Uncharted

Banking Relics like a Boss!

HIGH Finally figuring out all the rules after a few hours of play.

LOW Overlooking a combo bonus and going from a win to a loss in one turn.

WTF The final boss in the Golden Abyss campaign.

Killer App

HIGH Soaking in those sumptuous visuals.

LOW Finger-swiping QTEs.

WTF Why do I have to clean 100% of the dirt off this artifact with my tired finger when I can already make out the "hidden" image?

In this second part of our initial PlayStation Vita impressions pieces, Michael A. Cunningham gives his thoughts on some of the Vita launch titles. Michael has been burning through a stack of titles, spending between one and three hours with each.

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.