10 Greatest Programming Milestones In Gaming History

9. Uncharted 2: Among Thieves - The Train Sequence

The first Uncharted silenced cynics of the PlayStation 3's power with its fluid animation and physics that made great use of the cell processor's SPE cores. Uncharted 2 was in many ways the perfect follow-up - bigger, better and slightly darker in an awesome Empire Strikes Back kind of way. It somehow managed to look even better than the first, but one sequence in particular demonstrates Naughty Dog's technical wizardry and attention to detail more than anything else - the epic gunfight on top of a moving train. This kind of thing has obviously been done before, but never like this. Unlike in other games where the train is basically static, giving just the illusion that it's speeding through an environment; the train in Uncharted 2 is treated as a tangible object with its own physics. It becomes really impressive when Nate faces a chopper whose pilot has a blatant fetish for the destruction of locomotive-powered vehicles. Carriages get blown apart by missiles, fires rage inside cabins while goons flood in to kill Nate with no regard for their personal safety. And then of course there's the fact that the train courses through a tropical forest and a snowy, mountainous landscape with hardly any visible pop-in. The PS3 was notorious for being a difficult beast to work with, making Naughty Dog's technical masterpieces look less like works of coding genius and more like witchcraft.