Timeshift: The opening movie is actually really damn cool and made me think of what a perfect Flash game could be like. In fact, somebody should get working on a mod for that right away... skin the lead in red-and-yellow and drop all the gun stuff.

I didn't think the demo explained the time controls very well, or at least I never grokked them enough to know when to utilize them. Until the exploding corridor scene (where you are expected to rewind time so that the corridor fixes itself and you can run through safely), I barely activated my Amazing Time Powers.

Being able to pause, slow down or rewind time is quite a heady suite of options. They are so fundamentally mind-blowing that I rather expect the game to never use them properly. I'm the kind of player who would want to play to the end of the level and then rewind all the way back, just to watch it un-happen. I doubt that feature will be implemented. The demo does not do a fantastic job of expressing this one way or the other.

Definitely interesting. Just doesn't seem interesting enough.

Uncharted: Drake's Fortune: I am a font snob, and when I see professional grade products using off-the-rack fonts, it galls me. Sony's Uncharted uses the font BASE 01, which is freely available just about anywhere! Here's a quickie comparison... at the top is me typing straight into Photoshop using BASE 01 (and adding a drop shadow), below that is the actual Uncharted logo.

Sure, some designer muddied it up a bit, added plenty of scratches and wear... but that is BASE 01. Although the original font lacks the detail in the game logo, all of the major tear spots are present: the angled cut in the first stroke of the N, the damage to the top of the E, the missing piece in the T, the inside of the R, etc. Geez guys, do a little work and make something your own.

I also hate when people use a font and pretend its handwriting. I think there was an attempt to make the text "Drake's Fortune" look less like a mechanical font, but it's not good enough. The R's are identical and the E's not quite differentiated enough. The kerning does not look like natural handwriting... come on, look at the gap between the F and the O. Who writes like that?

So that all said "cheap" to me. Which is crazy, I know. But's that how I look at things. Happily, the actual game is not cheap. In fact, it's the first time I've played something that I felt actually looked like a next-generation game.

I think the main thing is that the demo shows off a very convincing jungle. It's one thing to construct your levels out of colorless, bombed-out buildings; it's something else entirely to do hills and trees and plants and waterfalls. It really is quite impressive.

I'm still kinda wishy-washy about the cutscenes. On one hand, the physical acting and facial features were convincing... the physical being more so than the faces. Definitely some very nice realistic CG heads. But on the other hand, the script was crap. All the usual action movie silliness, like when the guy is trying to maintain control of his flaming airplane, his partner straps on a parachute and asks "are you coming?" And he goes "Kinda busy right now!" Blah. I suspect that the game really won't graduate to much more than that.

The gameplay did not strike me as anything special. Run around, shoot enemies, climb hillocks and ancient ruins, occasionally find an excuse to shovel in motion controls. It just looked damned great doing all of the that. Best New Feature Of This Generation: characters actually speaking their lines when audio clips play during the game. Uncharted does it and Ratchet Future does it. We're knocking down the immersion-breakers one little step at a time.

Unlike most PS3 demos I've wandered into, I do definitely want to play Uncharted more than once. Font notwithstanding.

BONUS CONTENT: Here's a little about Beautiful Katamari, which I got to briefly enjoy last Friday.

The one sentence review is: They didn't fix a goddamned thing.

The obnoxious :30 klaxon is still there. The King's head still completely covers your view. The camera still can swing behind walls and get lost. And, most egregiously, there are still loading breaks. In fact, in one early level that I played, I did not go outside of the room I was in because I could see that nothing was out there... but in actuality, that doorway was a pause-and-load spot and the game does not draw in the outside clutter until you roll through the door. That's just plain horseshit.

That said, when the next Katamari game comes out for Wii or PS3, I'll get it. Even if I might as well just play the second one again. Having new music and environments is probably enough. I'm eager to see the sales figures for the 360 "exclusive." Probably won't even sell as many copies as Conker Live.