Uncharted: Drake's Fortune Comments by Kristan Reed

I love smoke machines - especially ones with red lights on lol ;-)

This is the PS3 game that tempts me somewhat, even though I still can't justify getting one.

Such a shame :(

Yes, shame on you!!!

Just read the review (boss is on lunch), and it does read like a very high nine. Inches from being a ten, I'd say (plus I suspect EG's 10 cannon is running out of ammo...?).

Also, kudos for the Isla Fisher and Firefly references :)

Great box art, too.

Review definitely sounded like a 10, what with no mention of negatives. Anyway, great review.

I'm confused. While I don't disagree with the mark (bit silly too since i haven't played it :) ) I have to admit I don't understand how the animation can be all that when it looked so horribly unnatural in the videos you have up on Eurogamer TV.

The fact that they're only using 30% of the SPUs is more indicative of the fact that it's actually extremely difficult to properly exploit the Cell architecture in a game engine. Read another way he's saying "even in an engine built ground-up for PS3, we still can't exploit 70% of the SPUs' potential".

They've obviously worked very hard to parallelize as much as they can, it'll be interesting to see whether multi-platform developers will start to go to similar lengths for their PS3 versions. Burnout Paradise should be informative.

Krudster, in the review you meantion 1080p glory, but the game's native resolution is still 720p though, right? Though it also supports 1080i, I don't think it renders all this in native 1080p?

looks really good actually!! which is a shame

The EG review makes this game sound stunning, something I kind of got the impression of from playing the excellent demo. Now I'm really excited about playing the game. It's not often we PS3 owners are spoilt but with this and the superb Ratchet and Clank Future last week plus the potentially great Haze before the end of the year, all those months of waiting for the triple A games to arrive makes it all worthwhile. :)

Everything I saw of the game prior to the demo didn't really do much for me. However, after playing the aforementioned this moved to the top my of list.

Can't wait for this to arrive.

All screenshots on EG are 1280x720 and don't look like being downsampled. So from those screenshots I assume it is not rendered in native 1080p. However, the press has a tendency to reuse old screenshots sent by the publisher's marketing dept, so it is not 100% sure.

Well done NickyJD, you're the first on my ignore list. Bye now!

/checks score

I'll read it later Krudster, I've just got to order it first.

I'm almost glad Assassin's Creed wasn't that great now, my pre-Christmas game budget can now accomodate this comfortably.

"Maybe he just never played Motorstorm, who knows?"

Or Ratchet & Clank....

rashes

WTF is this?, keep this fanboy shit out of Eurogamer please.

Couldn't have said it better myself.

/puts NickJD on ignore.

The ignore function is the most useful thing on this site I can finally get rid of all those stupid fanboy comments once and for all.

But Mass effect looks better so don't say 360 can't do these graphics.

ARE YOU CRAZY??

Now they really need to start pimping this, otherwise it's going to slide off the radar like a hot turd with the onslaught of Need for Speed: neon cocksock rehash edition and the rest of the generic xmas gash.

Now bring on Haze and UT3

But, thinking about it, when has Naughty Dog ever let us down?

"I'd have to say Jak II."


Slaps royal fool

/points to door :D

Have to agree though, Naughty Dog have never let me down. \o/

I always suspected the cutscenes were pre-rendered using the ingame engine as I said as much in the forum thread. The demo cinematics even have jaggies which are less evident in the actual game itself plus they obviously aren't prone to tearing either. I guess this is one area where the storage capacity of BD allows the developers to "cheat" a little to make loading times less noticeable or non-existent so you can't really complain at them not being real-time/a waste of disc space. Maybe that's the reason why this game wouldn't work as is on the 360 without introducing intrusive loading times. ;)

Saw the first ten minutes of the game in HD on Gamersyde last night and the game does look great but the amount of tearing was a bit alarming considering the start of the game takes place on a small boat in the middle of an empty ocean yet the demo, which had a detailed jungle setting, seemed to have less. The game is clearly pushing the PS3 though to produce these visuals so tearing is far more forgiveable here than it is in, say, LEGO Star Wars: TCS on the 360. I did notice it in the demo but surprisingly it didn't bother me too much. Must have been having too much fun playing it or something... LOL

Nice - got this pre-ordered over at Play.com for £32.99!!

