Ah, Uncharted's Nathan Drake — The everyman's adventurer. In a gaming landscape populated with neckless, 'roid-filled space marines and cyborg ninjas, you're here to remind us that being a regular joe on a mystical adventure is its own kind of cool.

The first years of the new millennium brought us the seventh generation of video game consoles, and with that came a whole new family of attractive men and women. With new evolutions, this decade introduced the start of increasingly realistic-looking characters.

They may swing from ledges, walls and cliffs like it's going out of style, but as real-life rock-dangler (and Kotaku Australia EIC) Mark Serrels explains, your favourite video game characters are, it turns out, terrible climbers.

You don't necessarily need noisy, crowded cities to make a section of a game exciting. Uninhabited wastelands, post-apocalyptic worlds, a sea of sand dunes, vast grasslands... These can all be strikingly beautiful places, and capable of telling enticing stories.

Indiana Jones is not the only one solving annoying ancient puzzles in haunted caves, armed with a whip and dynamites, far from civilization. A setting like this is perfect for video games, so it is no surprise that many were influenced by the character, and the similarities in some cases are amazing.

It can be a bit difficult to talk about the new Tomb Raider without also talking about Uncharted. Naughty Dog's PS3 series has always had a lot of Tomb Raider in its DNA, and Crystal Dynamics' new Lara Croft adventure has clearly been taking notes from Uncharted.

Competition demands dominion. Dominion begets power. And, if you're serious about keeping that power, chances are power weapons come into the picture.

The guys responsible for Nathan Drake's adventures have made some of the PlayStation 3's best games. But the excellence of Naughty Dog's Uncharted franchise came after a lot of hard lessons. Just as a probable reveal for the next PlayStation looms, a new interview on Eurogamer reveals that the development studio had a …

First revealed earlier this month, here's a better look at Sideshow's giant, expensive Nathan Drake statue, which will sell for $350.