You've played the video game, but now there's a movie coming out based on Uncharted. One part of the trailer really got me interested--from a physics perspective. It shows a cargo plane with a long string of large boxes roped together and hanging out the back. He climbs the string of boxes one by one until he reaches one closest to the plane, then he jumps, making a leap towards the interior. I have no idea why Drake is doing this, but it opens up a great physics question: Does he make it?

Of course I'm not the first to look at the physics in Super Mario Bros--there was this interesting paper looking at the optimal jump to get to the highest point on the flag at the end of the level. There is also a nice page looking at the acceleration of jumping Mario in the different games. This is a great chance to take another look at the physics of Mario. The best way to get data from a video game is to first capture the action and then use video analysis. With video analysis, I can get position-time data by looking at the location of the object in each frame.