If you haven’t checked on the interwebs yesterday or just happen to live under a rock and only read my blog via satellite beams to your tinfoil hat, then you just might have missed that Uncharted 2: Among Thieves was revealed.

Well, the fact it exists, the title, some details from a future article, a magazine cover and a video have been revealed. So basically not very much has yet been revealed, which means the next twelve months are going to be awesomely busy for me.

Yep, this is the game I’ve been working on since I joined Naughty Dog in June 2008. It’s actually pretty exciting that the news is finally out and it’s a relief I don’t have to be all coy and secretive about it. Although not much else can be said for now. You’ll just have to wait and see for the Spike VGA awards on December 14 to be aired to see our world premiere trailer and then for the January 2009 issue of Game Informer to hit subscribers and newsstands in mid-December to learn more about the game.

Otherwise you won’t hear a peep from me.

In the meantime, here’s what you can check out so far.

- I’ve written a blog post for PlayStation.blog that talks about all of yesterday’s activities
- Game Informer posted the cover image and details of their January 2009 issue
- GameTrailers posted a promo advertisement we made for the 2008 VGA Awards on Spike (SD | HD)
- I noticed that someone made a Wikipedia page for Uncharted 2: Among Thieves

You can view all of the coverage, as I find it by my own hand, across the Web on Naughty Dog’s delicious page under the “uncharted2″ tag.

If you’re really lazy, I’ve also embedded the VGA promo spot we made below.

I’m really behind on posting my topics this week. Earlier this week, on Sunday or Monday, the second episode of our XABY Radio podcast was posted. We’ve moved to a new host and the podcast will now be found at xabyradio.libsyn.com.

This time around I was properly caffinated and lubricated to join in on the discussion. I’m still fearful of listening to my own voice on this one, so all my impressions of the podcast are from memory. I briefly discuss being addicted to NHL 09–an addiction I broke almost immediately thereafter. All in all, I rather enjoyed this shorter episode even though I could only contribute as an armchair observer to the Tokyo Game Show rather than an in-person participant.

Download Episode 2 – Shorter For Her Pleasure

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I recently endured the ignominy of being awake at eight o’clock in the morning on a Sunday–a SUNDAY–to join Nayan, Josh, Eric and Segata to record our inaugural XABY Radio podcast. I didn’t talk much, so I definitely needed a coffee or a beer. Or both. Noted for next time.

Srsly.

I was pretty honored to be invited to partake in the podcast. These are all guys whose point of view I respect quite a bit and–at least those of us I could find a blog by–all have some pretty insightful and interesting commentary about games and the industry. We kind of ran out of time to get to some real interesting topics, but all in all, not too shabby a start. We’ll get better and I’m really looking forward to being more awake next time.

The podcast covers us reviewing our newest game purchases and discussing the recent Nintendo Conference (Japan, US – Day 1 and Day 2), the future of DRM, along with the road to Tokyo Game Show.

We’ll be placing it up on iTunes soon, but you can download a measly (28 MB) file on the XABY Radio page: http://xabyradio.libsyn.com/

I mentioned this to Nayan, who unfortunately hasn’t had a chance to play Portal yet. Talking a bit more, lead to the following bit of exchange:

• me: max payne is another good one.
• Nayan: Is max an unreliable narrator? there’s a lot of doubt that you see in his dreams
• Nayan: like, in Max Payne 1, you kill yourself after you kill your own family…but i always thought that was a metaphor for essentially killing your family for being married to your job
• me: if only you take it far enough to question whether his dream sequences have affected his judgement in reality.

That was just the start of it. It was nice to read something last night that got me thinking a bit more about some of the games I’ve played with, ones that I especially hadn’t considered from a more critical point of view. Even better was that Nayan’s post generated discussion between me and a few other folks about storytelling in games.

E3 2008 came and went pretty quickly this year for me. I had no activities scheduled for the show, so there wasn’t much of a reason to hang around the improved, “it’s new to you” LACC-centered E3 for me. One of the only work-related commitments was attending the Sony press conference at the Shrine Auditorium (video of the full press conference here). This was my first E3 press conference ever — I was not able to attend the Microsoft ones back when I was working on their products — so it definitely had an air of excitement and anticipation for me. Color me impressed at the degree of production that was involved.

After the press conference I headed back to the LACC to do a spot of work and run into former colleagues, journalists and friends for a couple hours. At the appointed time, I made my way over to King Taco on West Pico Boulevard to the PlayStation.blog reader meet-up. It was nice to see Jeff again — the last time was at the Sierra Spring Event back when I was working at Vivendi Games — and I brought some fancy Naughty Dog items in tow with me: a signed copy of Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune, a “>signed promotional poster for the game and a few of our new t-shirts. It was awesome to see all the folks that turned out, including regular gamers, some community press (including PS3 Fanboy’s Andrew Yoon and Platform Nation’s Steven Artlip and even a couple people from Wal-Mart’s Check Out blog, among others) and even a few people from other developers and publishers. Alas, I didn’t bring my PSP to participate in the Hot Shots Golf: Open Tee 2 tournament.

