And here I was thinking Arkham Asylum would be my game of the year...
Uncharted 2 is amazing. I'm on my second playthrough, and plan to make a third and a fourth (to beat it on Hard and Crushing), and jump in a couple of levels to collect all the treasures. This is the Indiana Jones 4 everyone hoped for when Crystal Skull came out. If you're a fan of the first three movies, you'll love this. It doesn't hurt to have a fondness for the first Uncharted, either.
I'd say the best part is how they make it like a page-turner. You don't want to put the controller down, because you want to see what happens next, even if you've seen it already. The acting and story are fantastic, as are the visuals, music, locations... MAAAAN. I even used to think MGS 4 was the closest gaming would ever come to being like a movie! Multiplayer's also a blast.
Sony and analysts are always going on about how "Game A is going to be a real system seller!" If any game should sell a system, this is the one. I even started to get worried about whether I made the right decision giving my brother my 360 so he can have it when I go off to college, and once I got through this game, I no longer fretted over it. This is light-years better than Naughty Dog's old Jak and Daxter series, and I also loved those. Maybe they'll revisit that series, with the lessons they've learned from Uncharted? Or maybe it's just better if they continue to come up with new concepts. Either way, I'm all the way in for whatever they do next.

I'm going to borrow this from a friend, I don't really want to buy this game until I know I'll like it.
Multiplayer beta was pretty cool though.

Heavy Rain is THE reason I bought a PS3, happily I got a deal with Batman and was blown away by a bundled game that actually shows off the good things the system can do (video card manufacturers could learn from that). Isn't Fl0wer one of those pretty tech demos that isn't really a game?
I've just gone through Uncharted 1 and thought it's in the top 10 best 3rd person action games I've ever played and if they'd managed to fix the small issues and design problems it would have been in the top 5. From what I've been told thats just what they did with number 2 so I'm looking forward to it (but Dragon Age comes first).

Are you looking forward to Demon's Souls? I'm playing it, after finally getting a chance to play it for the first time in months and I'm enjoying it a lot. Probably one of the best RPGs I've ever played .

I've been looking at it on and off, its one of those games I'd either have to get a demo of or find a bargain on. Not only is it an rpg developed by a japanese company (I passionately detest jrpgs) but its the japanese developer that fucked up Tenchu so I'm more than a little hesitant.
At least it doesn't look much like a jrpg

I completely agree. I know it's a horrible cliche but Naughty Dog has created the first truly "cinematic" game experience ever, and it really does feel like the long-awaited follow-up to the original Indy trilogy. The graphics are obviously the best available right now but, more importantly, the painstaking care which went into the script, voice/mocap acting, cutscenes etc. is simply astounding. There's a whole feature length film in here - roughly 91 minutes separated into 3-4 minutes short, impeccably directed chunks of ruthlessly efficient story exposition and character development, and it's all great fun to watch and rewatch (hell, even slightly moving at times, which is not something I say often about storylines in video games).
The cinematic qualities extend far beyond the cutscenes, though, and the single most amazing thing about the game is probably that virtually every gunfight (or puzzle segment, for that matter, though those tend to be relatively rare in the game) feels dynamic enough that it could serve as an elaborate set piece in a really good action movie. Rather than just spawning a few generic soldiers in an open space and have the player pick them off one by one, developer Naughty Dog throws in a helicopter, a moving train, a rapidly collapsing building or just about anything else that will make the action come alive and feel like so much more than just another room full of enemies. The effective use of scripted events in action-oriented 3D games arguably began all the way back in Valve's first Half-Life game, but never has it been done this ambitiously and with such amazingly seamless results.
The jaded cynic in me I kept asking myself "well, when is the game going to run out of steam and devolve into a standard action game?". The answer is that it simply doesn't; Uncharted 2 is an absolutely exhilarating experience all the way through the game's 26 chapters. If this is not a killer app, I don't know what is...

You aren't kidding about the page turner part. I started playing the game friday night around 9pm... I was so into the game that I kept on playing. Before I knew it it was 7am and I was watching the ending credits. I can't think of another game that drew me in so much for that long.

Thats a variant of what my sister and I call The Sid Meier Syndrome. You sit down for a game of civilization after dinner, have "just one more turn" at midnight and then wonder why the sun is coming up because you swear you've only been playing for a few minutes

Wow, and that IS a glowing review. I've seen somewhere that the game got 21/20 (!) in a magazine, and I keep hearing all these "you have to get it" things by my friends and all over the Internet. I've been looking around and it's amazing how much detail has been put into the game. I think I'll get it for my birthday, which is on November 7. Hopefully I'll have enough cash to buy it though.
Is the multiplayer really popular? What's it like?
That happened to me in both Peggle and Civ 4: Colonization. Started playing Colonization around 11 PM, and it's 7 and I'm still playing.

Yea I beat it about a week ago, will probably do another run to beat it on crushing, which will be a major challenge.
If you've played the first one (which I have), this game is basically the same except turned up a notch. The battles aren't as generic, and there is a lot more variety in tactics you can take. Stealth is actually a viable tactic in this game, I was a master ninja (achievement for taking out a certain number of foes with stealth) about a third of the way through the game, but you can just as easily run and gun your way through (there's a run and gun achievement as well...).
Game's excellent, graphics are top notch. The only minor let down I had was that the last boss was a little too easy and the method to beat him a little... gamey. The mechanic just seemed to be a forced mini-game within a game, which I don't personally like. I would've just liked to go one and one and beat him.
I normally don't say anything about acting in a game, but the acting in this game is awesome. Expressions, voice acting, all good. One of the main characters is voiced by Claudia Black (Farscape, Stargate SG1), which was minorly distracting for me as I recognized her right off the bat.
Don't go in expecting a free-roaming sandbox game, but if you're ok with a fairly linear but a very tightly put together cinematic action piece, it's great. There are also some decent puzzles, nothing very difficult. The trickiest parts are sometimes figuring out where you can jump to, the vast majority of my deaths were falling in places where I thought I wouldn't die.

Well, that actress that voices Elena was in Brothers and Sisters, and that kind of killed it for me.

would you be willing to say that the level of awesome it is, is indeed off the charts?

Oh come ON, this was supposed to be a rational discussion!

Ahh but it seems that you've not played 1 or 2, it was a tough thing to believe that the game was as good as my friend who loaned Uncharted 1 to me was saying but he was rather amazingly correct.
Uncharted 1 was nothing short of amazing even with a few flaws and annoying design choices it's in the same league of style and quality as Mafia: City Of Lost Heaven and Prince Of Persia: The Sands Of Time. Had I played #1 a few months ago, I'd have bought a PS3 prior to the release of the slim and probably wouldn't have quite had the space to place it so there's a benefit to waiting.