I have an xbox 360. That is more than enough for my gaming needs. Sure, there are a few titles that are exclusive to the PS3, but they are mostly avoidable giving the length of time an average person has to live. I can only play through so many games so even if I do miss a few big titles, it’s not a problem because my list of games is ever increasing, not shrinking.

Recently though, I picked up a PS3, partially due to its media playing abilities. I’ve ranted against the PS2 and the PS1, even though I’ve owned both, so the PS3 would be no different really. I don’t have anything against it technically (unlike the PS1 and PS2 which were weaker in terms of pure 3d hardware than their contempories) but I felt the expense and the bumbling Sony did during launch did detract from it.

Now, I think it’s a solid system, and in a closed ecosystem (ie, none of my friends have a 360) I would say that it’s nice. It has a few advantages (bluray) and a few things missing (media center extender) compared to a 360, but I would be able to live with it.

Now, one of the exclusives that I keep hearing about is this Uncharted.The main character was described as Ash+ Mal, which would have made him the greatest character ever incarnated. That’s probably my primary pull and in playing the demo, the lead character seemed like he could live up to that potential. The problem is that throughout the game, there weren’t enough good moments. He ended up being a rather generic semi-witty character instead of a balls to the wall all out character. A rather safe character. A CBS prime time lineup character. I won’t disgrace this game too much by saying that it’s on par with National Treasure, but let’s just say that if we had a scale where one end was National Treasure 2 and on the other end was Indy Anna Jones and the Last Crusade, the adventure in this game would lean a bit more towards the National Treasure 2 side. Of course, it’s not really fair to compare the story of a video game to that of a good movie, but I always hope that a game’s character can exceed my expectations.

For the gameplay, it was pretty good. Rather standard platforming and hiding behind cover shooting. The graphics were fine and some of the set piece shots looked pretty good, but I think that some of the reason why people think that it looked so good was because it deviated from the standard palette of grey and brown colors and had more lush surroundings. It’s easier to make a waterfall in the jungle look beautiful than it is to make a blown out building. The graphics weren’t a technical marvel, but did do a good job of presenting what it had to. I think since I only have a passing interest in platforming and there are plenty of games that do a better job in a cover system gunfight, I thought that the gameplay was competent if not spectacular.

All in all though, I would much rather play Afro Samurai. Afro is a bit more challenging (for instance, boss fights aren’t just a series of quick time events) and the character in Afro are much more amusing. In short, Afro Samurai is USA to Uncharted’s CBS.