I will echo the thanks that Jeff gave on the PlayStation.blog and thank everyone that made it out. It was great the see the turnout and kind words about the studio I now work for and it’s catalog of work.

After that, it was off to dinner and then meeting up with Howard from PopCultureShock and some other buddies for the Activision press conference. Looks like the soon to be Activision Blizzard has a nice line-up as well, based on what they showed. Afterwards, I spent some time socializing with some people I hadn’t run into earlier at the Convention Center and got a good-natured pop quiz from Forbes.com Scott Morris about how it feels like to go from publisher to developer, among a few other items, probably much to the amusement of his co-worker Mary Jane Irwin. I had to quickly make my escape (just kidding) and despite wanting to go to bed, went to the Bethesda party at the Saddle Ranch Chop House on Sunset. I’m kind of glad I did, as it seemed everybody and anybody I would want to see (since I wasn’t at E3 proper this week) was there. Fun times.

Although that was technically my only day at E3, the activities outside of it continue a little bit. I had dinner last night with Flynn and David from GayGamer.net (always a pleasure) and Honey from EA POGO at a nice little Japanese place in Little Tokyo — my first time there since coming to Los Angeles.

Tonight, I’ll be at the Joystiq reader meet-up at Mahalo in Santa Monica (with some more stuff from Naughty Dog). Feel free to drop by if you can!

We launched a new online ad campaign today and, let me tell you, it was cooked up by some extremely creative, enterprising people. Or maybe they just read NeoGAF far too much. We’ll never know. We do know that NeoGAF (kinda, sorta) still loves the cats. Several other sites, like Wii Fanboy and Go Nintendo like them too. Good show!

Grab your own Geometry Wars: Galaxies lolcats code at the GWG Cats site.

Image courtesy of John Harker (NeoGAF).

Even though Andrew and I had some friction from time to time in our professional relationship, he’s always been a great to work with. He’s a total stand-up guy and deserves — I say even commands — a whole lot of respect for what he has accomplished for gaming, gaming parents and families who play video games together.

Andrew’s wife posted a page with updates and asks for donations to help his undoubtedly mounting hospital bills — a much too unfortunate reality of this day and age. Help them out if you can, I’m sure any little bit helps.

I hope you feel better soon Andrew!

The only thing missing from the post was a screenshot of the building in the rhythm game developed by Bizarre Creations, so, finding his post interesting, I decided to oblige. I got credited more than I should have — I really didn’t go beyond the call of duty, I just wanted to contribute to what I found to be an interesting article. At least with 30 St. Mary Axe and the genre Boom Boom Rocket resides in, Bizarre Creations doesn’t have to worry about answering to a higher power.

It was very important for me to meet Shigeo Tatsumi, who was attending E3 and was at the community event. I have talked to Tatsumi-san on several occasions over the past two years, which is partly what led to our intermingling of foreign piñatas in our respective Viva Piñata gardens. Obviously this was the opportunity I would have to talk to him, but not really talk to him because I don’t speak Japanese and he doesn’t really speak English. Thanks to our great translator Jennifer we were able to speak briefly and I’d seriously like to learn Japanese so I could have a bit more of a conversation than we ended up having. I definitely look forward to talking to and meeting Tatsumi-san again in the future. Be sure to check out a video recap of the “C3@E3″ event as captured by Tatsumi-san and his videographer for their Xbox Japan community site.

After meeting with Tatsumi-san is where the whirlwind of meeting people and talking about anything and everything started. Another guy from Japan I was looking forward to meeting was CheapyD from CheapAssGamer. I laughed at his retelling of funny behind the scenes tidbits when he was doing on-air interviews with the BBC and Bloomberg. However, he hadn’t imported a bottle of Pepsi Ice Cucumber for me, so he unfortunately loses quite a few points right there. Spencer from Siliconera (and from Greenwich, where I grew up, go figure), Ben from Opposable Thumbs and I went over our thoughts about the press conferences earlier in the week. Let’s see, my memory is a bit fuzzy a week later, but I also said hello to Chris (the other Chris) from ShackNews, Charles from GamingNexus, Howard from Popcultureshock and Ron from Destructoid. I also ran into Flynn (Fruit Brute) and David (Tiny Dancer) from GayGamer.net, which recently celebrated the site’s first anniversary — you can read the recap of their first ever E3 here. I also ran into Cameron, who is a game designer at Krome and is working on the recently announced Viva Piñata Party Animals, which I was not able to check out due to a lack of ESA pass. James, community manager at Insomniac Games — speaking of whom you check out Major Nelson’s podcast for a great head-to-head between these two. Robert, community manager at Infinity Ward, was demoing the super hot Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, but I didn’t get a chance to even check that out. The night wound down and most folks headed over to the Gamecock party down the street while I joined Flynn and David for one more stop before essentially not sleeping the remainder of the night before my flight.

I know I missed about a million people, so apologies for anybody I may have missed, but it was an amazing trip that was well worth it. I hope to see all of these folks and more at the next E3, wherever they decide to hold it.

Images courtesy of the “E3 – C3@E3 Community Party” Flickr photoset by Gamerscore blog.