[PS3 - 183] Waiting for Uncharted 2 blowout.

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At its heart, Uncharted 2's multiplayer plays quite like one would expect. The same platforming-meets-cover-based gameplay is omnipresent in the online arena, and it serves as the one distinguishing characteristic that may separate Uncharted 2 from the other multiplayer games on the market. The developers really have embraced verticality; offering plenty of opportunities to take the fight to higher ground, while keeping sightlines open across sections of each battlefield. And thanks to it, awesome moments like watching a teammate jump across a gap between two buildings while your stuck in a shootout in the alley below come aplenty in Uncharted 2's multiplayer.

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And believe me, if the stage I had the opportunity to demo is any measure of the difficulty, this mode will keep players hard-pressed to stay alive.

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I stepped in for a couple rounds of action set in the same war-torn city that we witnessed at the previous Among Thieves event and I was surprised to find that it felt like a mash-up of Left 4 Dead and Gears of War 2's Horde mode.

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Currently, it looks like Uncharted 2's online modes are coming together quite nicely, but it remains to be seen whether Naughty Dog's fledgling effort will sound with the same thunder as other games out there that are sought after for their multiplayer components.

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Although it's finished and so close to release, it's still hard to get a feel for inFamous, because it's hard to satisfactorily demo any open-world game; the missions played well but felt out-of-context because, well, they were. Context is everything, and inFamous will stand or fall on the character and atmosphere of Empire City and its troubled inhabitants.

That being the case, it can only be encouraging that Fox and Sucker Punch are so keenly aware of context, so plugged in to the city on their monitors and the city outside their windows. If they get it right, inFamous will be an awesome riot.

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MAG is fun. In fact, it's massive fun. It's fast and loose, free-flowing, improvisational, spectacular, structured without being too rigid; it accommodates lone wolves, team players and power-trippers alike, and makes it easy for players themselves to direct the action. You'd expect it to be intimidating, but it actually feels like the FPS for everybody. Even after just one 20-minute, 128-player match, it's hard to shake the feeling that, one day, all multiplayer shooters will be made in its image.

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It's nice of Byrne to defer credit to his publishing, platform-holding paymasters. But there's plenty in MAG Sony can't take credit for. The superb tuning and tactile punch of the weapons; the expert finesse of the map design; the relentless pace of the battles; the perfectly-balanced tightrope-walk between order and chaos, between tactical primacy and player freedom. With alpha coming to a close, news of a public beta expected soon and release towards the end of the year, MAG looks fighting-fit already, and PS3 could soon have a multiplayer shooter that will be the envy of all.

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Eurogamer: These environments are drawn in remarkable detail, considering the immense technical demands of running a 256-player battler at a solid 30 frames per second. MAG isn't quite Call of Duty 4 or Killzone 2 in the beauty-pageant stakes, and it has an understated look. But it's sharp, the level of detail is convincing, and abundant use of light-scattering fog and smoke engenders an impressively gritty, war-zone feel. Zipper's coding achievement is quietly immense.

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1UP: Shockingly -- almost suspiciously -- this vast scale doesn't appear to be hurting the game's performance. Sure, the engine may sacrifice some graphical detail to support all these players; but even so, it's astonishing how smoothly the game runs with 128 human-controlled players racing through these huge environments.

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While our “test” game was made up of grizzled game journalists playing against Zipper employees and playtesters, in practice, match-making will be an important part of MAG. You will be able to enter battle with your friends or clan, but if you just log on to a random game, MAG’s matchmaking system will try to hook you up with the “right” teammates and opponents. The match-making system’s primary goal is to get you into a match fast, but secondarily to that, MAG will take your experience level and play style into account when it teams you up. Experienced players will be teamed with (and pitted against, presumably) other experienced players, but not to the extent that no newbs will be allowed. MAG also takes your play-style into account and matches you into viable groups, so you shouldn’t end up in a team of all medics or all snipers.

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The game spawns you with the rest of your squad-- in our case we dropped in on parachutes. Immediately upon “entering” the game, the player is immersed in battle. Sights familiar to anyone who has ever played a war game were there in abundance: The distance smoke of far off fires, the sounds of gunfire, a far-away air attack. But the difference between MAG and many games is that, according to Zipper, all of the events in-game are triggered by players. They don’t “cheat” by adding atmospherics: If you hear a mortar round land elsewhere on the battlefield, it means a player actually ordered that strike. Knowing that the battle was all “real” is pretty awesome and definitely adds to the gameplay experience.

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I’ve never been a super-hardcore realistic wargame player, so I didn’t go into this preview of MAG with incredibly high expectations, but playing it completely changed my mind. If the final game lives up to the promise set by the preview when it releases commercially, PlayStation 3 owners will be very, very happy, and I’ll be building my stats and working my way up the chain-of-command from release day on.