It's funny how my time spent with Uncharted made me forget about the lack of Home, trophies or my Gamerscore. Naughty Dog's game should be earmarked as one of the must-buy PS3 games this holiday season, and is a fine example of how developers can incorporate a rich rewards system that's wholly internal to the gaming experience. It resembles the Achievements system, since you'll earn rewards for using certain weapons, performing certain combos, or finding hidden items. The difference, however, is that instead of bragging rights, you'll get genuinely interesting stuff that goes above and beyond regular Easter Eggs. The next-gen filter is a good one, and you'll be able to see some very cool featurettes that show off the incorporation of mo-cap into the game. It's much more interesting to watch than it sounds, trust me.
It all makes me think that although I, like others, have been anxiously awaiting Home for months now, I'm also perfectly content to keep waiting and see how it fares. It's not easy to build a free online service that can compete with a five-year-old subscription-based competitor that has set the current industry standards. Especially when PS2 online was, and still is, a veritable Tower of Babel that seems to reward cheating and unstable servers while punishing the average gamer. I want to see how they're going to pull this one off.
Uncharted: Drake's Fortune doesn't have Achievements, but its rewards are nearly as good.
Original MGS on Handheld = Win
Although Sony had talked quite a bit about the incorporation of PSP technology into the PS3 leading into launch, it's certainly gone above and beyond my expectations. At first, I cynically thought that it was a rip-off of Nintendo's GameCube/GBA strategy, but it's really expanded nicely. With Firmware 2.00, you can now turn your system on and access it from anywhere you've got an Internet connection. On the other hand, I tried it out, and for some reason, the PS3 seems to wake up every five minutes, which made me unhappy. If it's a bug, I hope 2.01 fixes it. If it's me doing something wrong, well, that sucks. I'm only human.
Also, the library of PlayStation games that I can drag and drop is still growing. Microsoft's announcement concerning Xbox games on Live Marketplace has taken some wind out of the PS1 sails, but let's hope the emulation is good. Otherwise I really hope that the PlayStation library can expand this great feature. I'd be jazzed to see Konami release Metal Gear Solid in time for MGS4 so that I can drop it on my PSP and play it again while I'm commuting to work.
My only concern is that the licensing on classic PlayStation games might be fudgy, which would expose the problems the company is facing now (and Nintendo's making out like a bandit on): its dependency on third parties more than internal releases. Oddly, I think this is a big area for growth potential on both platforms, and would be disappointed to see all of the efforts in 2007 get stale in 2008, especially since the DS pretty much owns handheld, so it behooves Sony to grow in another direction with the PSP.
