Folks, I am really enjoying the new PS3 game “Uncharted 2: Among Thieves”.  I was thinking that it was probably game of the year, but now I’m thinking different.  Maybe it should really be considered *movie* of the year, because this game has as much in common with Hollywood than it does with video gaming.

Unlike many of my favourite games, Uncharted 2  is very linear — it doesn’t pretend to be sandboxy like Grand Theft Auto, and you don’t progress your character and choose your storyline as in an branching RPG like Fallout 3.

Instead it tells a story, and you as the gamer are a participant in that story.  There is usually only one way to deal with any particular situation, and frankly it’s never all that hard.  The strength of the game is that it’s story is superb, and are the voice acting and cinematics.   The cutscenes (which load seamlessly and are never annoying) are funny and compelling storytelling, and add to not subtract from the overall experience.

As you progress through the story, you are put in incredible situations which you have to deal with.  Right from the opening scene it will wow you in this regard.  But they keep on shaking things up, it’s not like Doom or Halo where you do basically the same thing in the basically the same setting over and over again.  In Uncharted 2, while the game mechanics remain the same (climbing, shooting, solving puzzles), the settings and puzzles are varied enough that it feels fresh every time.  Enough that it makes me go wow and giggle with glee every few minutes.

On paper, this game isn’t that much different than it’s predecessor, Uncharted.  What has improved is mostly polish — they tightened up the gameplay and cinematics, and made the puzzles seem much less contrived.  This polish though has pushed Uncharted 2 from being a good game into a truly wonderful entertainment experience.  Watching an Indiana Jones movie is dull in comparison to actually BEING in those circumstances and coping with the challenges in gameplay.

Seriously — this is not the future of games.  It’s the future of movies.

Today I tried to buy the Fallout 3 expansion packs from your PSN store.

Irritation #1: First I looked under “Game Add-Ons”, but instead of showing me expansions for the games I have it showed me add-ons for a bunch of games I don’t have, and not ones I was looking for were not listed. I did find them by scrolling through “new releases” though.

Irritation #2: One I went through the clumsy add-to-cart process for the four items I wanted, I tried to buy them. But instead of paying for things they force you to “add money to wallet”, and then “remove items from wallet”. This is a completely unnecessary step and makes the purchase process more annoying than it should be.

Irritation #3: One I went through their wallet process and tried to actually “add money to wallet”, my credit card was declined as the expiration date had changed. To change the expiration date, I had to go to “account management”. To get to this page, I had to exit the store. Exiting the store means I lost the contents of my cart and had to do it all over again.

Irritation #4: Once I got the correct credit card information into my account, and re-added all of my games, I successfully added the funds to my “wallet” and then immediately removed them again to buy the game. Now I tried to download the games, and it said that I didn’t have enough space to download them! Of course, to free up space I’d have to exit the store, and now that I’ve actually paid for stuff I don’t really want to do that and risk losing everything I paid for. So what I did was download each item in the background one by one and select “download in background”. Then I could exit the store without worrying.

Irritation #5: To clear up the disk space I had to sift through my saved games one by one. I have dozens of saved games for games I no longer want to play, but I have to use their clumsy 3 step process for every single saved game I want to delete. Please let me bundle some together!

Irritation #6: I want a pony. Where’s my frigging pony?