.

We're joined by Reviews on the Run host (and GameCritics alum) Scott Jones, who speaks publicly for the first time about his controversial Uncharted 3 review. Afterward, Chi and Mike take a Crater Lake-deep dive into the successes and failures of the game. Plus: Is gameplay an endangered species, and how on Earth do we find the time to play all these video games? With Chi Kong Lui, Mike Bracken, Richard Naik, and Tim "Deepak" Spaeth.

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• Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception Review

Please send feedback and mailbag questions to podcast (at) gamecritics (dot) com.

How would the man who played Indiana Jones feel about playing Naughty Dog's Uncharted 3? Well, naturally he'd be very excited and enjoy playing it very much.

Honestly, the video is a bit awkward. I don't know how handy Ford really is with a PlayStation 3 controller at home, but it doesn't look like he's very good in this video. Maybe it's the camera or the location, but it all looks a bit unnatural. Maybe it doesn't matter. All Sony wanted was to get Indiana Jones playing Nathan Drake from its new video game and it got it.

Hanno Hagedorn is a 3D artist that worked on Crysis, Uncharted 2: Among Thieves and the upcoming Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception. After promising (mostly himself) to create an online portfolio of his works, it's (mostly) done. Most impressive among his work are these digital sculptures of characters from Among Thieves. If they could be recreated in resin, I'm sure they would be mounted proudly on the bookshelf of every Uncharted 2 fan.

Forgive this bit of Scroogery on Christmas (hey, it's not my holiday).  I'm mostly reacting to Gamespot picking Demon's Souls over Uncharted 2: Among Thieves as Game of the Year for 2009. It's a positive reaction to the action-RPG title that I've seen elsewhere, so I'm not entirely surprised. But I also feel it's the latest in a series of hyperbolic reactions calling the game "new" and "inventive," when what I really think people are reacting to—both positively and negatively—is the game's difficulty.

Can a Video Game be a B-Movie, and Does this Present any Problems?

HIGH Watching Uncharted the movie, I mean game, unfold.

LOW Actually playing the game.

WTF There is absolutely no need to figure out what to do on your own, eventually the game will tell you.

Plenty of Sugar, Little Nutrition

High The train section in the middle of the game is exhilarating.

Low The firefights drag on, never as exciting as they should be.

WTF The weird "warp" animation when the devs force Drake to make an extra-long jump.