Yes, I’m still gushing about Uncharted.

Playing through the first Uncharted game, I have a new appreciation for Uncharted 2 and Naughty Dog studios. U1 is nice, but nothing I haven’t seen before. It’s Tomb Raider with a good cover system, fun combat, and a fun script. Uncharted 2 follows the same general mechanic, yet is like no other videogame I’ve played before.

Remember when you first played an FPS, or 3D game? Uncharted 2 is very much like that experience, but it achieves this status not through a revolutionary game interface, but by taking its genre to as close to perfection as we’ve yet seen.

It sounds like hyperbole, but it’s true. Playing through a level where an attack helicopter destroys the building you are in while you are actively playing is just one of many experiences in Uncharted 2 that have just never been done before. It’s just not a cutscene, not just some simple pre-scripted physics: the entire building you are in is rocking to and fro as walls are blown out and everything in the floor starts coming apart and flying around. No object in the room is fixed: desks, lamps, plants, etc. all start sliding around when the building starts going over and all are realistically running into you and the other characters in real time. The game truly captures a sense of actually being in the midst of chaos, and it is awesome. That’s just one of dozens of jaw-dropping set pieces in the game! When the Uncharted movie comes out, understand that it will necessarily be a watered down version of the game experience.

Let me also mention the awesome Tibetan guy you befriend in the game. He speaks Tibetan and there are no subtitles. It makes for traversing some very dangerous Himalayan cliffs and ice caves a very interesting experience. Immersion in game world? Complete.

Here’s the trailer, enjoy. That train battle the show a clip from at the end is even more awesome than it looks.

I’m a big fan of the videogame. I’m also an asian culture and history aficionado. Sarah and I have more than a few beautiful cultural artifacts, thousands of photographs, six and a half months of travel time in China (93% of that belongs to her), and a few direct connections to the continent. Suffice to say, the odds of us enjoying Uncharted 2 were really high.

As we played the game and learned that our character would be traveling to Nepal and Tibet I had three major criteria for awesome: prayer flags, prayer wheels, and ओं मणिपद्मे हूं. Happily, the dev team thought of everything.

This game was a lot of fun to play along with Sarah, as she could give me interesting explanations for the temple architecture and artifacts our character was running into while jaunting around Nepal and Tibet. I find it very commendable that the devs put in the tons of detail without any direct benefit except to more realistically flesh out their game world. Would anyone have really noticed if the left out temple guardians, or the ceiling incense, or a Tibetan saddle ring, or any of the countless other tiny details? I sure wouldn’t have, but whenever we ventured into a new locale we were constantly exclaiming “Wow, they put that in!”

At every turn we were happily surprised that they Got It Right. They even managed (and you’ll have to go on Sarah’s word on this) to capture the feel of being in Tibet. The way the light works, the way the Himalayas constantly dominate, the look of a Tibetan home. It’s all just marvelously done.

It didn’t hurt that it was also a completely action packed blast to play either. The game had me at “Climbing Up a Passenger Train Dangling off the Edge of a Himalayan Cliff”.