You have been promoted to Assassin! Keep on going!

Oh yeah!

Objective pits you in a story type mode with you and 2 other players. Like arena you can also play with you and someone else. There objectives are built in places of the main story, but cut out sections, so it's not the same as the single player experience. Instead of the arena mode, there is sort of a story here and the level progresses. It starts out with Drake saying "Alright guy, the treasure is in the plaza, all we have to do is go and get it." There is three characters here, Drake, Chloe and Sully. There is three of you, and each of you will be a different character. It seems that you cannot choose which character you want in the beta, but it seems that the host of the match will be Nathan Drake, the other two random as two who gets which character model.

So you go through an area killing enemies as you do, and eventually you will come to a moment where you need to work together to progress to the next section. This involves parties holding triangle to perform the action. Generally the action is to help lift a bookcase so you can progress, or get a boost up somewhere which will help you get something to help you advance. Generally what you will be doing is fighting off enemies though and doing an action which will help you proceed to the next area.

Also in the game is bosses. These guys pack a punch, they have really think armour and a galting gun that fires really fast. usually they have other lesser enemies with them as well. To kill these guys, you just need to keep shooting them, and they will die eventually. On the harder modes, they really take heaps to die. I found it was best to just keep shooting until it starts shooting at you, take cover and then let your friend shoot. In the level in the beta, there are two of these bosses. The second one is obviously harder, and once you beat him, that is the end of the level.

There is also 4 difficulty modes to play through; easy, normal, hard and crushing. You can set the difficulty in your profile. Because there has to be a set difficulty for everyone, the difficulty your team plays on is determined by whoever has the lowest difficulty in their profile. For example, if two people have crushing mode selected, and the other has easy, it will play on easy mode. This is not ideal for me, as I want to play a crushing game, but it seems that either people are not up to it yet, or forget to change their difficulty setting in their profile. I have yet to play in crushing mode, and have got other difficulties several times. It seems I will need to set up a match with a friend to get that difficulty.

Overall I found this really fun. It is reasonably paced, generally now I can complete the level in under 10 minutes depending on the teammates I have. I also liked how it moved through different areas and onto different situations, like a story instead of the co-op arena mode.

So the arena mode (also called gold rush mode) is a game mode in the Uncharted 2 beta (and obviously in the main game). I will explain abit about it. First it is a co-operative game mode with 2 or 3 players. Three players start out with the basic pistol and an AK47. The objective in the game mode is to get the treausre, and deliver it to the trasure chest, which is usually across the other side of the map to the treasure. There to stop you are enemies. The first few rounds are easy enough, you run to the treasure, and press the traingle button to pick it up. Now you have to make your way to the treasure chest. While you are holding the treasure, you can shoot with your pistol but not your two handed weapons (for obvious reasons.) The other two players will help you get to the delivery spot. If you get stuck with enemies around, you can drop the treasure quickly with traingle, or press and hold L1 and then press L2 to throw the treasure in the direction you are aiming. This can be good to get it up to someone else who can then throw it to someone else making for good teamwork.

If you lose all your health, you will go into a downed state. This is where co-op comes in, a team mate is required to heal you by going up to you and holding triangle to heal you. It is extremely important to heal teammates as 3 people is best in the later rounds. If your meter runs out while downed, you will be out of the round. You can also get choked in later rounds, enemies will get behind you and grab you, choking you. You have a meter that runs out, and you need a team mate to help get them off you. If your choking meter reaches zero, you go to a downed state. Team mates can shoot the enemy off you or grab or knock them off you.

If you survive and capture the treasure, you move on a round. Each round, the enemies get tougher and tougher, and get new weapons, get new shields, and even some bosses appears. This makes the game much tougher and means you must work as a team. The quicker you capture the treasure, the more points you get (or multiplier for the points you recieve for killing people.) After 10 rounds or capturing the treasure, the game ends. If all 3 of you are incapacitatd at one time, you lose a try and have 3 tries for the whole game. After that, it fails.

Beating the game is really hard, 10 levels, 3 tries, and comes down to the skill and teamwork of players. If you let a player die, it will become damn near impossible in the later levels. Similarly, if you just go around shooting enemies and not going for the treausre, you will die and wont be able to cash in the points you have earnt. You can only cash in those points you have earnt at level 10, but you still get $500 for every round completed and other bonuses for callenges, but you get a fair heap for completing the game. As long as you have good team mates who go for the treasure and not just stay and shoot everyone and everything, you should be fine.

My only worries: There is only 2 maps in the beta/demo. I'm hoping that's only because it's just that; a beta/demo. 4 would be good in the main game, or even better; more. Also when playing, sometimes the treasure would not go where I wanted it to go, I would try to throw it on a ledge, only for it to hit the tip of the ledge and fall back due, cue frustration after it happens 5 or so times. Also a source of frustration is some team mates who don't do the team thing.

But this game mode is fantastic. It's damn fun, I want to play it now instead of writing this article or sleeping. I have beaten level 10 a couple of times now.  It's great how you need to work together, and how the enemies gradually get tougher and tougher over time and tests your skills. It's great, look for the mode when uncharted 2 launches.

On bootleggers.   La Commercia. Owned by Goge himself. Let's see how long this will last before something happens, you generally don't last a long time in a crew on bootleggers. So keep a look out for my new account lol.

UPDATE: Not even 24 hours later
You have been kicked from your crew
Not dead but.

Establishments, once an exciting talking point of the bootleggers public, has recently, once again became the topic of conservation for many disgruntled bootleggers players. It appears that properties are not being snapped up as quickly as normal, and are indeed beginning to have bother selling. In my experience this is the first time this has happened to establishments, certainly since they have been re-introduced to the game at any rate. In fact the day they were released there was enough hype built up so that the establishments had to be slowly released throughout the day to give everyone a fair chance of owning one. On the big release day, there was only one type of building which could be built on a bit of land, a garage. However, we were promised that there would be many more buildings available soon. However time has moved on and all we have seen is the (arguably) useless safehouse being re introduced.

So is that the reason that establishment has stopped selling? It is getting boring, the same old properties are not attracting anyone. Could something as simple as adding a new type of building improve sales. A (not so) reliable source, last year confirmed (or not) to me that a underground crew headquarters was well under development... and almost ready for testing. However a year on and still no sign of one. I think this might improve sales, for awhile at least. However I dont think this would permanently fix the problem of establishments not being sold.Once people get bored of i, free spots of land might start popping up again. Of course another new building would fix this again, but the admins are lazy. 

Another reason establishment may have stopped selling is because owning land is not profitable. I have now held a bit of land in Colorado for  well over 24 days. The value of this bit of land has not increased by even 1 million.Where as if i was to have 1million in the bank for24 days I would make 1 million on it. There is no profit to be made from letting people stay in your safe house or keep cars in your garage, and even selling land onto other players is now not easy, as there is so much free land available.This all happened, since Sabin introduced a rushed (yet still managing to take months) fix to the way in which establishment gains value.

The good old inactive excuse can also be applied, there is possibly just not enough people playing bootleggers any more to require the land. I personally find this hard to believe as there is over 2 thousand people log into bootleggers each day and somewhere just over 1000 bits of land out there. Having said that the average person on bootleggers can now not afford a house. The average wealth has fallen below 2.5 million per player, and with average land prices being above this, some people do struggle in raising enough funds for a bit of land, especially when the land does nothing for them.

I suggest that the admins go for a combined approach, making land more attractive for players by making it both more profitable and useful.