My favorite game on the PS3 is Drake’s Fortune: Uncharted. The sound design, graphic design, insanely real animation, and story are really out of this world.

You play Nate Drake, a descendant of Sir Francis Drake. You’re a treasure hunter in search of El Dorado. Lots of fun guns to play with, a partner who actually helps kills people for you, fun puzzles to solve, and a beautiful environment in which to play. Seemingly relatively straight forward, and earth bound… until where I am stuck right now.

For more or less no reason, there’s these effing manimal beasty things with point teeth and 3 toes and bald heads who are infesting (of course) a dark tunnel system in which you’re trapped. You have to solve a mystery while klaxon horns sound and these damn manimal thingies come out of nowhere to rip out your throat.

It’s totally stressing me out. I’m not *scared* of these things, in the sense that I have nightmares about them, but they’re freaky. You can hear them snarl around the corners of your dark tunnel. They run a lot faster than humans. They hunt in packs. If one latches on, you have to shake your controller to get them off of you. THey’re powerful too: you can only sustain two direct slashes before they kill you. Every time they come out, my heart races and my palms get sweaty.

I can only take a few minutes of it at a time because it makes me a bundle of nerves. Not relaxing, not particularly fun at the moment, but its the best damn game I’ve ever played. So much so that while I continue to try to solve this one, I’ve sent 2 other games back to GameFly for their inferior… everything. The animations suck, or the fighting engines are ass backwards, or the sound design or story is stupid. (heavenly sword & frozen planet… awful)

Anyhoo I’m about 3/4 done with this game and another one (Folklore… also awesome, talk about it another time), and am mostly really pleased I decided to buy my PS3.