Hair of the Dog - Week of Nov 22, 2009

We’ve got just the thing to cure your weekly gaming hangover… every Saturday morning, Hair of the Dog compiles a round-up of interesting Naughty Dog and UNCHARTED 2 links from around the web.

(This week, we’ve observed this post until Tuesday due to the Thanksgiving holiday.)

The Engadget Show 003 - Engadget
Chris Grant from Joystiq joins the Engadget show to discuss what good this holiday in gaming. Chris starts discussing video games around the 34:00 mark, mentioning that UNCHARTED 2 is his personal pick for the year (to no audience reaction—come on audience!). The rest of this well-produced show, in front of the aforementioned live audience no less, covers all sorts of tech-y things and is well worth the watch.

Bonus Round Episode 310 Part 3 - GameTrailers
Infinity Ward joins Geoff Keighley for this episode of Bonus Round to cover off an all things Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, not to mention the past and future of the studio. When asked about other games that inspire and inform what they do, they mentioned UNCHARTED 2 how both of our studios talked and shared ideas during the development of both our games. We’re always open to talking to other developers and we think this kind of open dialogue can only help all of us make better games, and it’s always nice to hear someone else acknowledge this.

Exclusive: Conan Writing Duo Chart Course For Drake’s Fortune! - Latino Review
The Latino Review posts a (still unconfirmed) report that writing duo Thomas Dean Donnelly and Joshua Oppenheimer are in negotiations to write the screenplay for the UNCHARTED: Drake’s Fortune film, to take over for Kyle Ward, the originally reported writer. Unfortunately we don’t know about any of this or even if it’s true, but we’re really looking forward to see what Columbia and Arad Productions do with the UNCHARTED universe.

Hot video games for holiday shopping - CNN
UNCHARTED 2 makes the CNN list of recommendations for video games this holiday.

New MP map, leaderboards on the way - Naughty Dog
Yes, we’re featuring our own blog here—in case you somehow missed it, we announced that a new multiplayer map would be available, along with some changes to the multiplayer menus such as adding Leaderboards. The new map, “The Fort” was available to everyone for free and was included as part of the mandatory Title Update 2 for UNCHARTED 2.

Be Thankful as Double Cash returns! - Naughty Dog
We also hosted our second Double Cash weekend over the Thanksgiving holiday. While it amused us to no end seeing a team of Doughnut Drake skins take on a team of Doughnut Lazarevic skins in competitive matches, it was less amusing to find out that Medal cash rewards were not being doubled as we expected. We’ve been looking into this issue and we’ll have some more info on this for you soon-ish.