I fucking love Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune. Don’t consider this a review, but let me say, as a person who has beat the game, that it is amazing. If you have been hearing people talk about it being the best experience on the PS3 to date, they aren’t exaggerating. Go forth and purchase.

From the first time I heard the opening music of the game I had a feeling that something about this game was made for people like me. And by people like me, I mean Firefly fans. Kotaku has proven my gut feeling to be correct, as they informed me that the music was written by Greg Edmondson, composer for both Firefly and Cop Rock.

The music in this game sets the mood in all the right places. Hell, it’s so damn good that I am going to buy it off iTunes (Yes, I am a whore).

The shooting in Uncharted is decent, the platforming is amazing, and the game is one of the best looking titles I have seen to this day. I can’t wait for more games from Naughty Dog.

Chufmoney

The other day I posted about GoW:  Chains of Olympus was probably one of the factors that pushed the PSP firmware update.  The reason that I thought this was because the PSP firmware update unlocked the ability for the system to use all the power lying within.  The system currently runs at 222mhz but can now run at 333mhz if a developer makes a game that asks the system to do so.

Kotaku ran a story about how Cory Barlog insinuated that the PSP GoW game was going to take full advantage of the new cpu speed.  Like us, they assumed that this meant that the game actually required it, and that this unlocked speed was why the game had, up to this point, looked so utterly amazing.  Kotaku was corrected however, and has now learned that the game has been shown only at 222mhz.  The final game will take advantage of the higher speed, giving it better frame rate and what not, but the current build that has been shown has always been at the original system speed.  That is to say, that this is pretty fucking amazing.

So both Kotaku’s Michael McWhertor and I were wrong in our assumptions.  The game will use the speed but wasn’t running at that speed to look that good.

Chufmoney

Kotaku always seems to dig up all the juicy rumors.  And, unlike some other sites we’ve seen (yeah we’re talking about you CVG), they tend to have good sources.  So when we saw their details about the PSP revision, we had to pass it on to you guys.

The new PSP, whose details are expected to be officially announced at the upcoming E3, is not a newhand held.  It will still play the UMDs that the current PSP does.  While it will be a more efficient machine, it will not be the PSP2.  We’ll probably be waiting on that release for quite some time.

The PSP “slim,” as its endearingly called, will have the following:

-8 GB flash memory

-a new more efficient LED screen

-a smaller design

-a better D pad, designed after the PS3’s

-a battery life that supposedly lasts up to four times longer than the current PSP

-faster load times due to the improved UMD drive.

While all of these details are certainly exciting they are still rumors at this point.  However, should they prove to be true, and Sony does hit the 170$ price mark they are supposedly seeking, then this could greatly improve the PSP marketshare.  The PSP already has some great games out and even more on the way.  If Sony could improve upon the flaws that the system does have they could possibly take away some of Nintendo’s hold on the world of hand helds. 

Sony must work on downloadable content, especially if the PSP revision is going to have built in memory.  This, combined with their deeper games, will perhaps allow them to distance themselves from the constant comparison to the DS.

I certainly hope the Kotaku source is right.  Though I do feel slightly miffed because I was an early adopter.

Chufmoney

[via Kotaku]

If you’ve been visiting the site lately (and there have been quite a few more than usual lately, so welcome and thanks to our new and recurring visitors), it’s probably becoming clear that we have aren’t just interested in what games are coming out, what games are delayed, and what’s selling; we love Gaming as a hobby and as a culture, and we care about it. We hope that in some way, we can contribute to the evolution of our sub-culture forward into a more relevant, or at least valued place than it perhaps sits in now. This is why we’ve been posting stories so heavy on commentary lately, and it’s going to continue, because it’s what interests us.

This is going somewhere, I promise.

Anyway, there has been an increasing trend for the last few months for the gaming blogs like Joystiq and Kotaku, as well as the lesser known sites, to publish stories that seem increasingly tangential and fluff based, and less motivated by any sort of interesting news development. First, I understand some of the reasons behind this: both of those blogs are ventures that depend on traffic for monetary returns, and this year signals a first for the gaming blogs: March leading all the way through May was typically a snowballing news cycle leading up to E3, the biggest news extravaganza of the year, where there would be enough reveals and announcements to come through for the duration of the spring and summer release droughts until the big games dropped starting in September, and continuing through to January. You could tell that things were different in the aftermath of E3’s essential dissolution when every gaming news site has been focusing on every show that involves the video games industry as a possible “next E3″, and paying much more attention to events that used to be good for a day or two of news at most in previous years. These sites are desperate for a replacement to fill their news schedules in the way that pre-E3 and post-E3 coverage used to, and unfortunately, it would seem they’re going the tabloid route to do it.

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