First thing’s first, I put the disc in! Now I’m told I need to update the PS3 firmware, fair enough as I haven’t switched the thing on for christ knows how long! Whilst this is updating I get distracted only to look back at the PS3 45 minutes later and it’s only on 90%! What the hell! The 360 only take 5 minutes at the absolute most for an update. Once the PS3 update finally finishes, it then tells me it needs to update the game, which bare in mind is only a few weeks old, but it proceeds to download over 100MB worth of updates on the game too Good start this is!

Another hour later, I finally get to the game but I’m so bored of waiting by now I don’t have high hopes for it, even though many other reviews rated it quite well. Right, well on to the review of the actual game rather than the system now. We start off learning a few of the controls whilst hanging off a cliff in a wrecked train carriage, awesome start to the action. Following the instructions on screen, I immediately begin to recognise the controls from the first game (which I only actually played for about 2 hours, never got into it). Though at the same time, the controls were already frustrating me. I think this is because I played Assassin’s Creed II for so long and the controller layout for that was just perfect, but I was really struggling with this one.

Gameplay

So I’ve just started the game, I’m climbing up the outside of a train carriage vertically whilst it is hanging off of a cliff, piece of cake, right? Wrong! Right from the very start this game was aggravating me with it’s ridiculous camera angles. Let me set the scene for you. You are trying to go up the train, near the edge of a cliff, whilst it moves about in the wind slightly and you have debris falling down hitting the train. Where would you expect the camera, sideways on, perhaps a bit lower than your character to see where you are going? Apparently not, the camera here is looking straight down and is situated between the cliff edge and the train, I can’t see a thing! I finally get to the top after dying a few times and make it into the next carriage, which is on the top of the cliff but still round the right way. I start to walk through and the camera then pans to the door which I’m heading for at the far end, I stop expecting a cut scene or someone to come wandering in wanting to kill me. No. The train begins to slide and before I know it I’m dead again as the entire train goes tumbling off the edge. Grrrrr.

I’ve now progressed to chapter 20, which I’ve been told is the last one and the stupid camera angles are still giving me problems and I still have not got used to the controls to the point where I try and take the character out of covering behind a wall, he’ll run off, jump, do a roll then fall off a ledge, what the hell?! Seriously, this game has stressed me out so much I have to complete it just to get it out of the way! If you’ve ever played Uncharted 1, then you will know that it involves some form of free-running and climbing ancient monuments, a cross between Assassin’s Creed and Tomb Raider I suppose, just a very poor one. Let’s compare an example, in Assassin’s Creed you can run to the edge of a building, jump and land it, grab for something or simply fall to your death. With Uncharted 2 you can’t jump off certain ledges, it just doesn’t work, sometimes the character stumbles around and is then fine, sometimes he wall off but spin around and catch himself on the ledge, but also you can fall off and just die, there is no consistency at all.

Graphics

Now that the rant is over, let’s get some positive points about this game. The graphics are spot on, very nice visuals (and I hate to say this) but it looks better than most games on the 360. I don’t know if it’s down to the developers of the game or the console, but I have noticed that the PS3 handles 1080p TVs a lot nicer than the XBOX does. Everything on the screen looks good, the mountains in the distance, the flaming cars you are hiding behind and even the guns glowing on the floor indicating for you to pick them up. Even the speech lip sync is pretty much spot on with only a few blunders. Some of the best graphical examples are in the cut scenes where the story really takes form.

This video shows some of the great visuals, one thing in particular I noticed is the facial expressions on the main characters. The main character tries to be funny on quite a number of occasions (I say tries as it isn’t really funny, but it makes you laugh that they are trying) but the good point is the realism of the facial expressions, they look almost perfect. That look of “I’m soooo funny, but no one is laughing” with the faint sign of a smile but also sheer embarrassment. There are plenty more of the cutscenes on YouTube if you just search for “Uncharted 2 cutscenes”, hell you can even watch the entire game on there and save yourself some money rather than buying it!

