First Thoughts: Uncharted

So, three days ago was the anniversary of my blog opening. Woo! etc.

Went into Chips yesterday and grabbed Assassin's Creed and Uncharted: Drake's Fortune off the shelf - I fancied some retail therapy, and PS3 games seemed to hit the spot - and then the salesperson decided to put a brand-new copy of Ratchet and Clank: Future Tools of Destruction on the shelf. So that got bought too.

Haven't cracked open the latter yet, and Assassin's Creed is interesting based on my hour of play, but Uncharted is absolutely, mind-blowingly stunning.

You play as the decendent of legendary explorer, pirate and pioneering goatee-owner Sir Frances Drake, Nathan, a decent treasure-hunter in his own right. After leading an exhibition with friend Sullivan and TV show host Elena Fischer to uncover the great man's grave, you stumble onto a cover up: he never died, and his coffin contained a mysterious map that should lead you to the riches of the so-called mythical city of El Dorado.

Except, as in all the best adventure films, there's some other folks on the trail.

This premise launches you into a huge adventure based around sunken cities, lush jungles and lost civilisations - and one of the best will-they won't-they love sub-plots ever seen in games, and one that would work just as well in a film, since that's what Uncharted seems to have been designed as - an interactive film - and it's actually succeeded, which is a rarity when compared with some of the FMV-laden mistakes of the past.

I should mention that the game is utterly, totally captivating, not just because of the Tomb Raider rip-off gameplay that's been refined to the point of perfection, but because of the graphics. It is one of the best looking, if not the best looking game on PS3. It's not entirely realistic, because it's better - taking the Crysis route of upping the ante on everything, so the characters are better looking, the flora and fauna is more colourful, bright and alive than normal and the explosions are a little bigger.

There's also water everywhere, and with good reason - Crash Bandicoot veterans Naughty Dog have made it pretty much perfect. Waterfalls cascade with genuine force, and puddles are splashed out of your way as you run through them. Ripples erupt as you plunge into a lake and swim around. Then, when Nathan hauls himself out of the pool - with gorgeous animation, as everything has been motion-captured to perfection - his clothes are wet. They crease, cling to his body, wrinkle realistically. Spend enough time out of the water and they will, naturally, dry. Get yourself into the sun and they'll dry quicker. Phenomenal.

Walk past brushes and through grass, and the plants will, naturally, be pushed out of your way. The environments themselves are spectacular, dripping atmosphere. It's hard to describe them, to be honest, because they're so full of rich detail that's totally incidental but does wonders for your immersion in the game. It's a linear title - which some people have, ridiculously, used as a criticism - but so was Call of Duty 4. And the Half-Life games. And they've turned out alright.

I'm about half way through now, and I'm spellbound, just wanting to play more. There's a section in the fourth chapter where you emerge from some dense jungle, after a fierce firefight - there's a rocket launcher involved - onto a plateau on a high cliff above the ocean. An angry shout from an enemy distracts you - handily yanking your vision towards a monolithic fortress that you'll shortly begin to journey towards - before being impaled on an ancient booby-trap. It's then that you're freed for a second to take stock of your surroundings. Jungle, cliff. Sky. My god, it's beautiful. Sunset is approaching, and it's casting a golden glow over the dappled movement of the quiet, restful sea below, and it looks utterly real. I could have been on a cliff-top just outside of Aberystwyth, with a little imagination.

And that's just on Standard Definition. I can't wait until I get an HDTV.

Ben Elton - Then and Now

It's amazing what 16 years can do. Just ask Ben Elton, for example - as I've just finished reading two of his books, sixteen years apart in publication dates, and the difference is amazing.

Gridlock was Elton's first foray into novels, was written in 1991, and revolves around global warming and climate change. I may not agree with the way this issue is portrayed sometimes in the media today, but there's no denying the forward-thinking plot that Elton put forward - a world clogged by traffic with no end in sight, and a disabled main character who was utterly compelling. It's something you don't often see, and Elton, in some ways, was fifteen years ahead of his time with the issues he tackled, taking on subjects that just seem like they're tacked on for ratings or sales these days.

Despite this, I didn't really enjoy the book. The prose was formulaic, and there wasn't a huge amount of description - which is something that I crave in my books. Grammatically, it seemed to be all over the place, with sentence structure lacking and seemingly basic mistakes being made. I don't know who his editor was.

Leap forward the aforementioned 16 years, and I've finished Elton's latest book, Blind Faith. The plot concerns our society a few decades into the future, after a flood has wiped out most of what is now 'Lake' London, and society has crumbled into a vacuous pit of sex, gossip, blind subservience to a mysterious diety called 'Love' - the modern name for Jesus - and not much else. The story is subversive and follows a disenchanted man called Trafford Sewell as he searches for answers, truth and meaning to his life. It's fantastic, and not just because the grammar problems that seemed to plague Elton in his early career - Popcorn seemed to suffer like this as well - but because he's just developed a huge amount.

The plot is tighter, with more focus given to a smaller group of central characters to concentrate on rather than the constant jumping between peripheral groups of characters in short, sharp chapters. There's still not a huge amount of description, but the world is vivid and alive, full of allusions to things we know and asides that point ot things we recognise from our society that have been magnified by dozens of years of moral decay.

Speaking of pointing things out, Elton has calmed that down, too. I found that in Gridlock he'd step aside from the story when a brief mention of something sparked him off and spend a page or two ranting about a chosen topic. It wouldn't link back to the plot or the characters and felt hugely misplaced. While he still makes points about his moral standing in later books, like Blind Faith, it's with subtlety and is tied into the events of the story, so well sometimes that you don't even notice it happening, certainly not as something that felt so detached from the prose previously.

It's heartening that such an improvement has taken place - taking good books and making them into great ones. Hopefully it'll continue!