Uncharted isn't just a standout for Sony -- it's a standout for gaming as a whole. (IGN)

Wonderful news, I've really been looking forward to this and now my interest has just risen to yet another level of excitement.

P.S. Krudster, can you please tell me which make and model of HDTV you review games on that you don't see tearing on because I want one! ;)

Another game contributing to the PS3 ERA.
i think now Wii and 360 fanboys cant talk trash anymore. the price of the ps3 is down and their games are really good now. in one month, 3 big titles, (Uncharted, Ratchet&Clank:TOD and Folklore) and all their games are different genres, not all shooters lik 360... now let's see, God Of War 3, Killzone 2, Haze, UT3, GT5, Little Big Planet, Metal Gear Solid 4...

PS3 ERA

Yes, nicely done, good review, could you now please release the review I submitted during the weekend? I think I said some of the same things, but I said them before you, damnit!

:-p

There's tearing on the 360 Lego Star Wars? Last years edition didn't have any....

How strange...

But Mass effect looks better so don't say 360 can't do these graphics.

No one said anything about graphics, when you cue in lighting, animation etc etc all at once, you have to sit there and think when/if will someone on the Xbox 360 step up to the plate and top this.

besides Kristian said.

that makes me wonder

Which is important before we go all fanboy mode. ;)

"Another game contributing to the PS3 ERA."

Lol?

"i think now Wii and 360 fanboys cant talk trash anymore. the price of the ps3 is down and their games are really good now. in one month, 3 big titles, (Uncharted, Ratchet&Clank:TOD and Folklore) and all their games are different genres, not all shooters lik 360... now let's see, God Of War 3, Killzone 2, Haze, UT3, GT5, Little Big Planet, Metal Gear Solid 4... "

They can talk trash if they like, their platforms have 10/10 titles on them amirite?
/taunt ;)

At the end of the day it's good that all 3 consoles are doing (or starting to do) quite well, the stronger the competition the better it is for us, the consumer (in theory at least).

As for the other games you listed, lets wait and see before prematurely putting them on a pedestal shall we, that's only asking for trouble.

The TV I've just splashed out on is a 50" Samsung 1080p jobbie, ps50p96fd
Best value, highest spec 50" true HD 1080p out there - about £700 cheaper than the current flavour of the month, the Pioneer Kuro, and about £4-500 cheaper than Panasonic's top 50".


http://www.google.co.uk/products?q=samsu...

interested in what stopped this from being a 10?

did the review contain a single negative moment?

loved the demo, provided some spot-on filmic moments of my own creation. that's what i like.

"P.S. Krudster, can you please tell me which make and model of HDTV you review games on that you don't see tearing on because I want one! ;) "

Well he also said "Popup? That's the biggest non-issue ever." while other reviewers seem to disagree (e.g. "there is a lot of texture pop-in on the jungle floor and treasures while aliasing on the walls and screen tearing are par for the course" from IGN).

That said, everyone agrees it is a great game and a great looking game but after seeing this week's charts we can only hope it makes the top 10.

Quick question,

Is the PS3 region free for all games?
Can we be sure that this title will be region free?

Just want to be sure before I order an import copy.

Thanks.

I think the thing that stops it being a 10 is that there's not enough combat variety in there. Too many of the same enemies over and over.

It feels like it needed to develop a little more than it does, and ultimately the fact that's it's a little on the brief side counts against it just a touch. Not enough to stop you buying it and loving it, but enough to stop it getting top marks.

I bet the sequel will be amazing, but by then the 'more of the same' factor will have crept in.

The article that everybody keeps linking to on psu.com seems to suggest that it would be tricky to pull this game off on 360 as they wrote the engine specifically to utilise Cell and the HDD.

Uncharted on psu.com

Copy in the fact that they're 91% filling a blu-ray disc with fully optimised code and that all adds up to something that simply would not be achievable on 360 for a variety of reasons. So as fan-baiting as Krudster's comment may have seemed, it would seem he actually has a point.

When games are utilising 100% of the cell processor (rather than the 30% Uncharted manages), I think my brain will probably melt. But it'll be totally worth it.

I'm not sure what build other reviewers used, but I swear I never saw hideous popup. I'd have been the first to mention it, as that sort of crap bothers me, same with tearing, but if my eyes don't see it, I can't write about it.