Sound

I don’t really have much to say about the sound to be honest. It’s good, you can really feel the punch of the explosions through the subwoofer, but that’s becoming standard with most games now. As well as the sound of bullets whooshing past your ears and hitting the wall behind you. The speech for all the characters is really good and clear, this is actually one of the only games that I didn’t have to put the subtitles on to hear them properly. I have also noticed that the speech of the characters changes depending on the environment you’re in. I’ve just been in a massive ice cavern type thing and I noticed the occasional shiver mid-speech as well as a lot of echoing, you could really feel the environment around the character.

Conclusion

Personally, this game has stressed me out so much that I never want to go near it again (even Call of Duty doesn’t annoy me this much ) but the story and action of the game is so good, it’s a real let down really. This game would make a brilliant movie and/or short tv series, but as a game I don’t think it cuts it, not for me anyway. If the controls were as good and as smooth as they were in Assassin’s Creed II then this could easily beat that for entertainment value, but it’s just not a good game if it can’t be played properly. You can even see in the second video I posted that the player is struggling to perform the moves correctly and it looks really odd.

So overall, a major major letdown of a game, good story and great action, but if it can’t be played then it’s a bit of a useless game! I’d rate it 6/10.

Now the main reason I wanted a bigger drive (other than games taking up too much room on a stupid 60GB HDD), is that I wanted to experiment with Linux on the PS3, so I did a fair bit of research before I did this and found out that it is now a fairly simple procedure and available free on the interweb.

Obviously before we do anything, we will need the installation disc to get Linux onto the machine. After messing around with the pathetic website, I finally found the free download link which I will provide here for you: http://us.fixstars.com/support/downloads/

Please note that the file is a 3.7GB .iso image file, so be prepared to have something to do in the meantime, I played Guitar Hero again After downloading, I mounted the .iso file (using Disk Utility on my Mac) and burnt it straight to a DVD with that. Whilst it was burning, I found this very helpful PDF guide to using/installing YDL on the PS3.

First thing’s first, I need to partition the PS3 hard drive so that there is a space for Linux to go on, we go to Settings > System Settings > Format and you will then be asked if you want to partition the drive so that you get 10GB for your PS3 or 10GB for “the other OS” (this is pathetic, 320GB HDD and I can only give Linux 10GB of it, grrr). The PS3 then completed the partitioning so I went back to Settings > System Settings and this time popped in my newly burnt DVD then clicked on Install Other OS. After doing as I was told by the PS3 and selecting the other OS as the default OS, the install began!

We got a black screen for about a minute, it just gets to the point where you are thinking “oh crap I’ve messed up” and then it carries on. During my research (this is also on the PDF linked up there) I noticed that there is a command you must type in depending on which TV you have your PS3 connected to, now mine is a 1080p one so when the KBOOT: line appeared, I quickly typed in install_ps3_1080p and hit enter.

After some more command line stuff appeared (not be doing anything, but just the OS loading all the files off the DVD) we finally got to a more user friendly graphical interface where we begin the real installation process, very similar to Windows.

Just go through the setup process here (as you would with Windows) and I also installed the WLAN device as I don’t have a network cable in my PS3 currently, the PC I’m trying to sell is using it! After clicking next a few times, the install will start and you’ll get the following screen.

When that’s done, your PS3 should reboot itself (remember to grab the disc from the PS3 quickly or it will suck it back in and start the install process over again!) and you’ll get some more comman line stuff whilst it loads the OS.

Almost there!

Just a few last bits to do now, click next a few more times to go through the EULA and that crap, create a user account (basically everything you go through when settings up Windows as well).

Eventually we’ll finish with that bit, welcomed with a lovely login screen where you just need to put in the username and password you have just created then bam, all done!

That’s it, we are done. Now all I have to do is a find a use for having Linux on my PS3 I wanted to do this as I thought it would be challenging like getting Mac OS X to work on a normal machine with dual booting Vista, now that was a good challenge, took me 3 weeks to get everything working, YDL on a PS3 will take about 6hrs and that includes downloading the 3.7GB iso file!

My next little project will probably be modifying my PSP (buying replacement covers and a new screen) as mine is scratched to hell and I have a few dead pixels now Though I will not just go and buy a new “slim” one as mine is running on custom firmware at the moment so I’m playing through FFVII (the PSX version)!.

Peace out.