Could it be that American reviewers had an earlier build than European ones?

Yeah lets be fair now, Kristian was infact better off keeping that too himself, theres not many reasons to beleive it cant(which I suspect he knows but can see its got the level of polish atleast that those who waited and paid so much money will appreciate) so whether he really beleives it or not its only going to make him look less informed in the long run(thats the nicest way I can put it but you can see what Im saying).

Well back on topic, is this the first big PS3 exclusive that wont be seen as a bit of a dissapointment?(well for those of us who thought Motorstorm looked a bit dull from the start... that is overated IMO in gampelay and technology if you ask me, if they would have had some truely great games that wouldnt have gotten much attention)

@Trane notice how he lists three FPS' in a row after his opening sentence too...

Also I dont buy this 30% b*****ks for a second, they are a Sony dev and they started this engine knowing how much trouble Sony got themselves into with their hypefests at E3(infact I think it was the lead dev on GameTrailers a year back who pretty much said himself the two consoles were fairly even and complained a little about Sonys tools and online service plans) so you can bet they are using 100% for that engine. See the thing is even if this wasnt something Sony needed them to say(which it is if you use common sense its a pretty obvious gameplan) the percentages themselves are pretty meaningless guesstimations that most devs steer clear of for that reason. Im not going to waste my time arguing about it with anyone though(I really cant see PS3 doing anything out of 360s reach now... even physics which was probably the strongest arguement they had, AI and Lighting is still anybodies guess at this point, devs on both sides there, of course devs on the wrong side no matter how good, are always dissmissed by fanboys... Id go with 360 for them based off what weve seen so far), wait and see as I always say(do they ever learn though? "its the CELL powar n Blu-Rays" ).

In full:

As I said earlier, we couldn't have done Uncharted without the Blu-ray, at least at the quality we wanted to make it. To get such high-resolution textures and movies, a Blu-ray was indispensable to achieve the graphic quality of Uncharted. We fill the disc at 91 percent and it's optimized, meaning we don't duplicate any data. That includes all our game data, sounds, 7 spoken languages and 102 minutes of movie.

Talking about movies, I wanted to mention they are pre-render using our engine on the PlayStation 3. The only reason we did this was to eliminate any loading time before or after a movie and make our memory management easier.

Those 102 minutes of movie, presumbably rendered at 1080p native, would have taken up a lot of that space, its a good use of teh space but not an essential one.

krudster, do you lot get to claim humongous tellys on expenses? you ought to, you lucky gets.

krudster - "I'm not sure what build other reviewers used, but I swear I never saw hideous popup. I'd have been the first to mention it, as that sort of crap bothers me, same with tearing, but if my eyes don't see it, I can't write about it."

Now, I definitely want that 50" Samsung Plasma TV of yours!

As for the other comments about using SPUs to smmoth the animation I can't be certain how that would compare to the 360s multi processor setup, but the guarantee of having a hard disk on every system must be a boon for any developer.

Yey! A PS3 game worth buying!!

/pre-orders

@krudster:

Congrats on the TV! : jealous :

It would be useful for future reference if you press the info button and see if you can tell which output mode the PS3 is using. I assume you've got 720p, 1080i and 1080p enabled in the XMB, so then it's up to the game to decide which one it will use. It could be using 1080i or 720p, and depending on which there could be more or less tearing and so on.

re: the blu-ray thing, i don't really think that counts as a "zomg 360 couldn't do it!1" factor. Yeah, they'd have had to do localized releases instead of cramming all the languages on one disc, or (horrors!) split the game over a couple of DVD9s, but it's not fundamentally impossible.

A more interesting question is whether all the streaming tech could work from a DVD rather than off the HD, or whether they just need the HD cache because BR seek times are so long.

Also, the fact that they've specialised the whole engine around data parallelization for PS3 kind of re-inforces the point that Sony's console is difficult to accomodate into a multi-platform development strategy. It'll a be a weird reversal if PS3 becomes the console to own for its exclusive titles, but cross-platform stuff is better elsewhere (eg. PES, Skate, Orange Box etc). PlayStations have traditionally been the jack-af-all-trades consoles, and the default choice for third party development.

Reads like a 10/10???